CGD's weekly Global Prosperity Wonkcast, event videos, whiteboard talks, slides, and more.
In this episode, Owen speaks with two guests: Rakesh Rajani, a Tanzanian civil society leader who currently leads Twaweza (meaning ‘we can make it happen’ in Swahili), and Martin Tisné, director of policy at Omidyar Network.
This is the first of three episodes of Development Drums which look at the relationship between effective and accountable states, active citizenship and development.
Rita Perakis explains a new financing mechanism called Development Impact Bonds. DIBs would provide upfront funding for development programs by private investors, who would be remunerated by donors or host-country governments—and earn a return—if evidence shows that programs achieve pre-agreed outcomes.
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.
Senior fellow Owen Barder is interviewed for an Al Jazeera piece on British aid to India.
The CGD and Social Finance Development Impact Bonds Working Group is designing a new type of investment vehicle to attract private investors who want to do good and do well while delivering development outcomes. My guests this week are two of the group’s three co-chairs: Elizabeth Littlefield, President and CEO of the US Overseas Private Investment Corporation; and Toby Eccles, founder and Development Director at Social Finance, a UK-based non-profit that has pioneered a similar investment vehicle, the Social Impact Bond or SIB.
I recently spoke with Elizabeth and Toby following the working group’s second meeting here in Washington. Owen Barder, the third co-chair, joined the meeting via video link from London and did not join us for the Wonkcast.
Is it possible to invest in public services and make a return? In this BBC interview, Senior Fellow Owen Barder discusses the potential of Development Impact Bonds, an approach the draws the private sector into development. With DIBs, private investors would see their money go towards infrastructure, education, and disease vaccination in developing countries. "These are areas where the growth is going to be in the 21st century," Owen says of emerging market economies. "Any investor is going to be crazy not to be investing in products in these places." Listen to the full interview below.
In this episode, Owen talks with author and economist Diane Coyle about her latest book ‘The Economics Of Enough, How To Run The Economy As If The Future Matters’.
Diane shares her thoughts on economic growth as a satisfactory goal for economic and social policy, and discusses the measure of Gross Domestic Product in relation to indicators of happiness and welfare. She also explains her ‘manifesto for enough’ in relation to how it addresses these issues, along with how much it leaves unresolved.
Development Drums is hosted by Owen Barder and produced by Anna Scott at the Center for Global Development in Europe.
In this CNN interview Senior Fellow Liliana Rojas-Suarez argued that the Fed's recently announced expansionary monetary policy (QE3) is a response to the lack of action by the US Government and Congress to solve the real problem facing the US: the country's fiscal and debt positions. While not ideal, the Fed's policy is an attempt to improve consumers' expectations who have become highly risk adverse in the face of large uncertainties both in Europe and in the US.
Liliana explained that, in contrast to events in 2010, this time around the effects of the Fed's policies will have less adverse effects on Latin America and other Emerging Market Economies. The central reason is that these countries' current economic cycle is one characterized by declining economic growth resulting from a reduced global demand for their products. This in turn is the result of a global slowdown that includes advanced economies and China. In Liliana's view, to the extent that the Fed's actions can improve markets' confidence, the positive effect--however limited--on US aggregate demand will offset the adverse effects on currency appreciations in Latin America and other economies.
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.
On Friday the Governors of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) will decide who will be the Bank’s next President. Today we are publishing interviews with four of the candidates. The four candidates who agreed to be interviewed are: Thomas Mirow (at 03:58), the incumbent who has completed one four year term as President and is seeking re-election for the second term; Jan Krzysztof Bielecki (at 17:40), former prime minister of Poland; Suma Chakrabarti (35:45), a senior British civil servant; and Bozidar Djelic (at 47:43), the former deputy Prime Minister of Serbia. The fifth candidate, Philippe de Fontaine Vive Curtaz, is vice president of the European Investment Bank and did not choose to participate in this process.
Toby Ord is a moral philosopher at Balliol College, Oxford and the president of Giving What We Can, an international society dedicated to eliminating poverty in the developing world. In this interview, Toby firstly talks about consequentialism and the implications for development, with particular focus on cost-effectiveness. Secondly, Toby explains his personal decision to donate a substantial proportion of his income to the developing world, and shares with us the factors that guide his choice of recipients.
Most Wonkcasts focus on CGD’s research and policy work. This one is different. My guest is Owen Barder and our topic is CGD itself, specifically the effort that Owen is leading to greatly increase the Center’s engagement in Europe. Owen, a CGD senior fellow and director for Europe, previously worked for CGD on our Advance Market Commitment initiative, which led to a $1.5 billion pilot commitment to purchase and ensure delivery of new vaccines to prevent pneumococcal disease. He subsequently spent two years in Ethiopia and recently resumed working for CGD, based in London, to strengthen the Center’s ties with the European development research and policy community. [Note: Owen continues to maintain his own excellent blog, Owen Abroad and to host occasional podcasts, Development Drums; these are also now available on the CGD Website multimedia page.]
Tim Harford, a journalist at the Financial Times and author of The Undercover Economist and Adapt: Why Success Always Begins with Failure, talks about the implications for development of his idea that successful complex systems emerge from a process of trial and error.
Development Drums is hosted by Owen Barder and produced by Anna Scott at the Center for Global Development in Europe.
I recently interviewed Owen Barder, CGD senior fellow and director for Europe, shortly after his return from the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea. Did the December forum, with some 3,000 participants from around the world, matter to development?
We begin our interview by discussing the city of Busan itself, and South Korea’s dramatic transformation from aid recipient to donor. Busan is now a bustling city and the 5th largest port in the world. We then consider four conference outcomes that Owen identified in a blog post http://www.owen.org/blog/5131 soon after the conference: increased participation by emerging donors; a new deal for fragile states; significant progress on transparency, including a U.S. decision to join the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI); and significant changes in the international governance of the aid system.
In this two-minute 2006 video clip, Ruth Levine, then CGD senior fellow and director for global health, tells the story of CGD’s Making Markets for Vaccines initiative. She describes how a CGD Working Group produced an economic and legal framework for funds to incentivize vaccine development. The G-7 Finance Ministers endorsed the approach and five donors (Canada, Italy, Norway, UK and Russia, and the Gates Foundation) committed $1.5 billion to create an incentive for a vaccine against the strains of pneumococcus disease prevalent in low-income countries. Owen Barder, a co-author of the working group report, and Alice Albright, a member of the working group who was then CFO of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, help tell the story of moving this innovative proposal from idea to action.
Last week finance ministers and central bankers from around the globe convened in Washington for the annual meetings of the international Monetary Fund and World Bank. While the press and many of the meeting participants focused on the unfolding European financial crisis, below the radar there was plenty of discussion on development issues, including on the legacy of the Seoul Development Consensus and the role of development in the upcoming G-20 Summit in France.
In this week’s Wonkcast, Owen Barder, CGD senior fellow, director of our European program, and host of the podcast Development Drums, updates us on the state of the development debate in these global gatherings. I also invite him to reflect on whether such confabs, including the last week’s UN General Assembly in New York and November’s upcoming High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea, ultimately make any difference. His conclusion can be summed up simply: “can’t live with em, can’t live without em.”
It’s not often that the United Nations sees fit to officially declare a food crisis a famine. That’s a testament to the severity of the ongoing suffering in Somalia, a disaster of biblical proportions that has already claimed the lives of tens of thousands. But evidence abounds that famines are not only the result of natural occurrences. On the contrary, most are the shocking result of human error or, in the worst case, deliberate neglect.
This was the message Owen Barder drove home to me in this week’s Wonkcast. Owen acquired an intimate understanding of the realities of food scarcity when he traveled to Ethiopia during the food crisis of 1984-85, and more recently while spending three years in the capital, Addis Ababa. To him, governance and information are central components of food emergencies.