Nancy Birdsall

Nancy Birdsall offers Deputy Secretary of State Thomas R. Nides three recommendations on strengthening the Pakistani private sector.

This brief provides a summary of the forthcoming second edition of the Quality of Official Development Assistance (QuODA) Assessment sponsored by the Brookings Institution and the Center for Global Development.

Nancy Birdsall urges Senator Leahy to support approval by the United States of the proposed new lending instrument at the World Bank, Program for Results Financing (P4R).

Nancy Birdsall and Arvind Subramanian identify a fair deal on climate change for developed and developing countries by focusing not on equitable emissions quotas but on fair access to energy services.

An accompaniment to the report Beyond Bullets and Bombs: Fixing the U.S. Approach to Development in Pakistan, this data set describes budgeted levels of U.S. military and economic assistance to Pakistan for the period from 1948 to 2010.

In a new CGD report, U.S. and Pakistani development experts urge a substantial revamp of the U.S. approach to Pakistan, saying that U.S. efforts to build prosperity in the nuclear-armed nation with a fledgling democratic government, burgeoning youth population, and shadowy intelligence services are...

In a presentation delivered at the UK Department for International Development on March 9, 2011, CGD president Nancy Birdsall spoke about opportunities and challenges for the implementation of Cash on Delivery Aid, an approach that allows aid agencies to address both short-term and long-term...

A new focus on measuring development results would have far-reaching benefits for U.S. development strategy, for U.S. public diplomacy efforts, and for the strength of Pakistan’s democratic institutions. In this essay, Nancy Birdsall and Wren Elhai suggest five possible indicators that...

This brief describes a new approach, Cash on Delivery Aid, which gives recipients full responsibility and authority over funds paid in proportion to verified measures of progress.

QuODA is an assessment of the Quality of Official Development Assistance provided by 23 countries and more than 150 aid countries.

The fifth in a series of open letters, CGD president Nancy Birdsall outlines five recommendations on how U.S. development assistance to Pakistan’s education sector can be improved.

This essay draws on the work of the Center for Global Development's Study Group on U.S. Development Strategy in Pakistan and on the ideas in the group's open letters to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke to present five recommendations for spending aid money well in Pakistan.

In the fourth open letter to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, Nancy Birdsall conveys the recommendations of the CGD study group on a U.S. Development Strategy in Pakistan for necessary strengthening of USAID's staff capacity to better design and deploy an effective development strategy in the country.

Nancy Birdsall, Augusto de la Torre, and Felipe Valencia Caicedo analyze the Washington Consensus, from its early beginnings to failure as a reform agenda.

In the third open letter to Ambassador Holbrooke, Nancy Birdsall conveys recommendations from the third meeting of the CGD Study Group on U.S. Development Strategy in Pakistan, focused energy policy.

In the second open letter to Ambassador Holbrooke, Nancy Birdsall conveys recommendations from the second meeting of the CGD Study Group on U.S. Development Strategy in Pakistan, focused on the policies and programs that would be most effective in dealing with the security and development...

In an open letter to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, Nancy Birdsall relays four main suggestions from the CGD Study Group on a U.S. Development Strategy in Pakistan about how U.S. assistance should be delivered to maximize development outcomes.

Nancy Birdsall testifies before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on International Monetary Policy and Trade on rebuilding Haiti's competitiveness and private sector. March 16, 2010.

CGD president Nancy Birdsall testifies before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade as Congress considers how best to support the spirit of the G-20 commitments and global economic recovery.

CGD president Nancy Birdsall testifies before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on International Monetary Policy and Trade about the implications of the recent G-20 meeting in London. She reiterates the need for the United States to support the IMF and push for its reform.

Five billion people in developing countries are innocent victims of the global economic crisis. How well they cope will be crucial to sustained global recovery. In this CGD Note, Nancy Birdsall estimates that developing countries may need $1 trillion for bank rescues, for fiscal stimulus, and to...

The global financial crisis and economic slowdown are subjecting poor countries to increased financial, price, and output volatility. How can the multilateral development banks help? A new CGD brief by visiting fellow Nancy Lee, non-resident fellow Guillermo Perry, and CGD president Nancy Birdsall...

Improving education should be a part of the global development agenda of the next U.S. president. While aid for primary education has always appealed to U.S. policymakers and the public and is consistent with American values of expanding opportunity for all, U.S. aid for education has...

The need for a fresh American approach to development has never been more urgent. The economic crisis at home, the threat of failed states and hostile countries acquiring nuclear weapons, our inability to solve critical global problems like climate change alone—all these mean that America...

Testimony for the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere

The White House and the World: A Global Development Agenda for the Next U.S. President shows how modest changes in U.S. policies could greatly improve the lives of poor people in developing countries, thus fostering greater stability, security, and prosperity globally and at home. Center for Global...

In September 2008 official aid donors and recipients will meet in Accra, Ghana, to discuss how to make development assistance more effective. CGD president Nancy Birdsall and co-author Kate Vyborny suggest that advocates of better aid who really want a win at Accra forget haggling over broad...

Testimony for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

In an increasingly globalized world, inequality is an issue of rising concern, especially in Latin America, home to many of the world's most unequal societies. This new book, co-published by the Center for Global Development and the Inter-American Dialogue, describes the links between recent growth...

In this CGD Essay, Birdsall and Subramianian argue that the World Bank faces twin crises of relevance and legitimacy in a rapidly changing world. The solution, they argue, is for the bank to become a more active catalyst for generating global public goods and knowledge and a more reluctant lender...

For the past decade, U.S. attention to Latin America has focused mainly on promotion of free trade and opposition to narcotics trafficking and security threats. But there are signs that Washington is beginning to recognize the importance of helping the region tackle longstanding poverty and social...

A White House conference on social justice in Latin America this week may signal a shift to U.S. engagement with the region that goes beyond security, free trade, and anti-narcotics efforts. CGD president Nancy Birdsall and Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, suggest seven ways...

In this Essay, CGD president Nancy Birdsall describes the World Bank as a global club with a structure close to that of a credit union in which the members are nations. Its mission, as originally conceived–-to promote broadly shared and sustainable global prosperity--serves the common interests...

On Wednesday, March 28, 2007, Nancy Birdsall testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Dr. Birdsall, who leads CGD's initiative on Globalization and Inequality, took this opportunity to explain how the U.S. can...

Critics allege that the World Bank is deeply flawed. Yet the world needs a strong World Bank to help manage development and the related global challenges of the 21st century. Do the Bank's shortcomings put its future at risk? If so, can the Bank be rescued? Rescuing the World Bank, a new book that...

This syllabus, prepared by CGD President Nancy Birdsall for a course she taught in Bologna, Italy, for students of Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), brings together key readings on inequality and development in a globalizing world. The...

HIV/AIDS is one of the largest challenges facing the global community. The disease has reduced life expectancy by more than a decade in the hardest hit countries and slashed productivity, making it even harder for poor countries to escape poverty. Global HIV/AIDS and the Developing World, a CGD...

Given all the other pressing worries, why was education among the issues that G8 leaders discussed at the St. Petersburg Summit? Education and the Developing World, a CGD Rich World/Poor World Brief, explains why investing in education is not just the right thing to do, it's the smart thing to do....

Each year billions of dollars are spent on thousands of programs to improve health, education and other social sector outcomes in the developing world. But very few programs benefit from studies that could determine whether or not they actually made a difference. This absence of evidence is an...

This new collection of essays sets an agenda for increased American effectiveness in dealing with failed states to promote economic development and international security. It includes an overview of the poorly understood challenge of weak and failed states and case studies by regional policy...

This new report by a group comprising several of Latin America's most influential economic policymakers, CGD senior fellow Liliana Rojas Suarez, and CGD president Nancy Birdsall suggests ways for the IDB to become more flexible and to step up its support for market oriented reforms. The IDB's new...

As the Bush Administration prepares to announce the reorganization of U.S. foreign assistance, Nancy Birdsall, Stewart Patrick and Milan Vaishnav argue in a new essay that making a dent in global poverty will require that the U.S. address four flaws: low volume and poor quality of aid; incoherence...

This CGD brief is based on the book From Social Assistance to Social Development: Targeted Education Subsidies in Developing Countries, by Samuel Morley and David Coady.

Nancy Birdsall testified in front of a subcommittee of the House Committee on Financial Services concerning debt relief and IMF gold.

This report was prepared by a Working Group convened by the Center for Global Development to identify key priorities the Paul Wolfowitz at the start of his tenure at the World Bank on June 1, 2005. It argues that Wolfowitz's biggest challenge will not be managing the Bank, with its 10,000 staff,...

CGD President Nancy Birdsall testified before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, May 17, 2005 on the Commission for Africa report initiated by Tony Blair. She suggested the U.S. should prepare a package of Africa-related initiatives for the UK-hosted G-8 Summit in July covering...

This new CGD Note by Center for Global Development President Nancy Birdsall and Institute for International Economics Senior Fellow John Williamson argues that sale of a portion of IMF gold makes sense as a way to create a more transparent institution and use a global resource for debt relief for...

"No Child Left Behind" could move from a national program to a global mission if several current policies and initiatives converge: the Education for All Fast Track Initiative, the U.S. Millennium Challenge Account, and the renewed declarations of the Bush administration, supported by U.S. public...

Although nearly all poor countries are classified by the World Bank as IDA-only, Nigeria stands out as a notable exception. Indeed, Africa’s most populous country is the poorest country in the world that is not classified as IDA-only. Under the World Bank’s own criteria, however, Nigeria has a...

Education is an end in itself, a human right, and a vital part of the capacity of individuals to lead lives they value. It gives people in developing countries the skills they need to improve their own lives and to help transform their societies. Women and men with better education earn more...

his policy brief proposes a new job-based social contract, geared to the aspirations of the region’s vast majority of near-poor “middle” households, whose participation is key to achieving growth and strengthening democracy.

The historic 2002 United Nations Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico, overlooked a crucial question: regionalism. Financing Development: The Power of Regionalism is designed to correct this omission.

This note reviews the President’s 2005 international affairs budget request and offers insight into the potential MCA allocations in the context of the broader development assistance budget. The authors note that requested funding for the MCA is lower than promised and may be indirectly coming...

At the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000 the nations of the world committed to join forces to meet a set of measurable targets for reducing world poverty, disease, illiteracy and other indicators of human misery—all by the year 2015. These targets, later named the Millennium Development...

I suggest in this paper the logic of going beyond the standard, poverty-targeted, elements of good social policy to a modern social contract adapted to the demands and the constraints of an open economy. Such a contract would be explicitly based on broad job-based growth. Second, it would be...

In this MCA Monitor Analysis Nancy Birdsall argues that the MCA principle of country eligibility based on performance has merit, and maintains that the application of eligibility criteria may not be as restrictive as some fear.

This paper defines two distinct and overarching objectives for the MCA and proposes 12 criteria for assessing recipient country eligibility. The authors recommend that the MCA be targeted to the poorest countries that are eligible for World Bank grants and concessional loans.

This paper defines seven principles to guide the design and implementation of the Millennium Challenge Account" (MCA), a new compact for development announced by President Bush in March. It assumes that MCA resources will be targeted to low-income countries that have limited, if any, access to...

This paper examines trends in U.S. non-military global aid and how the administration’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2003 would affect those trends. The analysis addresses how the overall level of proposed aid compares with past levels and examines three standards for measuring aid over time:...

This study brings readers up to date on the complicated and controversial subject of debt relief for the poorest countries of the world.

Over the last several years, the United States and other major donor countries have supported a historic initiative to write down the official debts of a group of heavily indebted poor countries, or HIPCs. Donor countries had two primary goals in supporting debt relief: to reduce countries' debt...

At the end of the 1990s the future of Latin America seemed grim in the face of four devastating problems—slow and unsteady economic growth, persistent poverty, social injustice, and personal insecurity. For 10 years Latin America had pursued—with considerable vigor—the 10 economic policies...