How do courts work when they work well? You would expect them to be impartial, neutral, and consistent. In much of the Global South that is a tall order. 

So when courts fall short of it, are they failing?

Development institutions ask states to build strong courts on the North American and Western European model. Good governance follows, they argue. This model treats poorer, less democratic systems as deviations from a norm rather than as institutions doing different work.

Fiona Shen-Bayh (University of Maryland) joins Tim Phillips to review the evidence on what courts in the Global South actually do, and who they help. Where the state is weak, customary elders, NGOs, even rebel groups step in to adjudicate, and people often trust these forums more than the state's own courts. 

Taliban courts in Afghanistan upheld due process during civil war. Dictators sometimes build genuinely independent courts, because property rights attract investment and citizens' lawsuits tell the centre what local officials are doing.

The research behind this episode:

Rios-Figueroa, Julio, and Fiona Shen-Bayh. 2025. "Courts in the Global South." Annual Review of Political Science 28. 

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Fiona Shen-Bayh. 2026. "Courts in the Global South." VoxDev Talks (podcast). 

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About the guest

Fiona Shen-Bayh is Assistant Professor of Government and Politics, with a joint appointment at the College of Information Studies, at the University of Maryland. Her research spans authoritarian regimes, judicial politics, and the use of legal and judicial institutions as instruments of power, often drawing on digitised archives and text-as-data methods. Her book Undue Process: Persecution and Punishment in Autocratic Courts (Cambridge University Press) won the APSA-IPSA Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award, the Giovanni Sartori Book Award, and the Juan Linz Best Book Prize.

The paper is co-authored with Julio Rios-Figueroa, Professor in the Department of Law at the Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico (ITAM), whose work spans comparative judicial politics, the rule of law, and empirical legal studies, with a focus on Latin America.

Research cited in this episode

The triad logic of conflict resolution. Drawn from Martin Shapiro's Courts: A Comparative and Political Analysis (1981). A court is effective when two parties appeal to a third to settle their dispute, and three conditions hold: the parties believe the third party is impartial; the third party is neutral, not predisposed to favour either side; and the rationale for the decision is consistent with existing norms, the idea of precedent. The review deliberately relaxes the assumption that courts are effective only when all three conditions are met.

The rule of law revival. The wave of good-governance programmes promoted by the United States and Western European governments and NGOs after the fall of the Soviet Union, presenting strong courts as a remedy for corruption, instability, and tyranny in the Global South.

The fallacy of legalism. The belief that creating law through statute, legislation, or precedent is enough to bring about social change. The phrase, from Sandra Joireman's work on property rights in Africa, names a habit of thought rooted in the Western experience, where the state has historically enforced property rights and contracts. In much of the Global South the absence of the state does not mean the absence of rules and order.

Stateness. The extent to which a state exercises authority across its territory: its monopoly on violence in the classic Weberian sense, but also the creation of law and the administration of public affairs. Where stateness is low, non-state actors fill the judicial vacuum.

Taliban and Islamic State courts. Recent fieldwork-based research finds that Sharia courts run by the Taliban in Afghanistan upheld notable degrees of due process and impartiality, offering predictability during civil war, and that the coercion associated with the Taliban featured in only a minority of the cases their courts heard.

Courts in authoritarian regimes. A growing literature shows what courts do for dictators: establish credible property rights that attract foreign capital; monitor administrative conflict, as in China, where citizens' grievances against the state feed information upward to the centre; and, at other times, repress opponents or legitimise the regime by delivering popular moral outcomes even against the letter of the law.

Political competition and judicial independence. Electoral competition can sustain independent courts in healthy democracies, partly because divided governments struggle to coordinate against unfavourable rulings. Under instability or an expected change of regime, the relationship can reverse: incumbents pack courts to entrench their interests before leaving, and judges may rule strategically to align with whoever they expect to hold power next, a pattern visible across Latin America.

Access to justice and legal mobilisation. Social transformation through courts depends on people developing a "legal conscience", an understanding of the law and how to use it, and on support structures outside the judiciary: civil society organisations, bar associations, prosecutors, lawyers, and human rights groups that help citizens bring and sustain claims.

Courts and democratic backsliding. Courts hold neither the purse nor the sword, which makes them easy targets for hostile rhetoric, legislative threats, pressure to resign, and court-packing. Courts that are neither impartial nor neutral can still stabilise a democracy while rival parties remain uncertain of each other's intentions, provided both still accept competitive elections. Once a party, especially an incumbent, abandons that commitment, there is little a court can do alone.

Digitised judicial data. The digitisation and free publication of court records across the Global South has opened large-scale, fine-grained study of everyday jurisprudence, useful to scholars and to the judges, lawyers, and litigants who can now see how the law works in their own context.

The usual way to measure women's power in politics is to count the seats they hold in parliament. But most women who take part in politics never stand for office. They vote, attend meetings, petition, protest, or try to get the water supply fixed. 

In this week's VoxDev Talk, Soledad Artiz Prillaman of Stanford talks to Tim Phillips about her new review of the research into non-elite women's participation in politics, written with Peace Medie (University of Bristol).

They are not elite women with less money, she argues. They want different things and face different constraints. Social norms can prevent them from achieving the change they want. But in the Global South there is evidence that non-elite women are using collective action to gain access to politics, and using that access to renegotiate the norms that hold them back, rather than waiting for those norms to shift first.

The research behind this episode:

Medie, Peace A., and Soledad Artiz Prillaman. 2026. "Nonelite Women's Participation in Politics." Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 29.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Soledad Artiz Prillaman. 2026. "Nonelite Women's Participation in Politics." VoxDev Talks (podcast). 

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About the guest

Soledad Artiz Prillaman is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and faculty director of the Inclusive Democracy and Development Lab. Her research spans comparative political economy, development, and gender, with a focus on South Asia and on how and when women gain access to politics, both as citizens and as representatives. She is the author of The Patriarchal Political Order: The Making and Unraveling of the Gendered Participation Gap in India (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

The paper is co-authored with Peace A. Medie, Associate Professor in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Her work covers gender, security, and politics in Africa, including the campaigns to end violence against women.

Research cited in this episode

Elite and nonelite women. The paper defines eliteness by access to political power, not by office held or income alone. Elites include elected representatives, but also academics and business executives whose position gives them access to power. Nonelites are those who lack that access. The distinction matters because policy aimed at getting more women into elite positions only helps everyone else if elite and nonelite women want the same things, and the evidence that they do is thin.

The income puzzle. At the individual level, income is generally uncorrelated with women's turnout; at the national level, GDP predicts nonelite women's participation only in some places. Women in paid work do participate more, but the driver appears to be the networks and information that come with a job, not the wage.

Vote agency. Showing up to vote is not the same as voting freely. Asked whether they would vote for their own preferred party or the one a male gatekeeper preferred, at least half of women in some South Asian settings say they would defer. Work by Sara Khan shows that the women with the least agency are those whose preferences differ most from the men who hold power over them.

Varieties of patriarchy. All societies are patriarchal, but patriarchy operates differently across them. In parts of South Asia it takes the form of explicit, socially sanctioned control over where women go and how they vote. In the United States and Europe it shows up earlier, as socialisation, producing large gender gaps in stated political interest. Same underlying force, different mechanics, different policy conclusions.

Quotas. More than 100 countries have adopted some form of electoral gender quota, making it the most widespread women's empowerment policy in the world. The evidence on whether quotas help nonelite women is mixed; they raise some women's participation in some places, but in others the effect is null or negative. In India, Prillaman notes campaign material for quota seats that pairs the woman candidate's name with a man's photograph.

Collective action. Networks outside the home, through women's groups, microcredit groups, churches, unions or friendship circles, raise women's participation by widening their information and giving them cover against backlash. Prillaman argues that in the Global South women are increasingly using collective action to gain access to politics, and using that access to renegotiate norms, rather than waiting for norms to change first.

More from VoxDev

Where are the Indian female politicians?, an interview with Lakshmi Iyer on why a woman winning office in India does not lead to more women standing next time.

Related reading on VoxDev

Grassroots party activism by women promotes equal political participation, in which Tanushree Goyal finds that women politicians in Delhi recruit women activists, narrowing gender gaps in political knowledge and participation.

Women's microcredit groups empower women politically, in which Prillaman shows that microcredit groups raise women's political participation in India by building their networks, not their bank balances.

This episode follows a wide-ranging panel convened at Stanford's King Center on Global Development, featuring Gyude Moore, as well as Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman, former USAID Administrator and Ambassador Mark Green, and Chair and Founder of the Liquidity and Sustainability Facility Vera Songwe - The future of global development: Approaches and partnerships for a new reality.

Bilateral aid to sub-Saharan Africa will fall by between 16% and 28% this year, according to the IMF. In past downturns, multilateral and humanitarian funding tended to fill the gap when bilateral aid dropped. This time those channels are shrinking too.

Gyude Moore, who ran the Liberian President's Delivery Unit under Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, thinks the contraction is structural rather than a passing effect of the Trump administration, and that recipient countries should stop expecting the old arrangement to return. He wants economic growth put at the centre of development rather than treated as one programme among several. Instead of letting donors decide which programmes are run, he says, countries should run a growth diagnostic: a way of identifying the two or three constraints doing most to hold an economy back. Governments can then reorganise their budgets around removing those constraints, and use the diagnostic to decide which offers of aid to take and which to turn down. Moore calls this “sovereignty through analytics”. Aid was meant to be temporary, he argues, and the job now is to quickly reach the point of not needing it.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and W. Gyude Moore. 2026. "The end of aid dependency.” VoxDev Talks (podcast). 

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About the guest

W. Gyude Moore is a distinguished fellow at the Energy for Growth Hub and a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development. He was Liberia's minister of public works from December 2014 to January 2018, and before that deputy chief of staff to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and head of the President's Delivery Unit, which oversaw more than $1 billion of road, power and port projects in a country rebuilding after civil war. He also lectures at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy. His work covers African infrastructure, energy, industrial policy and development finance.

Cited in this episode

The scale of the cuts. The IMF's October 2025 Regional Economic Outlook for sub-Saharan Africa, using OECD figures, projects bilateral aid to the region falling by 16% to 28% in 2025, with more cuts likely. Moore says the cuts to multilateral and humanitarian funding run higher again, and that the most aid-dependent countries have been hit hardest, through weaker health, education and nutrition systems.

Growth diagnostics. A way of finding the constraints that matter most: the one or two that, once removed, allow others to ease. Moore likens it to a doctor running tests before prescribing. The method is associated with the Growth Lab at Harvard. He suggests governments hire an independent party to run the analysis, so the findings cannot be dismissed as political.

The Millennium Challenge Corporation. A US agency that runs what it calls a constraints analysis, then funds the removal of the constraint it finds. Moore offers it as an existing model for diagnostic-led aid, while noting that it has critics.

Sovereignty through analytics. Moore's phrase for using a credible diagnostic to set the terms with donors. A government can say what it is trying to do, ask for help where it needs it, and decline what does not fit. He points to Ghana, Zambia and Zimbabwe rejecting or walking away from US health agreements under the America First Global Health Strategy as evidence that recipient governments now have that leverage and are willing to use it.

The Development Alliance. Liberia's attempt, around 2014 and 2015, to bring every donor and NGO into one room to map who was doing what, spot duplication and find the sectors nobody was covering. Moore's assessment: useful, but voluntary, not written into law, and not built around a single diagnostic. His conclusion is that such a framework should be put on a legal footing.

Five-year plans. Moore, who teaches in China each autumn, points to the discipline that fixed planning periods impose, and argues that legislation can do a similar job of holding a development strategy steady across changes of government.

Delivery units. Small teams set up to push complex projects through where the wider bureaucracy cannot. Moore ran one in the Liberian presidency and calls them islands of competence; he offers them as a way around weak implementation.

The European politics of aid. Moore's reason for thinking the window may close. Nativist parties are gaining ground across Europe, from the AfD to Reform UK to the PVV in the Netherlands, and an ageing population will pull more public money homeward. Countries that do not adjust, he warns, may find the external funding gone.

It's 1990. A young staff economist walks into a director's office at the World Bank and says the number he's about to publish is "crazy". The director tells him not to worry about it. 

The number was the dollar-a-day poverty line. Lant Pritchett, now of LSE, was that economist. More than three decades later, he's still worrying about it. In this week’s episode he argues that the dollar-a-day line warped how the world thinks about poverty, by setting the bar so low that we can count billions of deprived people as not poor.

In a new paper, co-authored with Martina Viarengo (Graduate Institute, Geneva), their fix isn't to scrap the low line. It's to add a high one as well. They propose a global upper-bound poverty line of $21.50 a day, ten times the extreme-poverty standard, derived from four separate measures of material wellbeing.

Above it, you're no longer poor by any reasonable global standard. Below it, you're poor in a sense worth measuring. By that standard, 99% of Pakistan is poor, and almost no one in Denmark is. Should that affect how we think about anti-poverty policy? 

The research behind this episode:

Pritchett, Lant, and Martina Viarengo. Forthcoming. "Raising the Bar: An Inclusive Global Poverty Line." Journal of Development Economics. Available now as a working paper.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Lant Pritchett. 2026. "What the $1-a-day global poverty line gets wrong." VoxDev Talks (podcast). 

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About the guest

Lant Pritchett is a development economist and Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics. He worked at the World Bank from 1988 to 2007 and taught at the Harvard Kennedy School for nearly two decades. His work spans economic growth, state capability, education systems, and labour mobility.

The paper is co-authored with Martina Viarengo, Professor of International Economics at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Her research spans public policy, labour markets, comparative education, and international migration.

Research cited in this episode

The dollar-a-day poverty line. Created for the World Bank's 1990 World Development Report on poverty and based on the observation that national poverty lines in the poorest countries clustered at a low floor (Ravallion, Datt and van de Walle 1991). Updated for inflation, it now sits at P$2.15 a day in 2017 purchasing power parity. It was only ever meant to mark the lowest a global poverty line could plausibly be, not the line.

The focus axiom. A standard property of poverty measures, originating with Amartya Sen (1976), under which changes in the income of anyone above the poverty line do not register in the measure. Pritchett's objection is that this assigns mathematically zero weight to the near-poor; a household just above the line counts the same as a Danish millionaire, namely zero. He calls it an economic bug that became a political feature, because it takes global redistribution off the table.

Gresham's law applied to poverty. Pritchett's framing for how the simple headcount displaced richer, distribution-sensitive approaches; bad economics drove out better economics because it was easier to understand. He notes the World Bank of the 1970s was preoccupied with distribution, citing Hollis Chenery and Montek Ahluwalia's Redistribution with Growth (1974), so the idea that economists ignored distribution until poverty measurement arrived is a myth.

The two criteria for an upper bound. The proposed line rests on two ideas drawn from the tension between the focus axiom and standard welfare economics. One, material wellbeing achievement; the line sits where a household reaches a standard of living a rich-country citizen would recognise as adequate. Two, near enough satiation; the line sits where the extra wellbeing from another dollar has fallen so low that treating further gains as zero does little violence to reality. At twenty-one and a half dollars the marginal utility of income is roughly three percent of its value at the dollar-a-day line; at the World Bank's current high line of P$6.85 it is still around thirty percent.

Four measures of wellbeing. The number is triangulated across an iso-elastic utility function, food shares in consumption (Engel's Law), a household index of six basic conditions drawn from Demographic and Health Survey data, and a cross-national index of basics. The estimates cluster between twenty and forty dollars a day; twenty-one and a half was chosen because it is exactly ten times the dollar-a-day line, a focal point in the same way one dollar was.

The six minimal conditions of prosperity. Electricity, improved sanitation, safe water, primary schooling completed by older children, no child dying under five, and no young child malnourished. The test Pritchett applies is whether it would be absurd to call a household prosperous while it lacks one of them.

The rich of the poor and the poor of the rich. The tenth percentile in Denmark has higher consumption than the ninetieth percentile in Pakistan or Indonesia. This is why any global line that produces meaningful poverty in rich countries implies poverty rates near one hundred percent across most of the developing world; a point Dani Rodrik (2007) showed is widely misunderstood.

The prosperity gap. A distribution-sensitive welfare measure adopted by the World Bank (Kraay et al. 2025) that weights the whole income distribution rather than counting everyone above a threshold as zero. Pritchett offers it, alongside poverty-gap and squared-poverty-gap measures at a higher line, as the practical route to acting on a global upper bound without reducing everything to a single headcount.

More VoxDev Talks episodes

Rethinking evidence and refocusing on growth in development economics, Lant Pritchett on what the problem might be if we rely exclusively on rigorous evidence in development economics as a guide for policy.

Rethinking how we measure extreme poverty, Charles Kenny asks: is it time for a new measure of extreme poverty?

Every civil service reform plan opens with the same list of complaints: poor performance, low motivation, weak accountability. Across six African countries and three decades, governments launched 131 separate reform efforts; not one fully achieved what it set out to do.

Martin Williams spent more than a decade working alongside Ghana's civil service before writing a book called Reform as Process that analyses the lessons from his experience, and the rest of the 131 reforms. For example, 34 programmes across six countries tried to link civil service pay to performance; none delivered. One lesson is that formal rules and accountability systems cannot govern what matters in a civil service: innovation, adaptation, co-ordination, the willingness to act on the spirit of a rule rather than its letter. Meaningful reforms often require no money at all. They require changing expectations from inside, starting small and building credibility, decentralising the leadership of change, and treating new formal rules as a last resort rather than a first step.

The book behind this episode:

Williams, Martin J. 2026. Reform as Process: Implementing Change in Public Bureaucracies. New York: Columbia University Press. Open-access PDF available at uplopen.com.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Martin J. Williams. 2026. "Why civil service reform fails (and what actually works)." VoxDev Talks (podcast).

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About the guest

Martin J. Williams is Associate Professor of Organizational Studies and Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Michigan, and Associate Faculty at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. His research spans the politics and management of policy implementation, public service delivery, and bureaucratic reform, with a sustained focus on sub-Saharan Africa. He previously worked as an economist in Ghana's Ministry of Trade and Industry as an Overseas Development Institute Fellow, and as a Senior Researcher at the Economic Policy Research Institute in Cape Town. Reform as Process has been shortlisted for the Douglass North Award for best book in institutional and organizational economics.

Research cited in this episode

Non-verifiable tasks. In organizational economics, a verifiable action is one where a third party (an auditor, a judge, an administrative tribunal) can determine objectively whether it was performed correctly. Non-verifiable tasks are those where no such determination can be made; they include innovation, adaptation, co-ordination across teams, and acting on the spirit of a rule rather than its letter. Williams draws on this framework, which originates in contract theory, to explain why formal accountability systems consistently fall short: they can only govern verifiable outputs, leaving the full range of non-verifiable tasks unaddressed and, in many cases, actively crowded out.

Performance-linked incentive systems. Williams's dataset covers 34 separate reform efforts across Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Zambia that attempted to tie civil service pay or progression to measured performance. Not one delivered sustained differentiated incentives on an ongoing basis; only two achieved even partial delivery of rewards, and none delivered sanctions based on measured performance. Williams argues this is not isolated implementation failure but reflects a structural incompatibility between formalised performance metrics and the non-verifiable nature of much civil service work. Managers respond rationally: they set soft targets, award uniform scores, and the process becomes a tick-box exercise.

Projectization of reform. Williams uses this term to describe the dominant approach: treating change as a time-bound, discrete intervention with its own budget, acronym, and implementing team, conceived separately from the organisation's core work. This approach systematically distorts reform goals towards formally measurable outputs (new policies, new laws) rather than sustained behavioural change, undermines credibility by signalling a predetermined end date, and reinforces the perception among civil servants that reform is a temporary performance before things return to normal.

Continuous improvement. Williams draws an analogy with physical fitness: achieving a target and then stopping does not sustain the gain. High-performing organisations, in the public and private sectors alike, treat improvement as an ongoing process embedded in daily work, not a periodic project handed to a specialist unit. Starting small is not an absence of ambition; it is how credibility is built and larger changes become possible. Williams argues civil service reform should be reconceived on these terms, with performance improvement treated as the job of everyone in the organisation.

Decentralised reform leadership. The dominant model of reform leadership, Williams argues, is a visionary leader driving a top-down plan. This model is counterproductive. It personalises reform in ways that guarantee reversal when the leader moves on, and it cannot reach the day-to-day interactions among the thousands of individuals and hundreds of teams that determine how a civil service actually works. A more effective model is catalysing rather than forcing: creating conditions in which teams can identify and solve their own problems, escalate issues, co-ordinate with each other, and act on ideas for improvement without fear of being ignored or penalised.

More VoxDev Talks episodes

How government analytics can improve public sector implementation, in which Daniel Rogger and Christian Schuster discuss their efforts to use the data that already exists in governments to better understand how they function. 

In 1993, the World Bank published a report on a remarkable development story.

East Asia's post-war growth — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and their neighbours — had lifted millions out of poverty in a generation. The report documented the influence of export subsidies, state-directed credit, land reform, and government-business dialogue. But the bank, constrained by the Washington Consensus of the time, underplayed the industrial policies that were at the heart of this miracle.

Nancy Birdsall was head of the department that produced the report. In this week's VoxDev Talk, she looks back, talking to Tim Phillips about whether this stance affected policy in other developing countries.

Birdsall tells Tim Phillips how the report came to exist at all — financed by the Japanese government as a deliberate strategy to expose the bank's economists to a success story their prevailing framework couldn't explain. 

With industrial policy back at the centre of economic debate, Birdsall's new article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives asks whether the bank missed its moment to embed those lessons into its operational work. 

The research behind this episode:

Birdsall, Nancy. 2025. "The World Bank's East Asian Miracle: Too Much a Product of Its Time?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 39(4): 127–48. A free download is available at the Center for Global Development.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Nancy Birdsall. 2026. "The World Bank's East Asian Miracle." VoxDev Talk (podcast). [Episode URL].

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About Nancy Birdsall

Nancy Birdsall is president emerita of the Center for Global Development, which she co-founded in 2001. She was previously executive vice president of the Inter-American Development Bank and, before that, director of the Policy Research Department at the World Bank, where she oversaw the department responsible for the East Asian Miracle report. Her research spans development finance, inequality, economic growth and the role of multilateral institutions in the global economy.

Research cited in this episode

The East Asian Miracle (World Bank, 1993). A 400-page study of the economic performance of eight high-performing Asian economies — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand — covering the period 1965 to 1990. Commissioned with Japanese government funding, the report documented both market fundamentals and a range of active state policies; its handling of industrial policy was carefully hedged to remain within the bounds of what the bank's dominant Washington Consensus framework could accept. The full report is available from the World Bank Open Knowledge Repository.

The Washington Consensus. A term coined by economist John Williamson in 1989 to describe the package of macroeconomic and structural reforms — fiscal discipline, trade liberalisation, privatisation, deregulation and market-determined prices — that the IMF, World Bank and US Treasury broadly promoted as the framework for development in the late 1980s and 1990s. The consensus was dominant inside the bank during the period the East Asian Miracle report was written; countries following activist state policies did not fit its categories easily.

MITI (Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry). The Japanese government body responsible for coordinating industrial and trade policy during Japan's post-war growth period, including the direction of credit, protection of infant industries and promotion of heavy manufacturing exports. MITI was widely known inside the bank, but its role in Japan's development was not systematically studied or incorporated into the bank's policy advice until the East Asian Miracle report. It was abolished and reorganised as the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) in 2001.

Performance-based credit subsidies. A mechanism used across several East Asian economies in which exporters could access subsidised credit conditional on demonstrating actual export orders. The conditionality — credit only if you are already performing — was central to why the policy worked: it rewarded productive firms and withdrew support from those that failed to deliver. The East Asian Miracle report described this approach in detail without classifying it as industrial policy.

Japan's postal savings system. A government-run savings scheme that channelled household deposits through post offices into state-directed investment, providing below-market returns to savers while funding subsidised credit to targeted sectors. Birdsall notes it as a mechanism worth studying for developing countries seeking to finance industrial support without relying on private capital markets.

Indonesia and the airplane sector. The Indonesian government under Suharto sought to develop a domestic aerospace industry, with state subsidies to Industri Pesawat Terbang Nusantara (IPTN). The World Bank's East Asia regional department, which managed the bank's lending relationship with Indonesia, was concerned that the East Asian Miracle report might be read as endorsing this approach. Their pressure to limit the report's treatment of industrial policy is the episode's opening anecdote — and the source of what is possibly the best line in the show.

IDB report on public-private dialogue in Latin America. Birdsall references work by the Inter-American Development Bank on the conditions under which structured dialogue between government bureaucrats and private-sector firms can support industrial policy; she notes that access at the highest levels of government — including the president — appears to be a factor in whether such dialogues produce results. 

More VoxDev Talks on this topic

Industrial policy for economic development, Dani Rodrik on the evidence for active state roles in directing investment and exports, and the institutional prerequisites for making them work.

The future of the World Bank: Why knowledge is power, Penny Goldberg on the bank's role as a producer and broker of development knowledge, and how that function has evolved since the Washington Consensus era.

Related reading on VoxDev

Modern industrial policy: The Asian miracles' blueprint, a VoxDev Talk examining how the principles behind East Asian industrial success — performance conditionality, export orientation, technology learning — can be translated into policy frameworks for today's developing economies.

Where are we in the economics of industrial policies?, what three decades of research have established about when and why industrial policy works, and what conditions determine whether government intervention helps or hinders.

Implementing industrial policy effectively: Lessons from shipbuilding in China, how policy design and performance conditionality determine whether sector-level support produces lasting productivity gains — the same question at the heart of the East Asian Miracle debate.

This is an episode from VoxDev's new podcast series, Ideas in Development. This series has a separate podcast feed, where you can find every episode of Oliver Hanney and Kurtis Lockhart's conversations on cities.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjXmiaMPabQ 
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-perfect-city/id1866874059?i=1000767322240 
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3MfSc3AWT6lT5jG9kvXW4B?si=371569bc3d374d72 
Audioboom: https://audioboom.com/posts/8902311-the-perfect-city 
Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/p/the-perfect-city  

What does a perfect city look like in a low- or middle-income country – and how do you get there?

In the closing episode of the Ideas in Development cities series, Ed Glaeser joins Kurtis Lockhart and Oliver Hanney for a wide-ranging conversation on what makes cities work. He sets out the three foundations every city needs (safety, mobility, education), why infrastructure without the right incentives and institutions fails, what 19th-century New York's cholera outbreaks teach Lusaka about water, why “bus good, train bad” still holds, and what the medieval European city has to offer sub-Saharan Africa's fastest-growing urban regions.

We also discuss the political art of being a great mayor, why "capacity eats policy as a light afternoon snack", and his three priorities for African cities over the next decade.

Wherever Roshaneh Zafar went in Pakistan in the early 1990s, documenting World Bank social development projects, women told her the same thing: the water and sanitation are fine, but what about economic opportunity?

Zafar tells Tim Phillips how that question led her to train with Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank, and then back to Pakistan to found Kashf Foundation in 1996 — the country's first specialised microfinance institution for women. Thirty years on, Kashf serves more than one million clients, has covered six million lives through micro-health insurance, and has financed over 3,000 low-cost private schools. Zafar describes a model that long ago outgrew its Grameen origins: customised for Pakistan's diversity, run on a partnership rather than a hierarchical footing, and now embracing climate risk, ultra-poor programmes and AI-assisted credit decisions.

The episode also confronts the question: Does microfinance actually empower women? Research has questioned whether it makes a difference. Zafar has ten years of longitudinal data that tells a different story, and a view on why the two bodies of evidence are not as contradictory as they appear.

Research and references discussed in this episode:

Banerjee, Abhijit, Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster, and Cynthia Kinnan. 2015. "The Miracle of Microfinance? Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 7(1): 22–53.

Rana, Annum Ather. 2025. Evidence on the Impact of Microfinance Program on Poverty Reduction and Income Security. Kashf Foundation Focus Note Series, April 

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Roshaneh Zafar. 2026. "Roshaneh Zafar on 30 years of microfinance and mindset change in Pakistan." VoxDev Talk (podcast). 

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About Roshaneh Zafar

Roshaneh Zafar is the founder and managing director of Kashf Foundation, Pakistan's first specialised microfinance institution. A development economist by training, she worked at the World Bank before leaving to found Kashf in 1996 after training under Muhammad Yunus at Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Her work spans microfinance, micro-insurance, women's economic empowerment, low-cost private education and behaviour change communication. 

Research and context cited in this episode

Grameen Bank and the Grameen model. Founded by Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh in 1983, Grameen Bank pioneered group-based lending to poor women without requiring collateral, on the premise that social accountability within borrower groups could substitute for asset security. Yunus received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Kashf was established as a Grameen replicator but diverged significantly in its approach: hiring women loan officers from the outset, replacing the group hierarchy with a peer partnership model (using the Urdu term baji, meaning sister, for both client and staff), and adapting products for Pakistan's religious, linguistic and cultural diversity.

The 2008 microfinance delinquency crisis in Pakistan. Over-indebtedness, predatory lending practices and the absence of a credit information bureau led to a sector-wide delinquency crisis in Pakistan in 2008. Following the crisis, regulators, lenders and the Pakistan Microfinance Network introduced enhanced consumer protection standards and a credit bureau to prevent multiple borrowing. Kashf now limits lending to clients with no more than two active loans from any provider.

Banerjee et al. (2015) randomised controlled trial. The paper, a randomised evaluation of a microcredit expansion in Hyderabad, India by Spandana Sphoorty, found no statistically significant effect on women's empowerment, health, education or consumption over an 18-to-24-month follow-up period. It became the most-cited challenge to microfinance's development impact. Zafar's counter-argument turns on time horizon: empowerment, she argues, is a decade-scale process that short-panel RCTs cannot capture. A University of Minnesota longitudinal analysis of ten years of Kashf client data found a statistically significant positive correlation between the number of loans taken and business income, and between savings behaviour and subsequent business investment.

Behaviour change communication: theater and television. Kashf has used street theater for thirty years to communicate on topics including child marriage, girls' education, reproductive health and insurance take-up. After Zafar attended a conference session on the impact of telenovelas on gender norms in Brazil and Mexico, the foundation moved into television drama production, covering topics including child sexual abuse, human trafficking and cybercrime. A child sexual abuse drama prompted a legal notice from PEMRA (the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority), which was successfully contested. The dramas are produced with a media and creative team to ensure sensitive handling of difficult subjects.

The gender bond and gender sukuk. In 2005, Zafar rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. The experience prompted a long-term ambition to connect micro women entrepreneurs to capital markets. Kashf subsequently issued a gender bond listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange, followed by a gender sukuk (Sharia-compliant bond) listed on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange — the first such instrument linking Pakistani microfinance to international Islamic capital markets.

Low-cost private schools. Research by Kashf found that clients, once they had access to income, were moving their children from public to low-cost private schools; teacher absenteeism in private schools was far lower. Further research showed 70% of these schools were run by women. Kashf began financing them; it now supports over 3,000 such schools, with a requirement that girls constitute at least 50% of enrolment.

More VoxDev Talks on this topic

Breaking down access constraints faced by women: Experimental evidence from Pakistan, a VoxDev Talk on how removing specific barriers to vocational training take-up shifts economic participation among women in Pakistan — the supply-side complement to Kashf's demand-side model.

How safe transport could unlock women's labour force participation in Pakistan, a VoxDev Talk on how mobility constraints suppress women's economic activity in urban Pakistan, and how subsidised women-only transport services can shift that.

Related reading on VoxDev

What have we learned about microfinance?, a VoxDev article reviewing the evidence base on microfinance impact, including the conditions under which credit does and does not produce lasting change in household welfare.

Women's microcredit groups empower women politically, a VoxDev article on evidence that participation in group lending schemes produces political voice and civic engagement even when economic empowerment effects are limited.

Empowering women through digital financial services, a VoxDev article on how mobile money and digital accounts give women a private, named financial identity — and what that does to their control over household resources.

This is an episode from VoxDev's new podcast series, Ideas in Development. This series has a separate podcast feed, where you can find every episode of Oliver Hanney and Kurtis Lockhart's conversations on cities. 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOPG6UmOHGU
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cities-of-opportunity-not-powder-kegs/id1866874059?i=1000766172534
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6BoYX7rfpjn86KndCxsnyd?si=53213815c1fd4408
Audioboom: https://audioboom.com/posts/8899287-cities-of-opportunity-not-powder-kegs
Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/p/cities-of-opportunity-not-powder
VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/institutions-political-economy/leonard-wantchekon-youth-governance-and-africas-urban-future 

Are African cities a powder keg of restless youth – or the most promising place to build prosperity, peaceful politics and shared civic life?

Leonard Wantchekon joins Ideas in Development to argue that African cities should be seen as a youth opportunity, not a youth problem.

We discuss recent unrest in Kenya and Tanzania, his work showing that clientelism is overwhelmingly a rural phenomenon, and that deliberation and decentralisation are the institutional minimums African cities should be reaching for. Leonard then lays out what deliberation, decentralisation and a renewed urban culture could do for the next generation of African city dwellers.

Between 1959 and 1961, between thirty and forty million people starved to death in China. The Great Famine had many causes, and one of them was a campaign to eradicate sparrows.

Shaoda Wang of the University of Chicago tells Tim Phillips about Mao Zedong's 1958 Four Pests Campaign, which led to the mass killing of sparrows, set off a chain of consequences that scientists had warned about, but political pressure had silenced. Sparrows eat crops, but they also eat the locusts and other insects that destroy the crops. Remove the sparrows and the pests go unchecked. Wang and his co-authors estimate the eradication cut national grain yields by 8-9%, accounting for roughly a fifth of the total agricultural decline during the famine.

The research behind this episode:

Frank, Eyal G., Qinyun Wang, Shaoda Wang, Xuebin Wang, and Yang You. 2024. "Campaigning for Extinction: Eradication of Sparrows and the Great Famine in China." NBER Working Paper 34087.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Shaoda Wang. 2025. "How killing sparrows contributed to the Great Chinese Famine.” VoxDev Talk (podcast). 

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About Shaoda Wang

Shaoda Wang is an assistant professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago. His research spans environmental economics, political economy and development, with a focus on how state capacity and political incentives shape environmental and health outcomes in China and other developing countries.

Research cited in this episode

The Four Pests Campaign (1958). Launched as part of Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward, the campaign targeted rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows. Sparrows were included on the grounds that they ate grain and reduced agricultural yields. Several prominent Chinese scientists warned at the time that removing sparrows would destabilise the food chain by eliminating a key predator of crop pests, particularly locusts. Their advice was ignored. The campaign resulted in the killing of an estimated two billion sparrows.

County gazetteers as a data source. Official harvest data reported by local governments to the central government during the Great Leap Forward was heavily inflated; local officials faced strong political incentives to overstate output, and those exaggerated figures contributed to the famine by masking food shortages from central planners. Wang and his co-authors instead use county gazetteers: records compiled by local elites through a bottom-up process with no link to the political reward structures that distorted official reporting. Comparison between the two sources reveals the scale of over-reporting in the official data.

Sparrow habitat suitability index. Rather than relying on reported sparrow kill counts, which were distorted by local officials seeking to demonstrate compliance with campaign targets, the paper constructs an index of how suitable each county's climate and ecological conditions are for sparrow habitation. Counties with high sparrow suitability were more exposed to the shock of eradication; comparing their crop yield and mortality trajectories against low-suitability counties before and after the campaign provides the causal identification strategy. The two groups followed similar trajectories before the campaign; divergence afterwards is attributed to the eradication.

State food procurement as a famine amplifier. The Great Famine was not simply a production shortfall. The central government continued to export food during the famine years because inflated harvest reports gave it no signal of the actual crisis. State procurement quotas extracted grain from rural communities at a time when households were already facing starvation; the political system that caused the sparrow eradication was also the mechanism that amplified its consequences.

More VoxDev Talks on this topic

The economics of ecosystems: How nature and economies interact. Eyal Frank of the University of Chicago — a co-author of the sparrows paper — on how to measure the economic value of biodiversity. His research on bats and white-nose syndrome, and on desert locusts, shows what happens when natural pest control collapses; the sparrows episode is the historical counterpart.

Related reading on VoxDev

The political economy of policy learning: Evidence from China, a VoxDev article on how misaligned incentives across China's political hierarchy distort policy experimentation and produce systematically exaggerated signals — the same dynamic that inflated both the sparrow kill counts and the harvest figures during the Great Leap Forward.

Autocratic rule and social capital: Evidence from Imperial China, a VoxDev article on the long-run effects of political persecution under autocratic rule in China, and how the suppression of dissent shapes economic and social behaviour across generations.

The economics of conservation in low- and middle-income countries, a VoxDev article surveying the evidence on maintaining natural ecosystems, the role of governance, and the costs of losing species whose economic value is not yet understood.