Multimedia

The Arab Spring has grabbed the world’s attention, yet Iraq—the Arab country that not long ago was the very epicenter of American foreign policy—has almost entirely fallen off the front pages. While Iraq’s security has improved greatly, the country is still struggling to consolidate a functional government and come up with a coherent spending plan for its oil wealth. In a new CGD working paper, “Iraq’s Last Window: Diffusing the Risks of a Petro-State,” Johnny West, a longtime journalist in the Middle East and author of the recent book, Karama! Journeys through the Arab Spring, identifies a new opportunity for direct distribution of Iraqi oil rents that he argues could halve poverty, diversify the economy and cement territorial integrity by giving Iraqis a stake in their oil wealth. The event will feature a brief presentation of the paper by West, followed by a discussion with a distinguished panel.

How well did the 22 rich countries that belong to the OECD Development Committee (OECD-DAC) perform in terms of supporting development in 2011? In this week’s Wonkcast, my guest David Roodman, architect of the Commitment to Development Index (CDI), explains some surprising results of the newly released 2011 CDI. While the United States climbed the charts due to a controversial increase in internationally mandated military intervention in Afghanistan, other countries such as Spain and Ireland fell in the rankings because of slower immigration from developing countries.

I also ask David about CGD’s new research data disclosure policy, and its potential to help him improve the Index. As a result of this policy, which David initiated, and the World Bank’s decision to offer free access to its World Development Indicators, full CDI data and “do files” are now available on-line. David encourages students and researchers to poke at it—he is modestly confident that somebody will find some bugs. To read full show summary of the Wonkcast go to www.cgdev.org/wonkcast.

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.” 

Senior Fellow Liliana Rojas-Suarez was interviewed by CNN en Español on the current debt crisis within Europe. In this interview she states her view that a banking crisis is highly likely within Europe. She notes that, in addition to the recent issues experienced by the French banks, many other European banks are struggling. As opposed to the United States, the problems in Europe started in the public sector and moved to the private sector; the banks, in particular. Also in contrast to the US, the European banks don’t have a full Lender of Last Resort (a function that the European Central Bank is not committed to pursue). Moreover, given the political disagreements within Germany, a TARP like program does not seem probable. In this context, banks’ recapitalization would need to take place with private sector resources, which are not forth coming given the low levels of confidence in European financial systems as the risk of contagion increases. For example, French banks have a large exposure to debt issued by Greece. At this point, if the ECB were to develop a deposit guarantee fund, Germany will have to provide the backing, which at this point looks unlikely.

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.

Senior Fellow Liliana Rojas-Suarez was interviewed by CNN en Español on the European Central Bank’s (ECB) recent purchases of bonds from Italy and Spain. She notes that the size and duration of the intervention is important in determining its efficacy. Without a clear commitment by the ECB to act as a lender of last resort, the current monetary intervention will do little to resolve deeper economic problems within the European Union. Even more, a sustainable resolution of the crisis involves the restructuring of Italy and Spain’s bad debt in Europe’s peripheral countries.