Global Development: Views from the Center

Reuters reported last week that rich countries have missed a UN deadline for providing details on their pledges of some $30 billion in so-called Fast Track Finance to help developing nations deal with climate change. The failure to meet the deadline is raising doubts about whether the money will really be provided, to which countries, and how it will be used.

This recent Columbia Journalism Review article on Hiding the Real Africa reports:

And now for some good news out of Africa. Poverty rates throughout the continent have been falling steadily and much faster than previously thought... The death rate of children under five years of age is dropping… Africa is “among the world’s most rapidly growing economic regions,” according to the McKinsey Quarterly… Yet US journalism continues to portray a continent of unending horrors…

I’ve been mulling over this problem ever since I finished this paper with Arvind Subramanian. We conclude that to deal with the climate change threat to human well-being and livelhoods as we know them today requires an extraordinary technological revolution – not just reducing carbon content but completely eliminating it, i.e. completely severing the link between burning fossil fuel and generating energy.

Bipartisanship made a reappearance in a most unlikely place last Wednesday – at the podium of the United Nations.  In his address to the United National Millennium Development Goals Summit, President Obama unveiled his “new” approach to development, emphasizing a focus on results, investing in countries committed to their own development through sound governance and democracy, tapping the forces of the economic growth through entrepreneurship and trade, and the need for mutual accountability between developed and developing countries.  In doing so, he followed precisely in the footsteps of