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This year marks the 50th anniversary of the creation of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), one of a troika of Kennedy-era development institutions (the others being USAID and the Peace Corps) faced with the challenge of transforming themselves to meet the needs of the 21st Century.

In light of this milestone, CGD hosted OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria for a talk titled 21st-Century Multilateralism: The OECD in a G-20 World.

Nancy Birdsall and Francis Fukuyama discuss their recent Foreign Affairs article “The Post-Washington Consensus: Development After the Crisis” with students, as part of CFR's Academic Conference Call series.

Development is easy, right? All poor countries have to do is mimic the things that work in rich countries and they’ll evolve into fully functional states. If only it were that simple. My guest this week is Lant Pritchett, a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development and chair of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Master’s program in international development. His latest work looks at how the basic functions of government fail to improve in some developing countries (a dynamic he defines as a “state capability trap”). Part of the problem, says Lant, is that donors often insist on transplanting institutions that work in developed countries into environments where those institutions don’t fit at all.

Paul Collier’s 2007 book, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It, changed the way we think about poverty and development. Collier argued that the majority of the 5-billion people in the "developing world" live in countries with sustained high growth rates and would eventually escape from poverty. The rest—the bottom billion—live in 58 small, poor, often land-locked countries that are growing very slowly or not at all. These countries, stuck in poverty traps, should be the focus of foreign aid, Collier argued.

Andy Sumner, a visiting fellow at CGD and research fellow at the Institute for Development Studies at Sussex University, is boldly challenging that view with more recent data and a new frame of reference that tell a surprisingly different story: three out of four of the world’s poorest people, Andy asserts, live in middle-income countries with impressive growth rates but may nonetheless are trapped in extreme poverty. Andy joins me on this week’s Wonkcast to discuss his work on this “new” bottom billion.

Twenty-five years ago, James Foster's influential work with Joel Greer and Erick Thorbecke helped define the way the world measures poverty. Foster will present his recent work on the theory of how to measure poverty when we care not only about income but also other dimensions of well-being such as health and education. Martin Ravallion, Director of the Development Research Group at the World Bank, is the author of a new essay that criticizes the idea of a single multidimensional index. He will argue instead that multiple indicators should be tracked separately.

In 1974, three out of four countries were ruled by authoritarian regimes; today, nearly half of all governments are democratically elected—and even more democracies may be emerging in the Middle East. But with elections come new form of patronage—such as offering benefits in exchange for votes—that can undermine the intent of democracy and effectiveness of programs intended to help the poor. My guest this week, Simeon Nichter, a CGD post-doctoral fellow, is studying a phenomenon that has important implications for development but is often overlooked in optimistic accounts of democratic progress.

After the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak last Friday, I invited Arvind Subramanian, a former IMF resident representative in Cairo and a regular columnist for the Business Standard, the leading business daily in his native India, to share his views on Egypt’s economic prospects.

In the interview, Arvind argues that Egypt’s biggest economic challenge is reliance on rents, which he defines as wealth derived from historical and geographical legacies rather than job-generating economic growth. Arvind includes among these the Suez Canal, which I was surprised to learn generates some $5 billion a year in fees; aid received in exchange for peace with Israel; the pyramids and other antiquities that draw tourists, and even remittances, which he says are the result not of Egyptian success but of failure that forces its citizens to seek work abroad.

It’s been a busy time for Connie Veillette, director of the Rethinking US Foreign Assistance Initiative here at the Center for Global Development. Last week we hosted a major address by USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah describing the achievements of his first year in office and his ambitious plans for modernizing the agency. No sooner had Shah finished speaking than a group of Republican legislators proposed a budget cutting plan that would zero out USAID’s operating budget. I was eager to learn how Connie—an advocate for effective aid who spent much of her career working for Republicans on Capitol Hill—would assess these developments.