CGD's weekly Global Prosperity Wonkcast, event videos, whiteboard talks, slides, and more.
My guest Taeho Bark, the Republic of Korea’s trade minister and candidate to be the next director general of the World Trade Organization (WTO), has witnessed the power of trade transform his country into a high-income, dynamic trading entity.
My guest on this Wonkcast is Alan Kyerematen, Ghana's Minister of Trade, Industry and President’s Special Initiatives and one of nine candidates to be the next head of the World Trade Organization (WTO). In our interview, Minister Kyerematen tells me he possesses the skills and vision needed to lead the WTO.
Ten years after the conflict in Darfur began, Sudan and the newly-sovereign South Sudan are still experiencing terrible violence and efforts to ensure lasting peace in the region are falling short. What can the United States do differently to help foster governance that works for both countries? My guest on this week’s Wonkcast is Kate Almquist Knopf -- author of a newly-published CGD report that argues, surprisingly to me, that the United States should normalize diplomatic relations with both Sudan and South Sudan.
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.
My guest Anabel Gonzalez, Costa Rica’s minister of trade and a candidate to be the next head of the World Trade Organization (WTO), is a staunch believer in two powers: that of trade to uplift nations and that of the WTO to help navigate the process.
Minister Gonzalez witnessed the power of trade in her own country, which she says transformed itself from an exporter of four or five basic commodities to an exporter of more than 4,300 products including coffee and bananas but also computer parts.
Her confidence in the value of the WTO as a rules-based trade arbiter stems from a 1997 dispute: the United States had restricted imports of Costa Rican-made underwear. Costa Rica appealed to the WTO, which ruled in Costa Rica’s favor.
The leadership selection process for the next Director General of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is underway. As I explained in a recent Wonkcast, we at CGD are making a modest contribution by inviting each of the nine candidates to be a guest on the show. My first guest is Mari Pangestu, Minister of Tourism and Creative Economy in Indonesia, and former trade minister. In our interview, Minister Pangestu lays out her vision for the WTO and explains why she believes should be the best choice to move the organization forward.
She begins by explaining why Indonesia is an important player in helping the WTO to promote inclusive development through trade.
In his widely-acclaimed 2011 book Origins of Political Order, Fukuyama explores the divergent trajectory of political and institutional development across societies. His new CGD Working Paper "What is Governance?" presents a framework for quantifying governance across countries. As part of the Understanding India Series, Fukuyama will contrast the evolution of political institutions in India and China.
Candidates to succeed Pascal Lamy as the Director General of the World Trade Organization (WTO) presented themselves before the general council last week. All but one of the nine candidates are from developing countries, in sharp contrast to those who led the WTO in the past, all but one of whom were from high-income countries. Is this a good sign for the WTO or not? Does this leadership succession process have implications for trade and development?
CGD and Foreign Policy Magazine honored Senator Richard Lugar, winner of the 2012 Commitment to Development Award, The award is bestowed annually since 2003, and honors an individual or organization that has made a significant contribution to changing attitudes and policies towards the developing world.
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.
Imagine that a government employee holding an unfamiliar device and a laptop offers to scan your iris and create for you a unique identification record. Would you agree? For hundreds of millions of people in the developing world, the answer is unequivocally “yes!”
My guests on this Wonkcast are among the world’s leading experts on the burgeoning field of biometric identification and its role in development. Senior fellow Alan Gelb and policy analyst Julia Clark are the authors of a new CGD working paper, Identification for Development: The Biometrics Revolution, the first global survey of the development applications of a potentially transformative new technology. They tell me that biometric identification systems could be the next big thing in development, similar to microcredit and mobile phones in the far-reaching ability to transform poor people’s lives.
Todd Moss, senior fellow and vice president for programs at the Center for Global Development, demonstrates how leaders of poor countries can beat the resource curse -- the paradox that countries that strike it rich often suffer from high poverty, dismal governance, and terrible corruption. His policy option, called Oil to Cash, helps foster a social contract in resource-rich countries by directly distributing natural resource revenues. Under this proposal, a government would transfer some or all of the revenue from natural resource extraction to citizens in a universal, transparent, and regular payment--and, importantly, then tax part of it back.
On January 21st, Senior Fellow Liliana Rojas-Suarez was interviewed by CNN in Santiago, Chile about the recent growth recovery in China and its effect on Latin America. Although Liliana recognized that growth prospects in the region have improved for 2013 in light of China's recent events.
Last month members of the Latin American Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee (CLAAF) convened at CGD to discuss fiscal and monetary issues affecting the region. The claaf, which meets here twice a year, usually offers policy and regulatory recommendations for finance ministers and central bankers in the region. This time the committee proposed something quite different: the five-page statement claaf issued after two days of deliberation recommended the creation of a new regional financial institution—a Latin American Liquidity Fund, to supplement the efforts of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) when the next global financial crisis hits.
Join us for a MADS featuring Lant Pritchett. Pritchett will be discussing a new working paper, which reframes the impact evaluation debate. Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) has always been an element of implementing organizations’ accountability to their funders, and recently there has been a push for much greater rigor in evaluations to isolate causal impacts and enable more ‘evidence based’ approaches to accountability and budgeting. Pritchett and his co-author extend the idea of impact evaluation, and show that the techniques of impact evaluation can be directly useful to implementers, rather than a potentially threatening accountability mechanism. They introduce the concept of experiential learning (“e”), which allows implementing agencies to leverage monitoring data to search across alternative project designs. Within-project variations in design can serve as their own counter-factual, dramatically reducing the incremental cost of evaluation and increasing the usefulness of evaluation to implementers. The right combination of M, e, and E provides the right space for innovation and organizational capability building, while at the same time providing accountability and an evidence base for funding agencies.
When you opt to buy fair trade certified coffee at the grocery store instead of uncertified, how much good are you doing? My guest on this week’s Wonkcast, Kimberly Ann Elliott, draws on her recent policy paper,Is My Fair Trade Coffee Really Fair? Trends and Challenges in Fair Trade Certification, to tell me why the answer may be more complicated than you’d think.
Mead Over says the United States has been a leader in the fight against the global AIDS epidemic, spending billions of dollars through the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to hel
This Wonkcast was originally recorded in May, 2012
Since the 2010 earthquake, $6 billion has been disbursed in official aid to help the people of Haiti. Nearly all of it has gone to intermediaries such as international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and private contractors. Yet there has been a surprising lack of reporting on how the money has been spent. CGD senior fellow Vijaya Ramachandran and research assistant Julie Walz try to follow the money in a new CGD policy paper: “Haiti: Where Has All the Money Gone?” They joined me on this week’s Wonkcast to explain their findings.