Help Us Stay Paywall-Free

Democracy depends on the free exchange of ideas. Help sustain it with a tax-deductible donation today.

Development and Its Discontents

Writing from our archives on development economics and its critics.

Join our newsletter to get our weekly, editor-selected reading lists delivered straight to your inbox.

Following weeks of protests that led prime minister Sheikh Hasina to resign and flee Bangladesh, entrepreneur and banker Muhammed Yunus has taken command of the country’s interim government. Yunus is best known for pioneering microfinance, the idea that global development can be brought about by extending small amounts of credit to the poor: a market-friendly approach, notes Kevin Donovan, that is “hardly opposed to commerce.”

This week’s reading list collects writing from our archives on development economics and its critics, including Pranab Bardhan on the limits of NGOs, Jamie Martin on the IMF and call for a new “economic internationalism,” and a forum led by Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee on an evidence-driven approach to aid. 

Two new books critique poverty capital, but they don’t ask what borrowers need. 

Kevin P. Donovan

In place of public-private partnerships, we should revive the Pan-African ambitions of the green developmental state.

Ndongo Samba Sylla, Daniela Gabor

The vast hinterlands of the Global South’s cities are generating new solidarities and ideas of what counts as a life worth living.

AbdouMaliq Simone

To escape the imperial legacies of the IMF and World Bank, we need a radical new vision for global economic governance.

Jamie Martin

Kenya's poor were among the first to benefit from digital lending apps; now they call it slavery.

Kevin P. Donovan, Emma Park

How the New International Economic Order of the 1970s is inspiring a new generation of struggle against global inequality.

Adom Getachew

Big-time development economists are missing something.

Pranab Bardhan

The limits of the NGO movement in global development.

Pranab Bardhan

That people respond to the relative costs and returns of schooling might imply that the poor are optimizing the amount of school they invest in, as predicted in a simple economic model. But evidence suggests that reality is more complex.

Toward a new development economics.

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee

Aid can help to address global poverty. But we need field experiments—randomized controlled trials—to tell us which programs work.

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee

Most Recent

Introducing our Winter 2025 issue.

Boston Review

The problem is no longer “money in politics.” It’s just money.

Mark Schmitt

Our contributors have seen this moment coming. But we need your support to continue covering it.

Deborah Chasman

Subscribe to our newsletter

Newsletter subscribers get our latest essays, archival selections, reading lists, and exclusive editorial content.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Newsletter subscribers get our latest essays, archival selections, reading lists, and exclusive editorial content.