Ideas to Action:

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CGD's weekly Global Prosperity Wonkcast, event videos, whiteboard talks, slides, and more.

Impact Evaluations and the 3ie: William Savedoff

5/2/11

Efforts to design better aid programs often are hampered by the failure to evaluate what works—and what doesn’t—in existing programs. Today, the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation and other important efforts are helping fill the evaluation gap.

My guest this week is senior fellow Bill Savedoff. He was a member of the Center for Global Development’s 2004 Evaluation Gap Working Group, led by Ruth Levine, that urged and helped create a new institution for impact evaluation: the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation, or 3ie (“Triple I E”). Following a recent CGD speech by Esther Duflo on the importance of impact evaluation, I sat down with Bill to talk about how new impact evaluations are shaping development projects and policy.

Growing Business a Development Priority? (Event Video)

4/27/11

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A growing share of the Multilateral Development Banks’ (MDBs) business involves private firms. Lending to, investing in and guaranteeing private firms accounted for more than a third of MDB financial operations in 2008, up from less than a fifth at the start of the decade. What’s driving this surge? Is it appropriate to use scarce global public resources to invest in private firms? Is it good for development? This new CGD report by Guillermo Perry, a former finance minister in Colombia and World Bank chief economist for Latin America, examines this trend. The report identifies the activities, firms, sectors and countries benefiting from the MDB’s private sector operations and explores whether it catalyzes or competes with private financial markets. Perry explores how governments and private firms can benefit, while avoiding conflicts of interest. He concludes the report with a proposed agenda for MDB-private sector activity.

Carbon Taxes After All? A Conversation with William Nordhaus (Event Video)

4/21/11

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On Thursday, March 24, the Center for Global Develompent hosted William Nordhaus of Yale University for a conversation on the efficacy of carbon taxes and other leading carbon reducing strategies. Professor Nordhaus is one of the world's leading experts on the economics of climate change and a leading proponent of carbon taxes.

The Climate Change Vulnerability Index: David Wheeler

4/18/11

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Rapid climate change is upon us, and governments, multilateral organizations, and development agencies are preparing to dole out billions of dollars in adaptation assistance. Nevertheless, little research has gone into calculating which countries are most vulnerable to global warming.

On this Wonkcast, I'm joined by David Wheeler, senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, who created an index for determining which countries should be prioritized when the money starts to flow. His new paper, "Quantifying Vulnerability to Climate Change: Implications for Adaptation Assistance", provides an index for comparison of cross-country vulnerability to some of the most extreme climate threats. An accompanying map makes it easy to see which countries will be hit hardest.

Innovation in Vaccine Financing: Assessing Progress and Envisioning Future Directions (Event Video)

4/8/11

Alice Albright

In a recent speech, USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah said “The evidence is clear: vaccines are the best public health investment we can make.” As the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) prepares for its June 2011 pledging conference, CGD hosted a panel to look back at global efforts to support vaccination funding in developing countries over the past decade and reflect on lessons learned and future potential. The panel also looked to the issues and challenges facing vaccination financing in the 2010s.

What We Know about Health and Health Services in North Korea (Event Video)

4/7/11

Gilbert Burnham

Little is known about health status and health services in North Korea. The reports that are published are often based on a small number of interviews about events from some years past (Amnesty International), or based on manipulated data (World Health Organization). The reports of defectors and increasing information from inside North Korea paints a picture of continued malnutrition, though less than the 1990s. Health indicators continue to deteriorate in North Korea. There are widespread infections such as tuberculosis, typhoid (and paratyphoid), and hepatitis, suggesting a collapse of public health infrastructure. Increasingly medicines are available principally in markets from private vendors. Hospitalization is common and requires gifts to doctors which may exceed 100% of the patient's monthly household income. Drug problems from locally manufactured methamphetamine is an increasing problem, and reports suggest it is widely available.

Combating Drug Resistance: Rachel Nugent

4/4/11

Rachel Nugent

Drug resistance, a neglected but increasingly urgent problem, receives some much-needed attention this week as the focus of this year’s World Health Day, also dubbed Antimicrobial Resistance Day, on Thursday, April 7. I invited Rachel Nugent, lead author of The Race Against Drug Resistance
, a CGD working group report, for a progress report on efforts to address this problem since the report was released last June.

We begin with some scary stuff—the continued emergence of “superbugs” that doctors don’t like to talk about, such as hospital-bred pathogens that have become immune to antibiotics, drug resistant malaria, and my favorite nightmare, drug resistant TB, which the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates could infect two million people around the globe by 2015.

21st-Century Multilateralism - The OECD in a G-20 World (Event Video)

4/1/11

Angel Gurria

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 on Cash on Delivery (COD) Aid

3/28/11

Nancy Birdsall

A little over a year ago, I invited Nancy Birdsall, founding president of the Center for Global Development, to join me on the Wonkcast to talk about her big new idea, Cash on Delivery Aid (COD Aid), an innovative approach to the delivery of foreign assistance. COD Aid has since gained a lot of traction, so I invited Nancy back to update us on recent developments, including a planned pilot program in Ethiopia.

[Listen to the Podcast]

For those new to the concept, I start by asking Nancy to explain the problems with traditional aid approaches, and how COD aid would solve these. Too often, she says, aid is given based on priorities set by funders who care more about how their money is spent than what outcomes it produces. COD Aid focuses on outcomes by making aid transfers contingent on yearly incremental improvements in an agreed indicator, such as the number of kids who complete primary school and take a test. (For much more on COD Aid, see here.)

The Untapped Potential of Global Public Investors: Vijaya Ramachandran

3/21/11

Vijaya Ramachandran

Looking for an investor with billions? Want to know where the money is? If you’re a country with a sound financial and political record seeking money for infrastructure, you can find it in the hands of “global public investors” (GPI’s), a growing group of little-known foreign investment vehicles on the prowl for safe investment opportunities.

My guest on this show is Vijaya Ramachandran, senior fellow at CGD, who contributed to a new new report  from the Brookings Institute on GPI’s, a term the report authors coined to include such entities as sovereign wealth funds, foreign government employee pension funds, and foreign currency reserve funds.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Lant Pritchett on Mimicry in Development

3/14/11

Lant PritchettDevelopment 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.

Macroprudential Regulation and Developing Countries: Liliana Rojas-Suarez

3/7/11

Liliana Rojas-Suarez

Regulators at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, are hard at work designing regulatory standards to avoid future financial meltdowns like the global financial crisis of 2008. Joining them for two months is Liliana Rojas Suarez, a CGD senior fellow and the founding chair of the Latin American Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee.

I spoke with Liliana just before she left for Basel about macroprudential regulation—an approach that focuses on the systemic risks arising from the interaction among banks and other financial institutions. (Liliana had spoken about this at a recent CGD Research in Progress staff meeting; her slides are a useful adjunct to our Wonkcast discussion.)

The New Bottom Billion: Andy Sumner

2/28/11

Andy Sumner 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.

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