Although President Obama will be plenty busy during the remainder of his first term working with Congress to avoid the fiscal cliff, he need not wait until the start of his second term to further his vision for making US policy more supportive of global poverty reduction.
This blog post is co-authored with Martin Ravallion, who has been the Director of the World Bank’s Development Economics Research Group for several years and is currently Acting Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the Bank. The blog is cross-posted on the World Bank site here.
These days there is a lot of discussion within development organizations and governments across the globe (including the World Bank) about how to assure a greater emphasis on development impact. It would no doubt help if senior management gave stronger verbal signals on the ultimate goals of the institution, and more actively supported staff to attain those goals. But such “low-powered incentives” have been tried before, and the problems seem to persist.
This is a joint post with Jessica Brinton
At a recent CGD breakfast with Johnny West on his new book Karama! Journeys Through the Arab Spring, our colleague Mead Over asked how women would benefit from the Arab Spring. Though he speaks Arabic and has spent 20 years in the region, West didn’t have much to share about the role and prospects of women. As West explained, he had very few opportunities to interact with women. Unfortunately, this is a piece of a broader reality: even when women have played a huge role in protest movements, they are rarely represented in accounts of the revolution.
Poverty fighters unable to attend yesterday’s Massachusetts Avenue Development Seminar here at CGD (video) missed a lively debate between James Foster and Martin Ravallion on the new Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) developed by Foster and co-authors (available online here). This new approach to measuring poverty, which incorporates the
A new year calls for a development policy wish list. My wish list is about what the rich and powerful global actors– mostly but not solely in the United States – can do to improve lives among the poor and vulnerable around the world in the coming year.
On Monday March 15, Paul Romer gave an impassioned presentation here of his proposal that donor countries add a new tool to their toolkit for helping the world’s poorest – the establishment of “charter cities”. As you can learn in more detail here, such cities are conceived as contracts between three parties: a poor country which provides the land, one or more rich countries which establish the rules and norms and invest in the infrastruc
Last week was a busy time in Washington for those interested in results-focused approaches to foreign aid, with two major events, one here at CGD and one at the World Bank.
The book Newsonomics by Ken Draper documents the decline of the “old media” and opines on the negative impact such a decline will have on the quality of American political discourse. It seems to me that the collapse of the old media is also a development issue.
Gorik Ooms and European colleagues are organizing a small meeting in Brussels in October to be called the Global Responsibilities for Global Health Rights Conference. The Conference is organized by the Helene De Beir Foundation and has the moral or financial support of AIDS Fonds, Netherlands; Parliamentarians for the MDGs, Belgium; International Centre for Reproductive Health, Belgium; International Civil Society Support, Netherlands; Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium and The Lancet, United Kingdom.
Mead Over recently wrote compellingly about the importance of collective action to strengthen surveillance of the swine flu and other contagious diseases. A major issue, of course, is the cost of such surveillance measures, the timely receipt of data on potential infections, and the accuracy (and completeness) of such information. Mobile phones may be part of the solution.