CGD president Nancy Birdsall and other witnesses had a tough time last week persuading a U.S. House subcommittee that the United States should follow through on its G-20 pledge to join an international effort to boost IMF resources to help developing countries cope with a global economic crisis that began in New York and Washington. CGD deputy director for outreach and policy Sarah Jane Staats reports on the subcommittee's worries, Birdsall's replies, and the view of one member of Congress that he "is a citizen of the United States, not the world."

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Economists often use instrumental variables to demonstrate a causal relationship between some trait of a country and economic growth. In this new analysis, Samuel Bazzi and Michael Clemens show that a variety of instrumental variables used in top economics journals have severe but hidden limitations. They present three guidelines to improve future empirical studies of growth determinants.

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