CGD in the News
Further Thoughts on the Bangladesh Factory Disaster (Slate)
Senior Fellow Kimberley Ann Elliott's Q&A on worker safety following the recent Bangladesh factory collapse for the Washington Post is featured in a Slate article.
Is It Crazy to Think We Can Eradicate Poverty? (New York Times)
President Nancy Birsdall, Senior Fellow Lant Pritchett, and Visiting Fellow Scott Morris are quoted in a New York Times piece on the feasibility of eradicating poverty.
Why Ending Extreme Poverty Isn't Good Enough (Bloomberg Businessweek)
Senior Fellow Charles Kenny writes his weekly column in Bloomberg Businessweek on why the global community should fight poverty until all people live on a decent income, not until extreme poverty has been eradicated.
Give Sam Walton the Nobel Prize (Foreign Policy)
Senior Fellow Charles Kenny writes an op-ed on how Walmart may have done more for poor consumers around the world than any other business in American history.
How Did the World's Rich Get That Way? Luck (Bloomberg Businessweek)
Senior Fellow Charles Kenny writes his weekly column in Bloomberg Businessweek on why luck overwhelmingly why the rich are rich while the poor are poor.
Missing in Africa: How Obama Failed to Engage an Increasingly Important Continent (Foreign Affairs)
Vice president of programs and senior fellow Todd Moss discusses missed opportunities and the importance of Africa for the U.S.
Seismic Inequality (Foreign Policy)
Charles Kenny's weekly Foreign Policy column on earthquakes and inequality.
Should We Globalize Labor Too? [NYT]
CGD's recently released book, Let Their People Come by Lant Pritchett is the centerpiece for this New York Times Magazine article by Jason DeParle.
Africa's Rural Areas Suffer Most from Health Care Worker Exodus
CGD research fellow Michael Clemens was interviewed for this VOA article on the migration of African health care workers.
The Difference Between Calves and Cows
Research fellow David Roodman's latest publication, Microfinance as Business (co-authored with Uzma Qureshi), is discussed in this posting on Salon.com by Andrew Leonard. The article focuses on the pros and cons of micro-finance for development.
From the article:
For a couple of weeks now, I've been puzzling about poor women and cows in Bangladesh.
Let me explain.
On the same day that Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank and chief apostle of the church of microcredit, received the Nobel Peace Prize, the Center For Global Development (CGD), a Washington-based nonprofit, published a study by David Roodman and Uzma Qureshi with the title "Microfinance as Business."
Microfinance is generally taken to mean the provision of small loans -- microcredit -- and other financial services to very poor people, and Yunus is widely acclaimed as the man who pioneered its effective application. So CGD's timing was excellent. But the thrust of the study was contrarian to the point of outright dissidence. Though the Nobel Prize committee, as CGD noted in its own interview with Roodman published three days later, "praised Yunus and Grameen for 'their efforts to create economic and social development from below,'" Roodman says that for him "the jury is still out" over whether microfinance contributes to economic development among the poor. In their paper, Roodman and Qureshi argued that there isn't yet definitive evidence that microfinance actually lifts people out of poverty.
"Unfortunately, rigorously derived evidence that microcredit helps people in this way is surprisingly thin."
Surprising is the right word, because microfinance has never been hotter. 2005 was dubbed "The Year of Microcredit" by the United Nations. Philanthropists, aid donors, and profit-seeking capitalists of every stripe are all pouring hundreds of milllions of dollars into microfinance schemes across the globe. (An absorbing article in last week's New Yorker delves deeply into the differing motivations, and consequent friction between, the new players in microfinance, who include Microsoft's Bill "philanthropist" Gates and eBay founder Pierre "profit-seeking" Omidyar.) Heartwarming success stories of people living in extreme poverty -- mostly women -- who have clawed their way out of the most abject circumstances with the help of miniscule loans, abound...