Over the decade, donors have publicly declared that they would improve how they operate in order to make aid work better. They would coordinate better, let recipient countries take more ownership of project design, and so on. Ten years and ten days ago, there was the Rome Declaration.
In the last few days, a delicate dance of reconciliation between Myanmar and its estranged foreign creditors reached its final measures. At the Club de Paris---the collective negotiating forum for creditor governments such as Japan and the United States---a press release just announced a debt deal with the poor and long-isolated Asian nation. The creditors committed to what is by Paris Club standards an exceptionally generous deal: cancelling half the debt in arrears---Myanmar defaulted in 1998---and instituting a 15-year repayment schedule for the remainder, including a 7-year grace period. Because the interest rates on most of these the loans are low, typically about 1%, this stretching out of repayment further reduces the debt's economic cost ("net present value" or NPV). Overall, the NPV will fall 60%. Meanwhile the World Bank and Asian Development Bank made their first loans to Myanmar in more than 20 years, in the process erasing their own arrears issues with the country.
This Thursday, the World bank will host the unveiling of the latest edition of the best-known ranking of think tanks, which is produced by the University of Pennsylvania. The public event will reveal whether the Brookings Institution has lost its hold on "Think Tank of the Year," which tanks made the top 50 worldwide, which are best in Latin America, and so on.
I'm delighted to congratulate my colleague David Roodman on his winning the first ever Editor's Prize of the Stata Journal for his 2009 and 2011 articles. Here is one of the more easily understood bits of the citation:
This is a joint post with Alice Lépissier and Liza Reynolds.
This blog post announces the launch of the Europe Beyond Aid initiative and presents a summary of the research and preliminary analysis in its first working paper.
Europeans more than pull their weight in aid to developing countries. Last year Europeans provided more than €60 billion ($80bn) in aid, more than two and a half times as much as the United States. European members account for just 40% of the national income of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) but give more than 60% of the aid.
David Roodman and Julia Clark.
[Note: A follow-up post presents an index and ranking based on the indicators below.]
I argued three months ago that donors should refinance rather than cancel Burma's $11 billion debt. The logic: the reforms underway in Burma, while remarkable and welcome, are also delicate, reversible, and incomplete. The country's famed opposition figure Aung San Suu Kyi called early this year for the suspension rather than termination of the economic sanctions against her country.
Kenya has instituted a new tax that affects users of M-Pesa -- a widely popular phone-based money transfer service used by more than half of Kenya’s adult population. The new 10 percent excise duty on fees charged for money transfer services applies to mobile phone providers, banks, and other money transfer agencies. Operated by Safaricom, the largest mobile network operator in Kenya, M-Pesa accounts for the largest share of users of money transfer services. Users of M-Pesa products will therefore bear most of the impact of the tax.
This post is coauthored with Julia Clark. You can listen to the pre-release podcast with David Roodman and Owen Barder.
We're proud to announce the release of the tenth edition of the Commitment to Development Index. Each year since 2003, the CDI has ranked wealthy nations on how much their governments' policies and actions support global prosperity. Nations are linked in many ways: through trade, aid, climate, technology, and more. The CDI assesses policies in all these areas in order to communicate that helping takes more than aid, and to organize a comprehensive agenda for development policy.
Last week I gave a speech at the UN General Assembly (UNGA). I was the keynote speaker for a session on the global economy and the Millennium Development Goals. I came away with mixed feelings. On one hand, the inefficiency of the UN can be maddening—the place is badly overdue for a good skewering on The Daily Show.