Growth & development · Energy · AI
Tim Dobermann
Economist
Director of Research & Chief Economist, International Growth Centre (IGC)
Research Fellow, London School of Economics (LSE)
I research growth in developing economies using field experiments, administrative data, and quantitative models.
Fields Development, energy, environmental economics, and AI With political economy and the economics of new technologies
Methods Field experiments, administrative data, quantitative models Randomised trials run with governments and utilities
Fieldwork South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and MENA Pakistan, Ethiopia, Ghana, Jordan, India, Myanmar
Research agenda
Three themes
Structural transformation and technology
How industrial policy, artificial intelligence, and changing sectoral capabilities alter the path from poverty to prosperity.
Energy markets and state capacity
How contracts, prices, metering, and enforcement shape the reliability and affordability of electricity, and what that costs firms.
Climate adaptation and human capital
How education and mobility determine who can adapt to a changing climate, and why climate damages fall so unequally across places.
Selected research
Current work
AI and the Ladder of Development
Frontier AI could increase average productivity and incomes while pulling labour toward weak-learning sectors, eroding long-run capability growth.
Human Capital, Mobility, and the Unequal Effects of Climate Change
Education lets people change sector and location when crop conditions worsen — but the places facing the largest damages invest least in it.
The Economic Costs of Lopsided Contracts
A new database on Pakistan’s power purchase agreements, and what asymmetric information and regulatory capture cost the wider economy.
Pushing on a String?
Two randomised experiments run with government on how prices and norm-based enforcement change electricity payment and theft.
From evidence to policy
Advising governments on growth
I advise governments across Africa, MENA, and Asia on policies for sustainable economic growth, and work regularly with finance and energy ministries on public finance issues. This work is also where the data, the institutional constraints, and my research agenda come from.
- Pakistan
- Electricity tariffs, power purchase agreements, tax reform, and industrial policy, with the Ministries of Energy and Finance.
- Ethiopia
- National energy policy, diffusion of solar, and utility reforms.
- Ghana
- Electricity sector losses, outages, and industrial activity.
- Jordan
- Water and electricity tariff reforms.
- India
- Policies for climate adaptation and structural transformation.
- Myanmar
- The technical update of the National Electrification Plan and Yangon’s urban growth.