U.S. Drops the Ball on the Global Tobacco Epidemic

In January’s issue of Foreign Policy, Visiting Fellow Tom Bollyky describes the weak U.S. government response to multinational tobacco companies’ aggressive expansion into low- and middle-income country markets in search of profits. Ahead of the UN Summit on Non-Communicable Disease in September 2011, Tom argues for a stop to U.S. Trade Representative advocacy on tobacco tariff reductions and inclusion of tobacco-related investments in trade and investment agreements with developing countries, among other measures. On February 17, CNBC picked up the issue in its documentary on the Global Battle over Tobacco.

PopPov Research Network Holds Fourth Annual Conference in Marseilles, France

Convened by Deputy Director of Global Health Policy Rachel Nugent, researchers, policy-makers and funders met at the fifth annual conference of the Population and Poverty (PopPov) Research Network in January 2011. The Institut de Recherche pour le Développement and Agence Française de Développement hosted the meeting. Participants spent two days exchanging ideas on how to improve the evidence base on the links between population and economic development. New research was presented on a variety of topics, including the impact of environmental shocks on children, the effect of fertility on women’s labor force participation, and the cost-effectiveness of universal access to contraception. MIT’s Esther Duflo gave the keynote address on gender quotas in India. Links to the conference papers and presentations can be found here. CGD will continue to collaborate with the Network focusing on new issues in population and poverty economics in 2011-12, and the Population Reference Bureau will organize next year’s annual conference.

A Global Health Best-Bet: Vaccination

In a recent speech at the National Institutes of Health, USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah said “The most transformative new breakthroughs we have at our disposal are in fact, vaccines. … The evidence is clear: Vaccines are the best public health investment we can make.” Shah went on to say that one of the best investments USAID has made was to fund the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI). (See Amanda’s recent blog posts here and here for more on GAVI.) CGD also recognizes the importance of vaccines and has a storied history of recommending how vaccinations can reach the poorest, principally through our work on Making Markets for Vaccines. As both GAVI and CGD turn 10 this year, on April 4, Director of Global Health Policy Amanda Glassman will host a panel discussion to look back at a decade of GAVI financing and forward to the issues facing vaccination finance in the 2010s. Michael Kremer, Owen Barder, Amie Batson and GAVI’s Helen Evans and David Ferreira are confirmed to participate.

Unpacking the Global Fund Corruption 'Scandal'

The beginning of the year saw a flurry of activity on corruption and Global Fund grants after a January AP story and Foreign Policy article reported "large-scale" fraud. While the Global Fund immediately responded with a statement condemning corruption and outlining steps already taken to closely monitor all grants in its portfolio, it didn’t stop some donors, such as Germany and Sweden, from reconsidering pledges already committed to the Fund. Senior Fellow Bill Savedoff wrote that the story was typical of reporting on corruption, misleading readers into thinking the scale was massive when, in fact, the financial scale of the reported events was quite small. Bill also described better ways to assess corruption in aid programs using a representative sample of projects. (See Bill’s interviews with the Kaiser Family Foundation and NPR.) Acknowledging that the Global Fund is not perfect and any report of corruption is a concern, Senior Program Associate Nandini Oomman pointed out that, when compared to other donors, the Global Fund is actually the most transparent in reporting instances of corruption and acting on them. Both of these CGD blog posts sparked extensive debate in their comment sections, as the discussion spread throughout the blogosphere and other media outlets.