CGD's weekly Global Prosperity Wonkcast, event videos, whiteboard talks, slides, and more.
Has Barack Obama neglected Africa in his foreign policy? In this interview with BBC News, Todd Moss discusses US engagement with Africa, the strong precedents set by presidents Clinton and Bush, and how Obama measures up.
The World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA) was created more than 50 years ago to provide low-cost financing to the world’s poorest countries. Economic growth is lifting many of these countries into middle-income status. What happens when most of IDA’s borrowing countries are no longer classified as poor?
My guest on this week’s Wonckast, senior fellow Todd Moss, offers answers from a new CGD working group report he helped to write: Soft Lending without Poor Countries: Recommendations for a New IDA.
Vice president for programs and senior fellow Todd Moss comments on how to achieve peace and stability in Mali on Newsday, a BBC World Service radio program.
When a poor country finds oil, bad things often get worse. Countries rich in extractable natural resources, especially oil, frequently suffer from crummy governance, high poverty, endemic corruption and conflict. Is it possible to beat this oil curse? My guest on the Wonkcast this week, Todd Moss, CGD vice president for programs and senior fellow, says yes. He argues that a government that transfers some or all of its oil revenue to citizens in a universal, transparent, and regular taxable payment, could strengthen the social contract, fight corruption, and lay the foundation for future prosperity.
Ghana’s recent recalculation of its GDP led to an overnight $500 per capita jump, putting in motion unexpectedly rapid graduation from the International Development Association (IDA) and ultimately a new relationship with the World Bank. In this week’s Wonkcast, I speak with Todd Moss, vice president for programs and senior fellow at CGD, about his recent trip to the newly categorized lower-middle income country, the implications of IDA graduation, and a sudden influx of oil wealth.
My guest this week is Todd Moss, senior fellow and vice president for programs here at the Center for Global Development. Our topic is the newly updated edition of his popular primer: African Development: Making Sense of the Issues and Actors.
Todd tells me his publisher, Lynne Rienner, urged him to update the book, first published in 2007, because of the rapid pace of change in Africa, and the strong and growing interest in Africa among U.S. college students, a key audience for the book.
Leaders from around the world meet in New York City next week to review progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, a list of development targets set in 2000, after a decade of UN conferences and summits, for achievement by 2015. Ahead of the MDG Summit, I spoke with Michael Clemens and Todd Moss, senior fellows at the Center for Global Development and outspoken critics of the design and implementation of the MDGs. On the Global Prosperity Wonkcast, we discuss where Todd and Michael think that the MDG effort went wrong, and how it could be better going forward.
As the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico continues to spew thousands of barrels of oil each day, media attention has been focused on the toll on nearby economies and ecosystems and on the U.S. political response. On this edition of the Global Prosperity Wonkcast, we look beyond the Gulf of Mexico to explore what implications America’s biggest environmental disaster might hold for the new offshore oil boom getting underway in Africa.
My guests are Vijaya Ramachandran and Todd Moss, both senior fellows here at the Center for Global Development.
When Donald Kaberuka became president of the African Development Bank five years ago, he faced daunting tasks, including defining a mission for an institution that many dismissed as irrelevant.
My guest on this week’s show is Todd Moss, vice president and senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. Todd directed a working group that, in 2006, issued six recommendations, three each for bank management and the bank’s shareholder countries. Now, Todd has issued a report card that grades the bank and its shareholders on each of the recommendations.
Todd starts by explaining the basics of how the African Development Bank works. Like other multilateral development banks (notably the World Bank), it uses capital and promises of support by shareholder countries to raise and lend money for development projects, partly at concessional interest rates. During the 2008-09 financial crisis, the AfDB accelerated disbursements to African countries to cushion the impact of the crisis, at the request of the world’s leading donor countries.
In CGD’s first Global Prosperity Wonkcast I interview senior fellow Todd Moss on his innovative proposal for managing Ghana’s anticipated $1 billion per year oil windfall: money to the people. Subscribe to the podcast if you have iTunes; read Moss’s executive memo to Ghana’s President John Atta Mills, or get the full story in Saving Ghana from Its Oil: The Case for Direct Cash Distribution.