CGD's weekly Global Prosperity Wonkcast, event videos, whiteboard talks, slides, and more.
My guest on this week’s Wonkcast is Kevin Ummel, project manager Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA), a newly updated CGD database that reveals the carbon dioxide emissions, electricity production, corporate ownership, and location of more than 60,000 power plants around the world.
Electric power has been restored across northern India to the 600 million people who recently found themselves sweltering in the dark. But the massive blackouts have left lingering questions about the country’s ability to provide the infrastructure necessary to sustained growth and poverty reduction.
CGD Fellow Arvind Subramanian puts the blame on populism—a tendency of politicians to promise free or heavily subsidized electricity and officials to turn a blind eye to power theft—that has left India with an undercapitalized, inefficient power sector that has much higher transmission and distribution losses than other countries at a similar level of development.
On Voice of America's In Focus program, Todd Moss, vice president for programs and senior fellow, discusses US investment in Africa and Secretary Clinton's trip to the continent. (Beginning at 06:44)
The vast majority of people who care for children, the elderly and disabled in wealthy places like the United States come from developing countries. It's work that some say falls into the "3-D" category (dirty, difficult and demeaning). Immigrants who do these jobs are typically paid poorly and offered few basic workplace protections. It's a trend that's also creating care gaps in the families and societies these workers leave behind. We look at both ends of what’s known as the “global care chain.”
Gender permeates all development issues, and there is growing debate surrounding how best to implement and promote gender balance and equality throughout the development agenda.This episode broadly focuses on two different views of why we might be interested in women in development: the first based on instrumental reasons (what can women and girls do for development) and the second on more structural and contextual reasons (what development can do for women and girls).
Our guests are Andrea Cornwall of the Institute of Development Studies and Prue Clarke of New Narratives.
In this lecture, adapted from his Kapuściński Lecture of May 2012, Owen Barder explores the implications of complexity theory for development policy. He explains how traditional economic models have tried and failed to understand why some countries have managed to improve living standards while other countries have not.
Development is easy, right? All poor countries have to do is mimic the things that work in rich countries and they’ll evolve into fully functional states. If only it were that simple. My guest this week is Lant Pritchett, a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development and chair of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Master’s program in international development. His latest work looks at how the basic functions of government fail to improve in some developing countries (a dynamic he defines as a “state capability trap”). Part of the problem, says Lant, is that donors often insist on transplanting institutions that work in developed countries into environments where those institutions don’t fit at all.
Behavioral economics seeks to complement traditional approaches to economics by incorporating insights from psychology and human behavior, and taking a behavioral approach allows us to understand a host of behaviors that are critical to the success of a variety of development policies. In this event, Sendhil Mullainathan and Saugato Datta will present a paper exploring how behavioral economics can inform development policy, from education to health to cash transfer programs. Drawing on the latest research in these and other areas, the authors will discuss how behavioral economics provides policymakers with innovative new ways of tackling many important issues in development.
Reducing carbon emissions from forest clearing and degradation has become an important part of the international climate agenda. But how can we create incentives to reduce deforestation, and how can we measure success? My guest on this week’s Wonkcast, visiting senior associate Michele de Nevers, tells me that the answers to these questions are more valuable than ever – if we don’t act quickly, our forests will disappear.
In this video, originally published by PBS Newshour, Arvind Subramanian speaks with Judy Woodruff about the future challenges for matching supply with demand for energy in India.
At a public event at the Overseas Development Institute on July 3, 2012, Michael Clemens argues that aid projects in Africa need much more rigorous impact evaluation---that is, impact evaluation that is cost-effectively 1) independent, 2) consistent, and 3) transparent.
The Center for Global Development was pleased to host Michael Froman, President Obama's Deputy National Security Advisor and Assistant for International Economics, for a discussion of the Obama Administration's strategy to achieve poverty alleviation and sustained economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa. Froman recently led an interagency delegation to Tanzania, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Nigeria to meet with a cross section of government officials, private sector leaders and young entrepreneurs on a range of issues and initiatives including the East African Community trade and investment partnership, the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition; energy; and infrastructure.