Ideas to Action:

Independent research for global prosperity

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CGD's weekly Global Prosperity Wonkcast, event videos, whiteboard talks, slides, and more.

Holiday in Harare: Alan Gelb

8/30/11

Alan Gelb

What does extreme hyperinflation look like? Consider a pile of currency tall enough to encircle our entire galaxy. That’s how many Zimbabwean dollars you would have needed by the end of the country’s extraordinary inflationary crisis to equal one pre-crisis Zim dollar, according to CGD senior fellow Alan Gelb. Newly returned from a holiday in Zimbabwe with his wife, who was born in Zimbabwe, Alan shared his observations and reflections on the country’s fate in a blog post that provided the starting point for our Wonkcast chat.

Hail the Scholar-Practitioners: Nora Lustig

8/22/11

Here at CGD, we talk a lot about the “what” of policy. We’re in the business of ideas and that sometimes leads us to overlook the crucial question of the “who” in the policy process.

Thankfully we have Nora Lustig, a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development, Samuel Z. Stone Professor of Latin American economics at Tulane University, and non-resident fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue. Nora has just written a working paper on the role of scholar-practitioners in the creation, design, evaluation, and political survival of Mexico’s Progresa/Oportunidades anti-poverty program, which has become a model for both impact evaluation and for conditional cash transfer programs around the world. On this week’s show, she draws on her new paper to tell me the story of scholar-practitioners and Protgresa/Oportunidades.

Turning the Tide in the War on Tobacco: Bill Savedoff

8/15/11

Most people understand the personal risks associated with smoking, but surprisingly few understand its impact globally. Every year, more people die form tobacco related illnesses than from HIV/Aids, TB and malaria combined. Nevertheless, governments and international aid agencies have yet ot pay serious attention to what some believe to be one of hte most needless disease burdens in human history.

Here to breathe some fresh air into the fight to curb smoking is senior fellow Bill Savedoff, who joins me this week to discuss his latest blog post, Death by Tobacco: A Big Problem Needs Bigger Action. Upon returning from a meeting on tobacco control in New York City last month. Bill set out to raise the alarm about something he found to be shockingly little-known: the shockingly low cost of highly effective tobacco controls.

El banco central Europeo compra bonos de Espana y Italia (CNN en Espanol)

8/9/11

Senior Fellow Liliana Rojas-Suarez was interviewed by CNN en Español on the European Central Bank’s (ECB) recent purchases of bonds from Italy and Spain. She notes that the size and duration of the intervention is important in determining its efficacy. Without a clear commitment by the ECB to act as a lender of last resort, the current monetary intervention will do little to resolve deeper economic problems within the European Union. Even more, a sustainable resolution of the crisis involves the restructuring of Italy and Spain’s bad debt in Europe’s peripheral countries.

Impacto de decradación (CNN en Espanol)

8/9/11

Senior fellow Liliana Rojas- Suarez discusses the U.S. credit rating downgrade and its effects. She emphasizes that the fundamental problems behind the 2008 financial crisis – namely the deeply troubled mortgage markets - have not been solved, and that this downgrade, together with the ongoing European crisis, are indicative of an impending long period of very low global growth. Rojas-Suarez predicts that there will be no quick economic recovery for the United States resulting in stagnant growth and unemployment rates.

CGD@10 Ten Years Turning Ideas into Action

8/9/11

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In celebration of our 10th anniversary, we prepared this film to recount some of CGD's greatest impact achievements over the years. The video features three short stories detailing our work on the 2008 global financial crisis, clean-tech finance, and HIV/AIDS and includes two bonus vignettes about COD Aid and our Closing the Evaluation GAP initiative.

Famine in the Horn of Africa: Owen Barder

8/9/11

Owen Barder

It’s not often that the United Nations sees fit to officially declare a food crisis a famine. That’s a testament to the severity of the ongoing suffering in Somalia, a disaster of biblical proportions that has already claimed the lives of tens of thousands. But evidence abounds that famines are not only the result of natural occurrences. On the contrary, most are the shocking result of human error or, in the worst case, deliberate neglect.



This was the message Owen Barder drove home to me in this week’s Wonkcast. Owen acquired an intimate understanding of the realities of food scarcity when he traveled to Ethiopia during the food crisis of 1984-85, and more recently while spending three years in the capital, Addis Ababa. To him, governance and information are central components of food emergencies.

Jenny Aker: Mobile Phones for Development—Hope vs. Hype

8/2/11

Jenny AkerAre mobile phones revolutionizing development in Africa, or have they been over-hyped? My guest this week, Jenny Aker, says the truth is a little of both. Jenny is an assistant professor at Tufts University’s Fletcher School and a non-resident fellow here at the Center for Global Development. Her research interests include the impact of communication technologies in poor countries, especially Africa.

Mobile phone use has spread across Africa at a stunning pace. The percentage of Africans who could access a mobile phone leapt from only 10% in 1999 to more than 60% by 2008—far outstripping improvements in other infrastructure (roads, clean water, or indeed landline telephones). In a new CGD working paper, to be published later this summer in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Jenny and her co-author Isaac Mbiti describe four main ways phones have been applied to the problems of the poor. In the Wonkcast, we discuss these four applications:

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