Assessing the Los Cabos G-20 Summit and Rio+20 Earth Summit: Implications for Development (Event Video)
6/29/12
Over the course of one week, world leaders convened in Los Cabos, Mexico, for the G20 Summit and in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. The outcomes of these two high-level meetings have potentially important implications for poor people in the developing world in three key areas: food security and agriculture, energy, and green growth. U.S. representatives to the Los Cabos G20 and Rio+20 summits, and other distinguished speakers joined us for an assessment of these summits and the road ahead.
Over the last 15 years, development economists have carefully accumulated rigorous evidence about what works and what does not in promoting health in poor countries. While each individual evaluation tests specific questions or sets of questions in specific contexts, the large number of studies now means that it is possible to draw more general conclusions. In addition, randomized evaluations are increasingly being designed to test fundamental questions about how people behave and thus generate lessons that are relevant for the design of different types of programs. In this seminar, Michael Kremer will discuss a new research paper co-authored with Rachel Glennerster, Lessons from Randomized Evaluations for Improving Health in Developing Countries, which summarizes lessons from the growing body of randomized evaluations of health programs in developing countries. The paper finds considerable evidence that consumers do not always invest optimally in health. In particular, consumers underinvest in cost-effective products for prevention and non-acute care of communicable disease and are very sensitive to the price and convenience of these products. This underinvestment does not simply reflect a lack of information of the benefits of preventative health. While this suggests the need for government intervention, many government health systems perform poorly and there is little accountability and few incentives for health care providers. Of the approaches designed to improve accountability, community or nongovernmental monitoring has had mixed results but district-level contracting has been quite successful. Many programs can improve health without excessive reliance on dysfunctional health delivery systems—delivering health products through schools for example, or improving health through water treatment. 
Twenty years after the original summit, world leaders will reconvene in Rio for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. Ahead of the Rio+20, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde will focus on key challenges to be addressed by the international community in Rio. World leaders are faced with an economic crisis, an environmental crisis, and sometimes a social crisis that cannot be treated separately. The IMF has an important role to play in exploring how macroeconomic and especially fiscal instruments can be used to address these urgent problems. The institution has also highlighted that social and environmental problems really do matter for economic performance, and are themselves affected by macroeconomic performance. 
Given a small budget, would it make sense to vaccinate 10 children against childhood diseases, or one woman to prevent transmission of HIV to her unborn child? In today’s global health arena where resources are limited and demands are growing, policy makers constantly face such budgetary dilemmas with little expert guidance. 
Partnership for Growth (PFG) is a new model for the United States to engage with a select group of countries to accelerate and sustain broad-based economic growth. It involves rigorous joint analysis of constraints to growth, the development of joint action plans to address these constraints, and high-level mutual accountability for implementation. One of PFG’s objectives is to engage not just aid but also a range of available tools to unlock new investment. CGD is pleased to host Gayle Smith to present on PFG. Todd Moss will then moderate a conversation with representatives from the U.S. agencies involved in the partnership as well as representatives from the first set of PFG countries, El Salvador, Ghana, Philippines, and Tanzania. 
Senior Fellow Liliana Rojas-Suarez discusses the recent increased weakness of European banks. She argues that the crisis will exacerbate unless the European Central Bank (ECB) fully exercises its role as lender of last resort in the near future. Timid injections of liquidity will not do the job. In her view, however, Germany's political apparatus is not ready to support the ECB crucial role. At his point, the most likely scenario is a breakdown of the Eurozone and full-blown banking crises in a number of countries in the area.