Lisa Cameron is our top researcher in development economics

Lisa Cameron from the University of Melbourne is Australia’s top researcher in development economics.

Lisa Cameron from the University of Melbourne is Australia’s top researcher in development economics. Picture: Nadir Kinani

Lisa Cameron’s role as a development economist may sound dry but her research has covered sex workers in Indonesia, China’s one-child policy and the impact of building toilets in Mali.

Cameron’s latest project involves using tiny recording devices sewn into Bonds singlets worn by children in East Timor villages. She and her colleagues are evaluating a program encouraging parents to talk more to their babies to see how it impacts their vocabulary, speech and development in years to come.

Projects like these have been part of her work on economic and social issues in developing countries, primarily Indonesia and China, over the past 30 years.

“I’ve looked at the effect of economic growth on people’s lives, and because I’m interested in the wellbeing of disadvantaged people, I’ve also done a lot of work looking at policies to measure and alleviate poverty, as well as health outcomes from different policies,” says Cameron, who was named in The Australian’s 2025 Research magazine as Australia’s top researcher in development economics.

Now a professorial research fellow at the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne, Cameron took a winding path to her field. She started by doing a year of a science degree before switching courses after the physics, chemistry, biology and maths proved a bit dry.

“I changed to a bachelor of commerce under the misguided idea that I might be a business person, but actually I’m not at all suited to being a business person,” she says.

“The economics side of the degree appealed far more than the spreadsheet subjects.”

After backpacking for a year, Cameron headed to Princeton University in 1992 to do her PhD, hoping to research environmental economics. However, academics in the area were scarce as the field was so new, and she had to shift her focus.

“I’ve always loved travelling, and I’m so interested in other cultures and other ways of living, as well as learning languages, that I thought development economics was a great opportunity to combine those interests.”

It has meant a wide-ranging career, undertaking projects for organisations such as the World Bank and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, along with a diverse range of research.

“I’ve done a relatively recent paper on the effect of the criminalisation of sex work, which doesn’t sound like a typical economics problem. But you can use the tools of economics, particularly evaluation, to evaluate lots of different types of policy changes or changes in people’s circumstances,” she says.

In this case she compared districts in East Java in Indonesia where sex work had been criminalised with others where it was still legal, looking at the impact on the women’s livelihoods, health outcomes and children. Overall, criminalising sex work had a negative effect on the women, reducing their earnings, increasing rates of sexually transmitted infections and seeing more children drop out of school to work.

She hopes her research influences local leaders to consider the potential downsides of their decisions, as well as “seeps into the consciousness” of future policy makers in the development space, working at institutions like the World Bank.

“You see the resilience of people in places like Indonesia, where they’re less guarded and really make the most of what they have. I think it’s a skill we could really do with here in the West. We just tend to complain more and more over time as our living standards rise.”