No discipline has a monopoly on high-quality, policy-relevant research. As reflected on VoxDev, development economists are increasingly teaming up with other fields to improve the relevance of their research.
Interdisciplinary research is helping answer development questions that economics alone can’t. On VoxDev, we’re featuring more of this work, where economists team up with (or draw from) climate science, psychology, history, public health, political science, agriculture, and anthropology.
In this blog, I’ve highlighted some research that I’ve enjoyed reading and classed as interdisciplinary – broadly defined. I’ve included both examples that sit in established subfields (economic history, political economy, agricultural economics), and research resulting from newer collaborations between economists and other fields.
Development economics, climate science and ecology
Ecologists are increasingly sounding the alarm about the biodiversity crisis. Economists are, at long last, working to incorporate natural habitats and biodiversity into their thinking and modelling of economic systems. Some of the pioneers in this burgeoning field have outlined their research on VoxDev.
M. Scott Taylor and Rolf Weder explore how humans, and our economic systems, are contributing to this crisis. They show through simulations that markets, which are causing overharvesting, and climate change, which is gradually degrading habitats, can combine to cause mass extinction events.
For a broader summary of research in this area, Eyal Frank joined our podcast to discuss his work testing ecological predictions with economic tools. His research shows how truly dependent our economies are on the ecosystem services that different species provide. When a disease wiped out US bat populations, farmers responded by using far more insecticide. This increased human exposure to toxins, with infant mortality rising as a result. In India, the accidental poisoning of vultures removed critical scavengers, triggering surges in feral dog populations, increased water pollution, and ultimately 100,000s of human deaths. Ecologists’ warnings have significant economic implications.
Other collaborations integrate climate models with economic analyses. Chris Barrett, Jennifer Burney, Teevrat Garg, Ariel Ortiz-Bobea and Trinh Pham synthesised research on climate change and agriculture. Their conclusion, there is a feedback loop between climate change and agriculture, whereby climate change can intensify agriculture’s environmental harms and vice versa.
Development economics and psychology
Does being rich make us happy? Does alleviating poverty improve well-being? Does improving mental health have economic impacts?
There are a series of important questions at the intersection of development economics and psychology. Last year, Johannes Haushofer and Daniel Salicath discussed what we have learned so far and highlighted the importance of incorporating psychology into economic analyses. Economists increasingly measure aspirations, mental health outcomes, and beliefs – and design interventions that target them specifically.
In Niger, an interdisciplinary team tested adding a psychosocial component to an anti-poverty programme. This consisted of community film screenings to raise collective aspirations and life-skills training to build self-efficacy. Thomas Bossuroy, Patrick Premand and Catherine Thomas show how the blended programme raised earnings and economic diversification, and was more cost-effective.
In education, a long-run scholarship experiment in Ghana led by Esther Duflo, Pascaline Dupas, Michael Kremer and Elizabeth Spelke shows impacts that standard economic metrics might miss. To capture impacts on child development, they develop a broad set of tests which demonstrate improvements in early cognitive development for children whose mothers received high school scholarships.
Development economics and history
Historical periods of economic change inform current policy debates. Economists are increasingly accessing, or creating, data that can shed light on our history.
Southeast Asia’s economic transformation in the past 50 years has been the source of constant debate. Why were they able to transform their economies so rapidly? Can this be replicated elsewhere? Alexandra de Pleijt and Ewout Frankema provide a crucial perspective to this debate, by using modern microdata to trace education levels across the region during the twentieth century. They demonstrated that higher education played a key role in the economic miracle of Southeast Asia, and did so much earlier than previously realised.
How did expanding voting rights impact the world’s largest democracy? Guilhem Cassan, Lakshmi Iyer and Rinchan Ali Mirza use data from Indian censuses from 1921, 1931, and 1951, to explore how two major suffrage reforms shaped Indian democracy. Interestingly, there were not meaningful gains in political participation or competition, but government policy did shift, leading to higher spending on education.
Institutions are hard to change. Andrea Matranga and Timur Natkhov digitise the earliest Russian census to show how frontier defence needs entrenched serfdom, with persistent effects on inequality and local institutions.
And much research has explored the lasting impacts of colonisation:
- Concessions given to private companies for natural resource extraction still negatively impact the DRC – Sara Lowes and Eduardo Montero.
- The partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 had wide-ranging, long-lasting, negative economic and political impacts – Prashant Bharadwaj and Saumitra Jha.
- Sara Lowes and Eduardo Montero study colonial medical campaigns in Central Africa: coercive interventions left deep scars, depressing trust in medicine and dampening take-up of modern health programmes decades later.
Development economics and anthropology
Insights from anthropology help us avoid one-size-fits-all policy.
The informal sharing of income to manage shocks is a pervasive phenomenon across the world. Economists often assume households and/or villages are the main groups where this type of sharing occurs. Yet anthropology shows how the patterns of economic exchange vary across different cultures. Jacob Moscona and Awa Ambra Seck study societies with age sets, where ties between those of a similar age are stronger, and ties between generations and within families are weaker. They show that where obligations run along age cohorts rather than kin, such as in regions of Kenya and Uganda, the impacts of public policy propagate along different social lines.
And across Africa, Nathan Nunn and Eoin McGuirk show that pastoral regions are experiencing a sharp rise in conflict and violence, and explore the role of ‘mismatched’ agricultural development projects in this trend.
Development economics and health
The fingerprints of health research are all over development economics. Look no further than the most common method used in research on VoxDev, randomised controlled trials.
An area of research that has seen extensive economic x health collaboration is sanitation. Medical research links unsafe water to disease and stunting; economists extend the lens to adoption, credit constraints, externalities, property values, and how to reach coverage thresholds where health gains kick in. This joint evidence base informs financing, targeting, and community-wide approaches to improving the coverage of sanitation infrastructure, as highlighted in Britta Augsburg, Andrew Foster and Molly Lipscomb’s VoxDevLit.
And economists are developing new measures to help track important health-related issues, such as the illicit animal trade. Cosimo Beverelli and Rohit Ticku use methods pioneered by trade economists to measure the illicit animal trade, finding that it is associated with increasing infectious animal disease outbreaks.
Development economics and political science
The political economy of development blends political science theory with economic identification.
In India, Saad Gulzar, Apoorva Lal and Benjamin Pasquale show that the large-scale transfer of political power to India’s historically marginalised Scheduled Tribes significantly enhanced forest conservation. In Brazil, Ridwan Karim shows that tackling voter fraud by targeting suspicious municipalities to remove fraudulent registrations increased electoral competition, improved leader quality, and shifted spending towards public goods.
And our new VoxDevLit summarises evidence on the root causes and development impacts of organised crime. Work in this area blends political science and economics, helping policymakers form an integrated understanding of how to reduce organised crime and mitigate its impacts. Interested in reading more research of this flavour? Stay tuned for our forthcoming VoxDevLit on Political Polarisation.
Development economics and agricultural science
Raising farm productivity requires getting the science, and the economics, right.
By comparing farmers' reports of seed types to the true seed type, measured from the DNA fingerprinting of maize in Ethiopia, Doug Gollin, Nils Bohr, Tim Deisemann, Frédéric Kosmowski and Travis Lybbert reveal that many farmers don’t know what seeds they are actually planting. Inputs are then misapplied (over- or under-fertilisation), dragging down yields. The fix is both technical (seed certification, truthful labelling) and behavioural (better information).
A One Acre Fund programme provided farmers with credit, insurance, and training at scale. Joshua Deutschmann, Maya Duru, Kim Siegal and Emilia Tjernström show the effectiveness of this approach, which tackles both agricultural and economic constraints, and results in large gains in adoption and profits.
Better together
Our recent podcast on how culture interacts with economic development highlights the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration for advancing the frontier of knowledge. While academic incentives can make this type of work difficult, wider reading and networks spanning different disciplines can enrich the policy relevance of development economists’ research.
Importantly, across the examples I’ve highlighted here, economists didn’t just add fancy econometrics to others’ work. They combined methods and data to ask better questions and generate sharper, more actionable answers.
Interdisciplinary research enriches development economics, widening the toolkit, checking our blind spots, and making policy more likely to succeed.