David Roodman

David Roodman he offers practical recommendations to those involved in providing microfinance services, including donors, social investors, and microfinance leaders.

The Commitment to Development Index ranks 22 of the world’s richest countries on their dedication to policies that benefit the 5.5 billion people living in poorer nations. Moving beyond standard comparisons of foreign aid volumes, the CDI quantifies a range of rich-country policies that affect...

The Commitment to Development Index (CDI) ranks 22 of the world’s richest countries on their dedication to policies that benefit the five billion people living in poorer nations. Moving beyond standard comparisons of foreign aid volumes, the CDI quantifies a range of rich country policies that...

The Jubilee 2000 movement, which called for the cancellation of the foreign debts of the poorest nations, became one of the most successful international, nongovernmental movements in history. David Roodman provides thumbnail assessments of Jubilee 2000 from several perspectives, deemphasizing...

The United States ranked 17th in the 2009 Commitment to Development Index with strengths in trade and security but weaknesses in aid and environment. This CGD Note describes how the United States could boost its score.

David Roodman testifies before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on International Monetary Policy and Trade about supporting Haiti's private sector

This course explores the role of microfinance in economic development. It will discuss how poor people in poor countries use financial services such as credit and savings; the history and practice of delivering such services; what is known about their contribution to development; and how stories...

The 2009 Commitment to Development Index ranks 22 of the world's richest countries on their dedication to policies that benefit the five billion people living in poorer nations. Moving beyond simple comparisons of foreign aid, the CDI ranks countries on seven themes: quantity and quality of foreign...

This CGD brief summarizes the results of the 2008 Commitment to Development Index (CDI), which ranks 22 of the world's richest countries on their dedication to policies that benefit the five billion people living in poorer nations. The Netherlands comes in first on the 2008 CDI on the strength of...

How committed are the world's richest countries to the development of Africa, the world's poorest continent? Rich countries are usually compared on how much foreign aid they give as a percentage of their GDP, but helping Africa involves much more than aid. CGD's Commitment to Development Index has...

David Roodman, creator of the Commitment to Development Index (CDI), has devised a measure of foreign aid flows that takes into account the interest payments that developing countries make to rich country creditors. The Net Aid Transfers data set, which is a component of the CDI, is now available...

The argument about whether foreign aid "works" rages on. Recently, Paul Collier sought a practical middle path between William Easterly's development pessimism and Jeffrey Sach's development boosterism. How can smart people draw such contradictory conclusions from the same data? This new working...

Each year since 2003, the Commitment to Development Index (CDI) has ranked 21 rich countries on their dedication (or not!) to policies that benefit the five billion people living in poor countries. The CDI moves beyond simple comparisons of aid funding and in so doing embodies the mission of CGD,...

In this working paper CGD research fellow David Roodman explains how the four biggest developing countries -- Brazil, Russia, India and China, a group Goldman Sachs dubbed the "BRICs" -- stack up to their rich-country counterparts on the environment component of the annual Commitment to Development...

This CGD brief summarizes the results of the 2007 Commitment to Development Index (CDI), which ranks 21 of the world's richest countries on their dedication to policies that benefit the five billion people living in poorer nations. The Netherlands comes in first on the 2007 CDI on the strength of...

This working paper by CGD research fellow David Roodman provides an original synthesis and exposition of the literature on a particular class of econometric techniques called "dynamic panel estimators," and presents the first implementation of some of these techniques in Stata, a statistical...

The Commitment to Development Index (CDI), which ranks 21 countries across six policy areas, is widely seen as the most comprehensive and substantive measure of rich country policies towards development. In response to requests from other would-be index builders, CDI architect David Roodman...

The ninth negotiating round, named the "Doha" Round for the city in Qatar where it was launched, has proven to be unique, because many developing countries are flexing their political muscle as never before. As a result, the Doha Round seems destined to fail unless rich countries cut the trade...

The Commitment to Development Index (CDI) of the Center for Global Development ranks 21 of the world’s richest countries by evaluating their stance on seven domains of government policy to determine how those policies affect developing countries. This brief summarizes the components and results...

CGD working paper 32, "The Anarchy of Numbers: Aid, Development, and Cross-country Empirics" submits seven aid-growth studies to robustness testing and finds that most are fragile. The data used in the paper are in Excel (data set) and Stata formats (4-year and 5-year aggregates). Full results...

*REVISED Version May 2007Recent literature contains many stories of how foreign aid affects economic growth: aid raises growth in countries with good policies, or in countries with difficult economic environments, or mainly outside the tropics, or on average with diminishing returns. The diversity...

CGD working paper 26, "New Data, New Doubts: Revisiting "Aid, Policies, and Growth" by CGD non-resident fellow William Easterly, research fellow David Roodman, and Ross Levine (also published as "Aid, Policies, and Growth: Comment" in the American Economic Review, June 2004), concludes that the...