 This Wonkcast was originally recorded in April 2011.
Rapid climate change is upon us, and governments, multilateral organizations, and development agencies are preparing to dole out billions of dollars in adaptation assistance. Nevertheless, little research has gone into calculating which countries are most vulnerable to global warming.
Since the 2010 earthquake, $6 billion has been disbursed in official aid to help the people of Haiti. Nearly all of it has gone to intermediaries such as international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and private contractors. Yet there has been a surprising lack of reporting on how the money has been spent. CGD senior fellow Vijaya Ramachandran and research assistant Julie Walz try to follow the money in a new CGD policy paper: “Haiti: Where Has All the Money Gone?” They joined me on this week’s Wonkcast to explain their findings.
On Friday the Governors of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) will decide who will be the Bank’s next President. Today we are publishing interviews with four of the candidates. The four candidates who agreed to be interviewed are: Thomas Mirow (at 03:58), the incumbent who has completed one four year term as President and is seeking re-election for the second term; Jan Krzysztof Bielecki (at 17:40), former prime minister of Poland; Suma Chakrabarti (35:45), a senior British civil servant; and Bozidar Djelic (at 47:43), the former deputy Prime Minister of Serbia. The fifth candidate, Philippe de Fontaine Vive Curtaz, is vice president of the European Investment Bank and did not choose to participate in this process.
In developed countries, official identification systems are a fact of life, providing the foundation for a myriad of transactions including elections, pension payments, and the legal system. Without functional ID systems, citizens of many developing countries miss out on the benefits of official identification. On this week’s Wonkcast, I am joined by CGD senior fellow Alan Gelb who has been researching the potential for new biometric technology, such as computerized finger printing and iris scans, to help poor countries leapfrog the long and complicated process of setting up ID systems.
Industrial policy—an active government role in shaping the direction of the economy—is often disdained by Western-trained economists but frequently embraced by Asian policymakers. Is it the path to development success or a slippery slope that leads to development failure? “New Structural Economics: A Framework for Rethinking Development and Policy” by World Bank chief economist Justin Lin and contributing authors provides a timely opportunity to review the evidence. Are systemic reforms to strengthen the business climate enough? How can policymakers guard against the well-known risks of favoring specific sectors or firms? Is there such a thing as a "New Industrial Policy" and can it provide useful guidelines for developing countries? This debate is of particular interest for low-income countries in Africa and elsewhere and the advice provided by their development partners.
Conventional wisdom has it that when the United States catches a cold, Latin America gets pneumonia. But when the United States caught financial pneumonia in 2008, Latin America escaped with little more than a cold. What’s changed?
Toby Ord is a moral philosopher at Balliol College, Oxford and the president of Giving What We Can, an international society dedicated to eliminating poverty in the developing world. In this interview, Toby firstly talks about consequentialism and the implications for development, with particular focus on cost-effectiveness. Secondly, Toby explains his personal decision to donate a substantial proportion of his income to the developing world, and shares with us the factors that guide his choice of recipients.
 Worldwide, about 1.3 billion people lack access to electricity, while 2.7 billion lack access to clean cooking fuels. Meeting their needs is central to reducing poverty but relying on existing technologies would make runaway climate change unavoidable. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is leading a “Sustainable Energy for All” initiative that is built on his vision for deploying renewable energy, increasing energy efficiency, and achieving universal energy access during the next two decades. Can the Rio+20 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro this June help to foster a global consensus for action? What could the United States do to spur progress? The Secretary General and other distinguished speakers provide a thoughtful discussion of one of the world’s most pressing development issues.
 John Githongo, an advocate for transparency and good governance, is well-known for his work as the anti-corruption czar in Kenya, where in 2003 he uncovered a $1 billion scheme involving some of the country’s top ministers. His probing incited a backlash that forced him to flee the country for fear of his life, taking up a fellowship at Oxford where he released a report documenting government graft. Since then, Githongo has devoted his efforts to eliminating corruption and injustice in Kenya and across Africa. His lecture focuses on what outsiders—the high-income countries and emerging powers—can do to help foster democracy and poverty reduction in the developing world.
After an unprecedented competition, with three official nominees, the World Bank announced on Monday that the board had selected Jim Yong Kim, the Korean-born U.S. nominee, as the next president of the World Bank. My guest on this week’s Wonkcast is CGD president Nancy Birdsall, who discusses why it matters who leads the bank and sets out key challenges for the incoming president.
 In recent years the idea of strong health systems as a component of population health has been noted by both global health donors and national governments alike. Consequently, the question of how to measure the effectiveness of health systems interventions has become ever more pressing. But it remains unclear if efforts to assess health systems are providing enough information to establish a link between investments and improved health outcomes. How do we know if increased investments in the sector are creating the desired impact? This panel discussion will explore the linkage between health system strengthening activities and improving health outcomes and provide a platform for determining the efficacy of health systems investments. Panelists will address methodologies for analyzing health systems, beyond a mere compilation of indicators, and will explore innovative methods to measure health system performance.
José Antonio Ocampo presented his vision for the future of the World Bank at an event organized by CGD and Washington Post Live.
 My guest on this week’s Wonkcast is Justin Sandefur, a research fellow at CGD whose recent work has focused on education in Kenya. One study examines the returns of private schooling, while another looks at the effects of contract teachers on student test scores. The results of these studies highlight shortcomings in public education, including failures of accountability and a dense bureaucracy.
 Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala presented her vision for the future of the World Bank at an event organized by CGD and Washington Post Live, urging that the selection of the next president be based on merit. A second event will be held on Tuesday afternoon with José Antonio Ocampo.
 Johnny West is a man of many talents. An expert on oil, civil society, and governance in the Middle East who works as an advisor to the UNDP, he is fluent in Arabic, spent more than two decades in the Middle East as a journalist for Reuters, and has just published a highly readable book recounting his journey through the Arab Spring. On this week’s Wonkcast, we catch him between his travels to discuss a new working paper he’s written for CGD: Iraq’s Last Window: Diffusing the Risks of a Petro State. Johnny’s experience in the Middle East makes him think that the region just might be ripe for an Oil 2 Cash revolution that could help foster improvements in governance and reduce poverty.
 Most Wonkcasts focus on CGD’s research and policy work. This one is different. My guest is Owen Barder and our topic is CGD itself, specifically the effort that Owen is leading to greatly increase the Center’s engagement in Europe. Owen, a CGD senior fellow and director for Europe, previously worked for CGD on our Advance Market Commitment initiative, which led to a $1.5 billion pilot commitment to purchase and ensure delivery of new vaccines to prevent pneumococcal disease. He subsequently spent two years in Ethiopia and recently resumed working for CGD, based in London, to strengthen the Center’s ties with the European development research and policy community. [Note: Owen continues to maintain his own excellent blog, Owen Abroad and to host occasional podcasts, Development Drums; these are also now available on the CGD Website multimedia page.]
The U.S. political environment has changed significantly since 2007 when President Obama promised to double U.S. foreign assistance. As the 2012 election cycle presses on, cutting the budget and reducing the deficit are on the minds of many. What does this mean for U.S. foreign assistance?
My guests on this week’s Wonkcast, Connie Veillette, CGD’s director of the Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance Program, and John Norris, executive director of the Sustainable Security and Peacebuilding Initiative at the Center for American Progress (CAP), have a blueprint for making U.S. foreign assistance more focused and effective amid budget austerity.
 In the summer of 2008, the Congress-led government of India released five members of Parliament from jail to support the government in fending off a close no-confidence vote. The five politicians – all indicted for or convicted of murder – cleaned up, cast their votes, and returned to jail the next day.
The preponderance of suspected criminals among Indian politicians is no secret. In a country where one-of-four members of Parliament is under criminal indictment, anecdotes such as this are not uncommon. My guest on this week’s Wonkcast, CGD post-doctoral fellow Milan Vaishnav, was inspired by this story to study criminality among Indian politicians for his forthcoming Ph.D. dissertation. He reached some surprising conclusions.
Conventional wisdom has it that when the United States catches a cold, Latin America gets pneumonia. But when the United States caught financial pneumonia in 2008, Latin America escaped with little more than a cold. What’s changed?
In this week’s Wonkcast, CGD senior fellow Liliana Rojas-Suarez explains why Latin America was mostly successful in coping with the fallout from the 2008 global financial crisis and she introduces a new methodology for predicting how countries will fare in the next global financial crisis. Our conversation draws on her new working paper, Credit at Times of Stress: Latin American Lessons from the Global Financial Crisis, written jointly with Carlos Montoro of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).
Following Robert Zoellick’s announcement that he will step down from the World Bank presidency at the end of June, the World Bank board has called for member countries to submit nominations for his successor, with a fast-approaching deadline of March 23rd. The board has said it will then narrow the nominations to a short list of three, with the goal of naming a new president before the World Bank/IMF spring meetings in April.
In this interview Liliana Rojas-Suarez argues that for a true and lasting solution to the Greek crisis to occur, a deeper restructuring of sovereign debt is needed (one that is based on the country's capacity to repay, and not on arbitrarily-determined goals for debt ratios; i.e. 120% debt/GPP by 2020) . Since the likelihood of key Eurozone members (especially Germany) to agree on further debt restructurings (including ECB’s holdings of Greek debt) is very low, the most likely scenario is still one where Greece leaves the Eurozone. This would allow for a depreciation of the domestic currency to boost competitiveness. In this scenario, it is essential a re-design of the IMF program to include the avoidance of a banking crisis (which could occur if banks' borrowers, earning' income denominated in a depreciated currency, are not able to make good on payments on Euro-denominated loans).
 The UN is gearing up for discussions about what international development goals should come after the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which expire in 2015. My guest on this week’s Wonkcast is CGD senior fellow Charles Kenny, who recently published a working paper, written jointly with CGD visiting fellow Andy Sumner, that assesses the impact of the MDGs and offers suggestions for what should come next.
We start with a brief review of the history of the MDGs, which were adopted in 2001 by the UN General Assembly and cover eight areas of development, such as reductions in poverty and hunger, and improvements in gender equality, education, and child and maternal health.
 In August 2001, when the Bush administration and key leaders in Congress were readying the plans for a sweeping overhaul of America’s troubled immigration system, filmmakers Shari Robertson and Michael Camerini were there to record history in the making—negotiating exclusive access to document the lives and strategies of the principal players. The resulting “Grand Bargain” promised to change the lives of tens of millions of immigrants and affect every citizen and every state in the union. Its eventual failure offers lessons for what a future, successful bargain might look like.
Robertson and Camerini join Esther Olavarria, a key player in the film series, and CGD senior fellow Michael Clemens, for an exclusive look at never-before-released scenes and a discussion on lessons-learned from the “Grand Bargain” era, pointing to what is possible for future, bi-partisan immigration policy.
|
Print
Share
Multimedia
