Ideas to Action:

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

Liquidity Needs in Times of Stress: Should Latin America go Beyond the IMF? (Event Video)

Large accumulation of international reserves by Latin American countries was central in containing the adverse effects of the global financial crisis. Lines of credit from the Federal Reserve and the new liquidity facility from the IMF also played a key role, at least for some major countries. However, reserve accumulation is not free of cost, Fed support is not guaranteed and IMF resources might not be sufficient at times of systemic crises and may carry conditionality that make such assistance only contingent. This raises the question as to whether Latin America should actively pursue the effective implementation of regional arrangements capable of ensuring the availability of liquidity at times of acute financial stress. The Latin America Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee dealt with this issue by answering these questions, among others, and shared their statement publicly at this CGD event:

Corruption and Development -- William Savedoff

This Wonkcast was originally recorded in October, 2012.

Savedoff

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.

Liliana Rojas Suarez Discusses Risks to Growth Sustainability in Latin America

Amanda GlassmanIn these interviews Senior Fellow Liliana Rojas-Suarez discusses the risks to growth sustainability in Latin American countries derived from the large vulnerabilities in advanced economies. In particular, she emphasizes risks for emerging markets from the lack of solution to the fiscal cliff problem in the U.S. While Liliana is confident about China's capacity to continue on a solid growth path (albeit at slower rates than those observed in previous years), she believes that the permanent solution to the European debt crisis requires either a comprehensive write-down of the Greek debt or a separation of Greece (and possibly Portugal) from the Eurozone.

ABCs of the CDI and Europe – David Roodman and Owen Barder

Roodman, Barder

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.

Development Drums Episode 35: Migration and Development

In this episode, Owen talks to fellow CGD Senior Fellow Michael Clemens about the relationship between migration and development.

Michael talks about the impact of migration on migrants themselves, and how micro-data has been used to expose a significant inequality of opportunity based on location. He then responds to various criticisms of migration from a receiving country perspective, focusing on the costs and benefits of the economic, communal and cultural effects of migration. At the end of the podcast, Michael discusses the impact of migration from the perspective of the migrants’ countries of origin. 

Achieving an AIDS Transition – Mead Over


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.

Program-for-Results: An Update on the World Bank's New Finance Tool (Event Video)

The World Bank's Program-for-Results (PforR) financing instrument was approved in January 2012 to complement the two existing financing instruments of the Bank: the Policy Financing instrument (DPL), which focuses on discrete policy actions within the direct control of governments, and the Project Financing instrument (IL), the Bank's main instrument to finance investment projects. PforR has been developed to enable the Bank to support the performance of a government program using the government's own systems, and when the risks to achieving the program's objectives relate to the capacity of the systems to achieve better results.