Voices in Development: A Podcast from Yale's Economic Growth Center EGC Podcasts

​Much of the research on economic development in low- and middle-income countries, particularly in Africa, is led by researchers who are outsiders to the regions they study. While this outsider perspective can help them see elements of the social or economic structure less visible to those who are deeply embedded in local institutions, partnerships with individuals and communities living and working in the area provide crucial insights for both the research process and its application to policy.

In this episode of Voices in Development, Christopher Udry, Robert E. and Emily King Professor of Economics at Northwestern University, Co-Director of the Global Poverty Research Lab, and former director of the Yale Economic Growth Center, discusses the role of in-country partnerships in development economics research. In collaborating with in-country partners, Udry regularly shares his research findings but rarely makes policy recommendations. "I view my work as more trying to support my local collaborators in providing them with the resources and the tools and maybe the authority to make recommendations to government," he says. "So I view myself as sort of a cheerleader, maybe a coach, for the athletes who are going to do the real policy."

This episode also featured Rohini Pande, Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics and Director of the Economic Growth Center, and Francis Annan, Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Annan, who grew up in Ghana and studies digital financial markets, insurance, and firms, notes that involving in-country partners in the production of research data is essential because it can help reproduce meaningful results. “If the local institutions, the regulators, the users of this evidence are part of the production process for this evidence, it tends to make our lives easier,” he says. 

Despite the widespread acknowledgment of the potential for digital technologies to accelerate inclusive economic growth, not everyone has access to the mobile devices, internet connectivity, and affordable data they need to participate meaningfully in the digital economy. This digital divide, which includes gender specific barriers, prevents billions of people from accessing the fundamental digital resources necessary for participation in the modern economy. Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) enables countries to more effectively connect marginalized communities with markets, resources, and services through tools such as a digital ID, but the infrastructure alone does not mean it’s equally accessible to everyone who might benefit.  

In this episode of Voices in Development, Pramod Varma, the Chief Architect of Aadhaar, India's digital identification program, discusses the role of DPI in economic development, specifically in terms of increasing access to financial services. Varma argues that the most effective DPI is much like a highway network that is built by the government but traveled by vehicles designed and manufactured by the private sector. With the essential infrastructure in place, he suggests, the private sector, NGOs, and philanthropists can develop faster, cheaper, and more sustainable ways to reach marginalized communities. 

This episode also featured Rohini Pande, Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics and Director of the Economic Growth Center, and Alix Peterson Zwane, Senior Fellow at the Yale Jackson School and CEO of Global Innovation Fund, who discussed the links between DPI and inclusion. 

The vast majority of climate financing is directed towards mitigating, reducing, or preventing greenhouse gas emissions. However, there is a vital need for climate financing aimed at adaptation, protecting the lives and livelihoods of the people most affected by climate change. Low-income countries are disproportionately suffering from climate breakdowns, particularly among the poorest and most vulnerable people within these countries. 

In this episode of Voices in Development, Kelsey Jack, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, discusses her recently completed study focusing on rainwater harvesting techniques in rural Niger, where intensive agriculture practices have degraded soil quality, making the population particularly vulnerable to climate shocks. Jack studied the impact that rainwater collection has on increasing soil quality through the digging of demi-lunes, which are semicircular basins that farmers dig into the earth to collect rainwater. Jack’s team organized a training period conducted by the Ministry of Agriculture that led to massive adoption of the demi-lunes. 

The podcast also features interviews with Rohini Pande, Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics and Director of the Economic Growth Center, placing mitigation in the larger climate agenda; Gregory Lane, an Assistant Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, on how innovations in weather forecasting can impact farming practices in India; and Islamul Haque, a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE), on identifying the “low hanging fruit” in climate adaptation technology.  

Today’s environmental crises are affecting lower-income countries – and within those countries, poor and marginalized communities – most of all. Policymakers in these countries are seeking new ways to balance trade-offs between the economic growth that can provide citizens with income-generating opportunities, and the harmful emissions that industrial production usually entails.
For over a decade, EGC affiliate Nick Ryan and colleagues have worked with policymakers in the highly industrialized Indian state of Gujarat to reduce emissions at low cost to industries. Now the team is expanding their work to implement a cap-and-trade market for carbon emissions from large sources. This series of studies – the first of its kind among today’s emerging economies, outside of China – is a collaboration of the Gujarat Pollution Control Board, EGC, the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC), and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL).

In this episode of EGC Voices in Development, Ryan talks about the trade-offs low-and-middle income countries face between expanding access to energy, while also reducing the health and environmental costs of energy production. He says a critical role that development economists can play in supporting environmentally sustainable economic growth is to generate evidence on the impact different policy changes can have in order to inform decision-making. 

Nicholas Ryan is an Associate Professor of Economics at Yale University. He was a Prize Fellow in Economics at Harvard University from 2012-2014. He received a PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012 and a BA in Economics summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania. Ryan studies energy markets and environmental regulation in developing countries. Energy use enables high standards of living but rapid, energy-intensive growth has caused many environmental problems in turn. Ryan’s research measures how energy use and pollution emissions respond to regulation and market incentives. His work includes empirical studies of the effect of power grid capacity on electricity prices, how firms make decisions about energy-efficiency and how environmental regulation can be designed to best abate pollution at low social cost. Recent research studies the adoption and pricing of renewable energy in low- and middle-income countries.

How do social norms – the set of informal rules, beliefs, and biases that govern behavior in a given group or society ­– affect the development process? While positive norms can support and accelerate development, harmful ones like slavery or female genital cutting can constrain it, exacerbating poverty and inequality. While social change in many high-income countries has reduced the prevalence of the most harmful norms over time, they continue to exist in many low- and middle-income countries, often preventing disadvantaged communities and groups from reaching their full potential.  
In this episode of EGC Voices in Development, Rohini Pande is joined by Eliana La Ferrara and Samuel Moyn to discuss the “stickiness” of harmful social norms, both today and throughout history – and how changing such norms is often at the heart of the development challenge.
Rohini Pande, Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics and Director of EGC, frames the discussion by considering how research in development economics often approaches norms from the perspective of political economy, which often focuses on formal institutions. While this has generated important insights about the role and influence of formal institutions on economic development, it has focused less on how harmful norms can be perpetuated through informal institutions – such as marriage dynamics within individual households – and how these can impede development.
Samuel Moyn, Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History, notes that we can learn many lessons from historical examples of advocacy for social change. In the United States in the 19th century, for example, abolitionists confronted an entrenched set of political, social, and economic systems in their fight to abolish slavery. Moyn underscores the difficulties abolitionists faced in seeking to spark that change, and the radical shifts in social norms that were required.
Eliana La Ferrara, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, draws on her research on female genital cutting in Sierra Leone and Somalia to analyze the role of social and cultural norms in economic development. She notes the cultural weight of the harmful practice in some cases, but has also noticed that the persistence of such practices often arises not from widely-held social beliefs, but the perception that these beliefs are widely held – a phenomenon in social psychology known as “pluralistic ignorance.”
 This wide-ranging discussion touches on many examples of harmful norms, both from history and today, and considers how they might be changed at the grassroots and broader levels. Indeed, a key challenge is embracing the notion that changing harmful norms can unlock development success.

Almost 60 years after the passing of the Civil Rights Act in the US, race continues to determine patterns of income, wealth and opportunity. For Black Americans in particular, the predominance of exploitative practices such as sharecropping following the slave trade has enabled inequality to persist through a number of generations.
In order to develop policies that tackle these injustices, what can economics or other disciplines reveal to us about past and present inequalities in societies with racial, ethnic, or caste-based hierarchies?


"Even in that first book, I took great pains whenever I was describing things that were occurring to give it a comparative perspective... some obvious things like... the Emancipation in the Caribbean, which took place about 30 years earlier, and the transition problems they had there. But I also took some pains to talk about the development of different forms of agriculture in places like India and other parts of the world, because I thought that some of the events that are happening aren't strictly and solely because we're looking at former slaveholders faced off against their former slaves." – Gerald Jaynes
Economist Gerald Jaynes, A. Whitney Griswold Professor of Economics, African American Studies, and Urban Studies and EGC affiliate, uses interdisciplinary research methods to aid his study of structural inequalities and Black agency in the United States. In this episode of Voices in Development, Jaynes discusses the domestic and international implications of his research, linking it to similar patterns in low- and middle- income countries.
Gerald Jaynes earned his doctorate in economics from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, 1976. He previously served as a legislative aide to State Senator Cecil A. Partee, President Pro-tem of the Illinois State Senate and as an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. His policy and public sector engagements include acting as the Study Director of the Committee On The Status of Black Americans at the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C. and Chairman of the New Haven, Ct. Minority Business Development Agency by Mayoral appointment. He has testified before the United States Congress on numerous occasions and served as a consultant to federal and local government agencies.