Ideas in Development
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Podcast Overview
<div>Conversations on the forces shaping economic development.</div>
Language
🇺🇲
Publishing Since
1/6/2026
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Recent Episodes
June 16, 2026
S4 Ep3: Moving billions towards evidence
<div> <p>In 2022, Dean Karlan became Chief Economist at USAID, tasked with steering the world's largest bilateral aid agency towards evidence-backed approaches. He left in 2025, as the agency was being dismantled, having moved roughly $1.7 billion of funding in the process.</p><p>In this episode of Ideas in Development, Dean joins Oliver Hanney to discuss what evidence-based policy actually looks like inside a government institution; how his team picked their battles; why collaboration beat prescription; and where the limits of taking goals as given lie. They also cover the rise of embedded evidence labs in countries like Rwanda and Peru, the synthesis and implementation gaps between academia and policy, and whether there are questions in development economics, like the impacts of cash transfers, on which we now have enough evidence.</p><p>Dean Karlan is Professor of Economics and Finance at Northwestern University, founder of Innovations for Poverty Action, and former Chief Economist of USAID.</p><p>Read the show notes on our Substack: <a href="https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/">https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/</a></p></div>
June 9, 2026
S1 Ep5: How Ethiopia reformed its economy
<div> <p> Ethiopia is one of Africa's most ambitious bets on export-led manufacturing. It’s also the site of one of the continent's boldest recent macroeconomic reform programmes.</p><p>In this episode of the Ideas in Development series on growth, Oliver Hanney and Kartik Akileswaran speak with Mamo Mihretu, the tenth Governor of the National Bank of Ethiopia and a former senior economic advisor to the prime minister. Having viewed Ethiopia’s economic change through various lenses, Mamo explains why Ethiopia's industrial parks succeeded where others stalled, what it took to attract anchor investors, and how the central bank prepared, sequenced and executed reform under acute economic pressure.</p><p>Our conversation ranges across the limits of debt-financed, public-investment-led growth; the institutions behind the industrial-parks programme; why the most credible, not the cheapest, wins investment; the macroeconomic foundations for a thriving economy; and the lessons for any government embarking on an ambitious growth agenda – diagnostics, sequencing, communication, and ownership.</p><p>Read the show notes on our Substack: <a href="https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/">https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/</a></p></div>
June 2, 2026
S4 Ep2: Aggregating evidence
<div> <p>The conversation about evidence-based policy usually asks why good evidence isn't shaping decisions. But we should also be asking, is the evidence base itself actually worthy of shaping policy?</p><p>In this episode of Ideas in Development, Rafe Meager – Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales and one of the leading meta-analysts in economics – explains why a single paper is not a proof, why we should learn to respect statistical noise, and why a result that holds in Kenya may or may not hold in Ghana.</p><p>We walk through Rafe’s work aggregating microcredit RCTs, and their research with Noam Angrist and Youth Impact showing that how well a programme is implemented predicts how well it works. Often, the right question for policymakers is not ‘does this work?’ but ‘can my system actually deliver this?’</p><p>We also discuss the research process in social sciences, some rules of thumb for interpreting a single causal claim, and why the public should be empowered to understand that evidence comes in different qualities.</p><p>Read the show notes on our Substack: <a href="https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/">https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/</a></p><p>Check out Rafe’s research: <a href="https://sites.google.com/view/rachaelmeager/home">https://sites.google.com/view/rachaelmeager/home</a></p></div>
27 total episodes available
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- What is Ideas in Development?
<div>Conversations on the forces shaping economic development.</div> - How often does this podcast release new episodes?
This podcast updates daily.
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