Lawrence MacDonald

Program-for-Results (PforR), a new World Bank lending instrument, is one of several innovative approaches to development aid that focus on measurable development outcomes. Proponents argue that PforR will help strengthen institutions, build capacity, and enhance partnerships. Critics contend it...

Most low-income countries (LICs) recovered swiftly from the 2008-9 global crisis and have grown strongly since early 2010. But progress in rebuilding macroeconomic buffers has been slow, and the LICs are now less well prepared to deal with external shocks than they were before the crisis. At a time...

My guest this week is Mead Over, one of the world’s leading experts on the global response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. We discuss his new book, Achieving an Aids Transition: Preventing Infections to Sustain Treatment. The key idea is simple but powerful. Mead argues that, instead of reaching vainly...

In this Wonkcast, originally posted on July 2010, Tom Bollyky explains the problems that motivated him in establishing CGD’s Clinical Trials and Regulatory Pathways Working Group. The group’s final report, Safer, Faster, Cheaper: Improving Clinical Trials and Regulatory Pathways to Fight...

When Dominique Straus-Kahn resigned suddenly as head of the International Monetary Fund last May, the world was thrown unexpectedly into search for his successor. Within days, CGD launched a survey of the global development community opinion on three issues: the selection process, criteria for...

My guest this week is Todd Moss, senior fellow and vice president for programs here at the Center for Global Development. Our topic is the newly updated edition of his popular primer: African Development: Making Sense of the Issues and Actors. Todd tells me his publisher, Lynne Rienner, urged...

Last week finance ministers and central bankers from around the globe convened in Washington for the annual meetings of the international Monetary Fund and World Bank. While the press and many of the meeting participants focused on the unfolding European financial crisis, below the radar there was...

“February 2021. It’s a cold blustery morning in Washington. The newly inaugurated president of the United States is on his way to the office of the Chinese managing director of the IMF to sign the agreement under which the IMF will provide 3 trillion dollars in emergency financing to the...

If you found a trillion-dollar bill on the sidewalk, would you pick it up? Michael Clemens thinks he has found a bunch of such bills—huge gains to the poor people and the world economy that could be achieved by easing restrictions on cross-border labor mobility.  He has written a working...

What does extreme hyperinflation look like? Consider a pile of currency tall enough to encircle our entire galaxy. That’s how many Zimbabwean dollars you would have needed by the end of the country’s extraordinary inflationary crisis to equal one pre-crisis Zim dollar, according to CGD...