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Global Development: Views from the Center

Global Development: Views from the Center features posts from Nancy Birdsall and her colleagues at the Center for Global Development about innovative, practical policy responses to poverty and inequality in an ever-more globalized world.

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Global Development: Views from the Center

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African Economists Care About Jobs; Non-Africans Care About Institutions?

3/22/13
Justin Sandefur

There's a lot of chatter in the blogosphere about Westerners' perceptions of Africa, and how poorly they align with Africans' own views of the challenges their societies face.

This week I'm in Oxford, for the annual conference on "Economic Development in Africa" at the Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE) .  The CSAE conference is unique among top-tier development econ conferences in that it brings together a huge number of scholars based in African universities and research institutes  -- as well as people like me, non-Africans working on the economics of Africa.

7 comments

Naked Contracting Bleg

9/10/12
Charles Kenny

Impressed by the response to Justin Sandefur’s recent CGD blog entry, I’ve titled this post in an attempt to sex up the topic of government procurement. No need, you say? What’s hotter than one hundred pages of legalese and a bill of quantities detailing asphalt and gravel? The below is for you, and it ends with a request for your help.

1 comment

Clicks to Policy Bricks: Can Innovation Jumpstart Development Transformation?

8/6/12
Nancy Birdsall

I participated last week in a conversation about innovation and technology for development at the Brookings Blum Roundtable in Aspen. Amazing changes are happening out there that exploit new information technologies, improving the lives of the poor and vulnerable. But a big unanswered question for me is clicks to bricks (see #8 below: Are crowdsourcing and open access innovations being matched by innovations in making government accountable and delivering public services?) I am more convinced today that web-based innovations are helping poor people become their own change agents in making t

1 comment

CGD's New Data & Code Transparency Policy

8/1/11
David Roodman

CGD has just adopted a policy that I believe will improve the quality and usefulness of our work. We have decided to become more transparent. Henceforth, the presumption will be that when authors post publications on cgdev.org that involves quantitative analysis, they will also post the data and computer code needed to fully reproduce their results. That way, any visitor to the web site will in principle be able to check our work.

5 comments

Picking a New IMF Chief: Place Your Bets!

5/19/11
Justin Sandefur

The great thing about opinion polls in a democracy is that they tell you both who should become, for example, President of the United States, and who likely will become President. "Is" and "ought" are conveniently aligned when the majority rules. The IMF is not a democracy, and the majority of the world's population has historically had no real say in choosing the Managing Director; since 1946 all ten IMF chiefs have hailed from Europe.

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