Independent research for global prosperity
Lawrence MacDonald, CGD vice president for communications and policy outreach, interviews a CGD expert in this weekly Podcast. The blog offers a short text summary.
The leadership selection process for the next Director General of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is underway. As I explained in a recent Wonkcast, we at CGD are making a modest contribution by inviting each of the nine candidates to be a guest on the show.
Candidates to succeed Pascal Lamy as the Director General of the World Trade Organization (WTO) presented themselves before the general council last week. All but two of the nine candidates are from developing countries, in sharp contrast to those who led the WTO in the past, all but one of whom were from high-income countries. Is this a good sign for the WTO or not? Does this leadership succession process have implications for trade and development?
When you opt to buy fair trade certified coffee at the grocery store instead of uncertified, how much good are you doing? My guest on this week’s Wonkcast, Kimberly Ann Elliott, draws on her recent policy paper, Is My Fair Trade Coffee Really Fair? Trends and Challenges in Fair Trade Certification, to tell me why the answer may be more complicated than you’d think.
Economists, development and otherwise, often assume that people given the right information will make informed decisions in their own best interest. Not! Just like the rest of us, the poor people targeted by development programs sometimes lack self-control and fail to take actions that would benefit them in the long run, even when they understand the potential benefits.
Here’s a list of the ten most popular Wonkcasts of this year, and the number of times each audio file has been downloaded. Of course, downloads aren’t listens. Some files may have been downloaded once and listened to more than once. I suspect that more commonly they are downloaded but not played.
This podcast was originally recorded in September, 2012.
It’s that time of year again. In just a few weeks, CGD will release the 2012 results of its annual Commitment to Development Index (CDI) – a product that measures the extent to which wealthy nations are supporting poorer countries’ development efforts in seven policy areas: aid, trade, investment, migration, environment, security, and technology. In this week’s Wonkcast, I chat with David Roodman, CGD senior fellow and chief architect of the CDI, and Owen Barder, senior fellow and director for Europe, about the ABCs of the CDI and what we are calling a “deep dive” into the CDI for Europe.
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David recalls that CDI had its origins in a 2001 meeting between CGD president Nancy Birdsall and Moisis Naim, then editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy Magazine. Moises suggested that CGD, then a brand new think tank, should publish an index. Nancy knew she wanted to measure the rich world’s support for development and put David in charge of figuring out how. Eleven years later the index results remain fairly consistent -- with smaller, northern European countries grabbing top spots. I ask David why.
The Millennium Development Goal of universal primary-school completion has been successful. By 2011, 90 percent of countries had already met the goal; only 19 of 212 countries are unlikely to meet it by 2015.
Being able to prove who you are is a powerful tool that can serve as a basis for exercising rights like voting, accessing financial services and receiving transfers, and reducing fraud. Yet billions of people in the developing world lack a means to officially identify themselves. In this week’s Wonkcast, Alan Gelb and Julia Clark draw from their ongoing research on biometric technology and development to explain how developing country governments and donors can tap advances in biometrics to help empower poor people.
Our Wonkcast this week covers two separate topics and two international figures recently in the news. First, Muhammad Yunus is considered the father of microfinance as the founder of Grameen Bank. Why then has he been removed from his post? What does it mean for the future of Grameen? Following up, we discuss another Nobel peace prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, and the future of Burmese debt.
Your tax dollars bought that bridge, that road, that school. But unless you live in Colombia or the UK, you probably can’t look at the contracts for these things bought on your behalf. My guest on this week’s Wonkcast is Charles Kenny, senior fellow here at CGD and we are discussing his latest work: “Publish What You Buy: The Case for Routine Publication of Government Contracts.”