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This Wonkcast was originally recorded in October, 2012.

Pogo famously said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” That thought underpins my conversation with CGD senior fellow Bill Savedoff on corruption and development. Bill joined me last week after hosting a roundtable discussion with two anti-corruption experts who have recently published books on the issue, Frank Vogl, author of Waging War on Corruption and Laurence Cockcroft, author of Global Corruption Money, Power, and Ethics in the Modern World. In our conversation, Bill draws on the key ideas in these two books to unpack the various ways of thinking about—and addressing—corruption in development. We also discuss three emerging areas of CGD work on the issue, each of which focuses on the policies and practices of the rich and powerful—in global terms, us.

This podcast was originally recorded in September, 2012. 

It’s that time of year again. In just a few weeks, CGD will release the 2012 results of its annual Commitment to Development Index (CDI) – a product that measures the extent to which wealthy nations are supporting poorer countries’ development efforts in seven policy areas: aid, trade, investment, migration, environment, security, and technology. In this week’s Wonkcast, I chat with David Roodman, CGD senior fellow and chief architect of the CDI, and Owen Barder, senior fellow and director for Europe, about the ABCs of the CDI and what we are calling a “deep dive” into the CDI for Europe.

My guest this week is Mead Over, one of the world’s leading experts on the global response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. We discuss his new book, Achieving an Aids Transition: Preventing Infections to Sustain Treatment. The key idea is simple but powerful. Mead argues that, instead of reaching vainly for the unsustainable goal of offering treatment to everyone in the developing world who needs it, donor policy should aim to sustain current treatment levels while reducing the number of new infections below the number of AIDS deaths, so that the total number of people with HIV/AIDS declines.

The Millennium Development Goal of universal primary-school completion has been successful. By 2011, 90 percent of countries had already met the goal; only 19 of 212 countries are unlikely to meet it by 2015.

In this austere budget climate, generating “value for money” (VFM) is a top concern for global health funding agencies and their donors, who want the biggest bang for their buck in terms of lives saved and diseases controlled. To this end, CGD has convened a working group to help shape the VFM agenda for global health funding agencies, with a particular focus on the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Leading these efforts is my guest this week, Amanda Glassman, a senior fellow and director of the global health policy program at the Center for Global Development.

Latin America's emerging middle class, defined as those unlikely to fall back into poverty, has grown by 50% in recent years and now includes one of every three people on the continent, roughly equal to the number of people who remain poor. A new World Bank study finds many potential benefits from this surging middle class but cautions that these benefits can only be fully realized if countries can strike a new social contract that links middle class interests to the inclusion of those left behind. The event will include presentation of the report's key findings and a panel discussion with some of the leading experts on the region's middle classes.

This post was originally published in March, 2012

Conventional wisdom has it that when the United States catches a cold, Latin America gets pneumonia. But when the United States caught financial pneumonia in 2008, Latin America escaped with little more than a cold. What’s changed?

The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) is moving to tackle one of the most difficult and important challenges of health policy: strengthening regional mechanisms for assessing which health technologies are cost effective and therefore appropriate for public funding. It's a sensitive issue that vexes poor and rich countries alike--including the United States. A recent PAHO resolution signed by the United States, Canada, and countries in Latin America and the Caribbean will strengthen a network created last year to improve the quality of Health Technology Assessment studies and their use in the allocation of public budgets.