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A 2011 referendum in Southern Sudan will determine the sub-nation’s independence – and it’s just one month away. Ahead of the South’s possible secession, Sudanese leaders are scrambling to find solutions to a host of questions, a critical one being: What should be done with Sudan’s crushing $35 billion external debt burden? I’m joined on this Wonkcast by Ben Leo, a research fellow here at the Center for Global Development, who has just published a CGD working paper which outlines potential scenarios for post-referendum debt division between the Khartoum government in the north and an independent Southern Sudan. On the Wonkcast, Ben explains how debt complicates the landscape for splitting Sudan and outlines a range of possible approaches to a viable solution.

What does the new makeup of Congress mean for global development looking forward? My guest this week is Sarah Jane Staats, director of policy outreach here at the Center for Global Development. Sarah Jane is responsible for engaging the development policy community—especially senior staff in the U.S. Congress, the administration and policy experts in leading development advocacy NGOs—in the Center’s research and other programs.

In this Wonkcast, Sarah Jane starts by explaining that, “the first big takeaway with the elections is that they were really not about foreign policy.” Because domestic issues drove the rhetoric of the candidates this election cycle, even the foreign policy positions of some freshman Congressmen are still unknown. Thirty nine of the sixty new House Republicans align themselves with the Tea Party, a group with no clear foreign policy agenda, much less a unified view about whether and how to engage developing countries.

Heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and cancers are usually considered diseases of the rich world, the result of too much food and too little exercise. But these serious diseases are already a huge problem in the developing world, accounting for about half of the burden of disease. Yet new research from the Center for Global Development has found that barely 3% of foreign aid and philanthropic spending for developing world health addresses these often overlooked diseases.

My guest this week is the lead author of that research, Rachel Nugent, CGD deputy director of global health. In a forthcoming working paper co-authored with Andrea Feigl – Scarce Donor Funding for Non-Communicable Diseases: Will it Contribute to a Health Crisis? – Rachel examines the impact of non-communicable diseases in the developing world and assesses the response of international donors. In the Wonkcast, we discuss her findings and recommendations for addressing this challenge.

In development, it's good to try new, innovative ideas-- but even better to know whether or not they work. My guests this week are Michael Clemens, senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, and Gabriel Demombynes, a senior economist at the World Bank, based in Nairobi, Kenya. They have written a new paper in which they argue that one very high profile development program, the Millennium Villages Project, isn’t being evaluated in a way that would provide clear evidence of its impacts. They propose a better way to evaluate the project.

After months of study, work, negotiation and anticipation, the Obama administration has announced its development policy. What’s new here and what are the chances of implementation? To find out, I chatted with Connie Veillette, who has recently joined the Center for Global Development as director of our Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance program. Connie comes to us from Capitol Hill, where she spent many years with the Congressional Research Service and worked most recently as a senior professional staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee minority staff, specializing in U.S. foreign assistance and USAID.

Many developing countries have found that large deposits of oil or other natural resources are more a curse than a blessing. My guest on this week's Wonkcast is Alan Gelb, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. Together with co-author Sina Grassman, Alan has written a paper that explores the options facing developing countries with abundant natural resources and draws on historical evidence to recommend best practices for dodging the 'resource curse.'

We begin with a discussion of that curse. Alan explains the various problems that accompany oil revenues. Most obviously, that money is easy to misdirect and can often end up fueling corruption. But even for honest and well-intentioned leaders, oil money still presents special headaches. The extreme volatility of oil prices, which can vary by hundreds of percent from one year to the next, make it exceedingly difficult to plan national budgets. The trick is to stock away money in boom oil years to smooth spending in bust years—not easy even when small surpluses are involved. "Clearly you've got to save," Alan explains. But to flatten the boom-bust revenue cycle, "the typical producer may have to save an equivalent of its whole GDP."

Which countries are leading the pack on achieving the Millennium Development Goals? My guest this week is CGD research fellow Ben Leo. In a new working paper, Ben lays out an index for measuring country-level progress towards the MDGs. His paper, the first to offer comparative country-level rankings of progress towards key MDG-related indicators, finds some surprising trailblazers. Who knew that Honduras would come out on top!?

As the UN prepares for the MDG Review Summit next month, the conventional wisdom is that the global progress has been adequate—mostly because of China’s huge size and rapid poverty reduction—but that Africa lags sadly behind. Ben says that this view is overly simplistic, if not just plain wrong. Africa accounts for four of the fifteen countries ranked as “trailblazers,” on track to reach at least half of the examined MDG indicators by the 2015 target year (they are: Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, and Uganda). Notwithstanding that the MDGs are wildly over ambitious given historical rates of progress (see here and here), Ben finds that low-income countries have made as much progress as middle-income countries. And some countries that we might expect to see on the trailblazer list, such as Tanzania, have performed poorly.

Even as the cost of treating HIV/AIDS has fallen dramatically, the number of people newly infected has remained high. What can be done to reverse this trend and finally defeat this disease? This week on the Wonkcast, I’m joined by Mead Over, a senior fellow here at the Center for Global Development and perhaps the world’s leading expert on the economics of HIV/AIDS. He has recently published two major essays, which introduce the concept of the “AIDS transition”—the point in time where the number of people living with the disease begins to fall. He argues persuasively that to reach this point, international donors must greatly strengthen incentives for effective prevention.