Multimedia

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.

When Dominique Straus-Kahn resigned suddenly as head of the International Monetary Fund last May, the world was thrown unexpectedly into search for his successor. Within days, CGD launched a survey of the global development community opinion on three issues: the selection process, criteria for rating the candidates, and ratings for 15 candidates identified in international media.

My guest on this Wonkcast is David Wheeler, who led the survey and a similar survey on the process for selecting the president of the World Bank when Paul Wolfowitz resigned from that post in 2007. The big take away (summarized in CGD working papers here and here): Regardless of nationality, a huge majority of respondents agree on the need to reform the leadership selection processes for the two Bretton Woods institutions.

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.” 

If you found a trillion-dollar bill on the sidewalk, would you pick it up? Michael Clemens thinks he has found a bunch of such bills—huge gains to the poor people and the world economy that could be achieved by easing restrictions on cross-border labor mobility.  He has written a working paper that sets forth a new research agenda on migration and is urging economists to pay more attention to the benefits of increased labor mobility for the people who move, the people and countries that receive them, and those who remain at home. In this week’s Wonkcast we discuss his four-point research agenda, and explore why some important questions about labor mobility are so rarely investigated.  

Take the topic of so-called “brain drain.” While plenty of research has gone into documenting the exodus of skilled workers from developing countries, Michael says, little research has examined the actual effects of these departures on those left behind—and even less has considered the welfare gains to those who move. “When people talk about migration at the international level, they tend to only focus on the costs,” says Michael. “This negative labeling happens to such a degree that they eventually define the movement with a pejorative little rhyme, brain drain.”

Here at CGD, we talk a lot about the “what” of policy. We’re in the business of ideas and that sometimes leads us to overlook the crucial question of the “who” in the policy process.

Thankfully we have Nora Lustig, a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development, Samuel Z. Stone Professor of Latin American economics at Tulane University, and non-resident fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue. Nora has just written a working paper on the role of scholar-practitioners in the creation, design, evaluation, and political survival of Mexico’s Progresa/Oportunidades anti-poverty program, which has become a model for both impact evaluation and for conditional cash transfer programs around the world. On this week’s show, she draws on her new paper to tell me the story of scholar-practitioners and Protgresa/Oportunidades.

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.

The American media is abuzz with stories of doom and gloom as tensions mount over stalled efforts to raise the U.S. debt ceiling. Europe, meanwhile, has its own debt woes, with mounting fears that a default in Greece could spill over into Ireland, Portugal and Spain. So far, however, there has been relatively little discussion about what these twin crises would mean for the 5 billion people living in developing countries. Sadly, those with the least influence over the issue could pay the highest price.

On this week’s Wonkcast, I invite senior CGD fellow and global finance expert Liliana Rojas-Suarez to explain why it’s important to the rest of the world that Europe and the United States put their financial affairs in order. The showdown in the U.S. is especially worrying, Liliana says, because of the U.S. dollar’s role as the international reserve currency.

 

Every year, billions of dollars are spent on food assistance to provide lifesaving sustenance to millions of people. That’s a lot of money, and an important cause, so it was encouraging to learn last week that the United States and the G-20 are starting to seriously scrutinize food aid policy. Recent developments in Washington and Paris show a growing consensus that it’s about time to overhaul outdated approaches to feeding the hungry.

Joining me this week to discuss these developments is Connie Veillette, director of CGD’s Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance Program and CGD research fellow Ben Leo. Having closely tracked U.S. and international food aid, both have concluded that reforms in financing, procurement and delivery can help ensure that food aid reaches more people who need it at lower cost.