About


Welcome to the website of John Toye, who is Chair of the Advisory Panel of the Department of International Development, Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford. He is also a Professorial Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London..

His research interests include:

* public finance
* the political economy of development
* international economic institutions
* the history of economic thought.

His books include: Aid and Power: the World Bank and Policy-based Lending (1991), The UN and Global Political Economy: Trade, Finance and Development (2004) and Dilemmas of Development: Reflections on the Counter-Revolution in Development Theory and Policy (1987).

He was previously Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford and Visiting Fellow of St Antony’s College from 2000–03. Before that he was Director of the Globalization and Development Strategies Division of the UN Conference on Trade and Development in Geneva from 1998–2000.

John Toye studied the economics of poor countries at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His Ph.D thesis at the University of London was on the relation between public expenditure and development planning in India. His interest in Africa started from evaluations of the impact of aid in Africa in the 1980s. He returned to Africa to study the operation of aid conditionality in Ghana, in the context of structural adjustment programmes. This was published as part of a larger study of the World Bank, P. Mosley, J. Harrigan and J. Toye, “Aid and Power: the World Bank and Policy-based Lending”, 2 vols., second edition 1995. Since then, he has worked on aspects of poverty reduction policies in Tanzania, Zambia and Ethiopia

John Toye’s academic career began as a Research Fellow in Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London from 1970–72. Then he was Graduate Assistant at the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge from 1972–74. Later he was Research Officer at the Overseas Studies Committee at Cambridge from 1975–77, and Assistant Director of Development Studies at Cambridge from 1977–80.

He worked briefly as Director of Research Coordination at the Commodities Research Unit Ltd in London and New York from 1980–82, continuing as Non-executive Director from 1982–85. Dr Toye took up an appointment as Professor of Development Policy and Planning and Director of the Centre for Development Studies at the University of Wales, Swansea in 1982 and remained there until 1987 when he was appointed Director of the Institute of Development Studies and Professorial Fellow of the University of Sussex in Brighton, a position he held until 1997.

He has consulted with the National Audit Office, the Department for International Development, the Commonwealth Secretariat, the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the World Bank and many other agencies and has been a member of, or led, professional assignments in 25 overseas countries. He is a Region Head for Africa at Oxford Analytica. John Toye was Chairman of the Board of the Journal of Development Studies from 1976–2006 and serves on the boards of Contemporary South Asia, Journal of International Development, World Development, and European Journal of Development Research. He was Managing Editor of the journal Oxford Development Studies from 2005 to 2009.

John is married to Janet Toye. They have one son, Richard and one daughter, Eleanor.