Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist Nick Kristof joined us this week for a small roundtable discussion on his work. This time last year we helped Nick select the finalists for his 2011 Win-A-Trip contest, and we’ll be helping again on the 2012 contest—more on that below.
I was delighted to learn yesterday that Tufts University’s Global Development And Environment Institute, will award its 2012 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought to Michael Lipton of Sussex University and to world-renowned agricultural expert and CGD Non-Resident Fellow Peter Timmer. This year's award, titled "The Global Food
Five years ago, probably the most positive you could be about global development was to argue that, despite a sluggish performance in reducing global income poverty connected to slow-changing institutions, broader quality of life in areas like education and health had improved everywhere. That’s pretty much the story I told in Getting Better. But since then, what we have learned about development progress suggests su
USAID Administrator Shah has taken another step in his ambitious program of making USAID not only a premier development agency (as Hillary Clinton promised it would be back in her January 2010 development speech) but premier in economic analysis, and in macro as well as micro. Shah could not have been smarter than to recruit Steve Radelet from his job as a senior advisor on development to Secretary Clinton.
Long-delayed elections finally happened last Sunday in Cote d’Ivoire and Guinea (even the New Yorker noticed). Good for those countries and for West Africa. But it strikes me that there are three absolutely huge elections coming up in the next six months that—at the risk of being over-dramatic—will determine nothing less than the future of Africa.
The McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of consulting giant McKinsey &Co, has just released its latest report, Lions on the Move: The Progress and Potential of African Economies. The report concludes that “Africa's economic growth is creating substantial new business opportunities that are often overlooked by global companies.
As many of you who closely track U.S. development policy doubtlessly already know, one of CGD's first senior fellows, Steve Radelet, joined the U.S. government this week as a senior advisor on development in the office of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Last Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that she would undertake the first ever, and she hopes forever
Sen. John Kerry called for a grand new vision to put diplomacy and development alongside defense at the heart of America's foreign policy in a knock-out speech at the Brookings Institution last week. Sen. Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, spoke of a new generation of global challenges—ethnic tension, religious extremism, financial crises, climate change and poverty—that require a dramatic overhaul of U.S. foreign policy to protect our common security and prosperity.
President Obama has generally gotten high marks for his performance after 100 days in office. But the development community has to be disappointed. Why?