CGD's weekly Global Prosperity Wonkcast, event videos, whiteboard talks, slides, and more.
Following Robert Zoellick’s announcement that he will step down from the World Bank presidency at the end of June, the World Bank board has called for member countries to submit nominations for his successor, with a fast-approaching deadline of March 23rd. The board has said it will then narrow the nominations to a short list of three, with the goal of naming a new president before the World Bank/IMF spring meetings in April.
Tim Harford, a journalist at the Financial Times and author of The Undercover Economist and Adapt: Why Success Always Begins with Failure, talks about the implications for development of his idea that successful complex systems emerge from a process of trial and error.
Development Drums is hosted by Owen Barder and produced by Anna Scott at the Center for Global Development in Europe.
The UN is gearing up for discussions about what international development goals should come after the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which expire in 2015. My guest on this week’s Wonkcast is CGD senior fellow Charles Kenny, who recently published a working paper, written jointly with CGD visiting fellow Andy Sumner, that assesses the impact of the MDGs and offers suggestions for what should come next.
We start with a brief review of the history of the MDGs, which were adopted in 2001 by the UN General Assembly and cover eight areas of development, such as reductions in poverty and hunger, and improvements in gender equality, education, and child and maternal health.
The debate over U.S. foreign assistance in Pakistan has grown hotter lately, with Stanford political scientist Stephen Krasner arguing in Foreign Affairs that the United States should get tough by threatening to halt aid to Pakistan to force the country into cooperating better on security matters. CGD president Nancy Birdsall responded with an article in Foreign Policy. Drawing on the recommendations of a 2011 CGD study group report, Beyond Bullets and Bombs: Fixing the U.S. Approach to Development in Pakistan, she argued that U.S. development assistance should be focused on helping to create a stable, prosperous Pakistan—goals that are in America’s own best interest and would be ill-served by trying to use the aid as a bargaining chip.
When a poor country finds oil, bad things often get worse. Countries rich in extractable natural resources, especially oil, frequently suffer from crummy governance, high poverty, endemic corruption and conflict. Is it possible to beat this oil curse? My guest on the Wonkcast this week, Todd Moss, CGD vice president for programs and senior fellow, says yes. He argues that a government that transfers some or all of its oil revenue to citizens in a universal, transparent, and regular taxable payment, could strengthen the social contract, fight corruption, and lay the foundation for future prosperity.
David Wheeler, our lead researcher on climate and development, decided recently to retire from CGD, though he will continue to be active in CGD’s intellectual life as our first Senior Fellow Emeritus. Since joining CGD in 2006, David has published more than 20 working papers and launched two path-breaking global databases, Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA), which provides data on the CO2 emissions of more than 50,000 powerplants worldwide, and Forest Monitoring for Action (FORMA), which uses satellite data to provide rapid, high-resolution tracking of tropical deforestation.
We discuss some surprising findings from David’s newly released analysis (Forest Clearing in the Pantropics: December 2005-August 2011) of the FORMA data. There is both good news and bad news. Total forest clearing has dropped during the global recession, but with enormous variation within countries and across regions, he says. For example, there have been large declines in the rate of forest clearing in Brazil, Bolivia, Indonesia, and Paraguay but large increases in Myanmar, Malaysia, Peru, and Venezuela. A companion paper (Economic Dynamics and Forest Clearing) finds that economic factors such as market prices, exchange rates, and interest rates all influence forest clearing. The availability of communications infrastructure such as mobile phones, zoning, rainfall and terrain slope also play a role.
Global health funders have historically focused their aid on countries with the lowest per capita incomes, on the assumption that that’s where most of world’s poor people live. In recent years, however, many large developing countries achieved rapid growth, lifting them into the ranks of the so-called middle-income countries, or MICs, even though they are still home to hundreds of millions of very poor people. Andy Sumner has called the poor people in the MICs a “new bottom billion”, as distinct from the bottom billion in poor and fragile states that Paul Collier wrote about in a popular 2007 book.
In this week’s Wonkcast, I ask Amanda Glassman, a CGD research fellow and director of our global health policy program, how global health funders should respond to the emergence of the new bottom billion. Should money that now goes to the world’s poorest countries be reallocated to reach poor people who happen to live in the new MICs? Are there other ways that the global community can help? Amanda’s answers draw on the findings of a new working paper she wrote jointly with Sumner and Denizhan Duran, and an accompanying policy brief.
U.S. - Pakistan relations, troubled in the best of times, have been unusually rocky of late. A recent cover story in The Atlantic dubbed Pakistan the “Ally from Hell.” CGD’s Study Group on the U.S. Development Strategy in Pakistan argues that the strong U.S. interest in a stable, prosperous Pakistan makes savvy U.S. support for development there more important than ever. In this week’s wonkcast, post-doctoral research fellow Milan Vaishnav and policy analyst Danny Cutherell discuss the recent upsets in U.S.-Pakistan relations and offer practical suggestions, drawn from the CGD Study Group’s report and a recent open letter from CGD president Nancy Birdsall to deputy secretary of state Thomas Nides, which focuses on U.S. support for private sector growth in Pakistan.
I recently interviewed Owen Barder, CGD senior fellow and director for Europe, shortly after his return from the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea. Did the December forum, with some 3,000 participants from around the world, matter to development?
We begin our interview by discussing the city of Busan itself, and South Korea’s dramatic transformation from aid recipient to donor. Busan is now a bustling city and the 5th largest port in the world. We then consider four conference outcomes that Owen identified in a blog post http://www.owen.org/blog/5131 soon after the conference: increased participation by emerging donors; a new deal for fragile states; significant progress on transparency, including a U.S. decision to join the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI); and significant changes in the international governance of the aid system.
My guest on this week’s Wonkcast is David Roodman, senior fellow and author of the long-awaited book, Due Diligence: An Impertinent Inquiry into Microfinance. After more than three years of unprecedented investigation into the movement, David was able to cut through the hype and come to understand the capabilities and limitations of microfinance in ending poverty.
David explains that while the microfinance movement has built thriving industries that deliver valuable services to millions of poor people, he hopes his book will help the industry shift away from its traditional emphasis on credit to other services focused on savings, insurance, and new technology.
In this Wonkcast, originally posted on September 7, 2011, Michael Clemens explains why one of the biggest growth opportunities in the world economy lies not in the mobility of goods or capital, but in the mobility of labor. His message remains relevant as International Migrants Day approaches on December 18th. In his recent blog, Clemens argues we have plenty of reason to celebrate the movement of people – and backs it up with economic evidence and history.
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.
On December 15th the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), an innovative U.S. aid agency, is set to announce which countries will receive its unique development assistance. Casey Dunning, policy analyst at CGD and my guest on this week’s Wonkcast, provides insight and recommendations on how these countries will (and should) be selected. I catch Casey shortly after her return from Honduras, where she saw firsthand the positive impacts of an MCC compact on rural development and highway construction.
The U.S. military has become increasingly involved in economic development, fulfilling roles normally played by USAID and other development NGOs. My guests this week, senior fellow Vijaya Ramachandran and research assistant Julie Walz, discuss their recent paper written with Gregory Johnson on the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP), which provides funds for development projects in Afghanistan as part of the military’s development operations. While Vij and Julie are not advocating for or against military involvement in development, they recognize its occurrence and offer practical recommendations.
Ghana’s recent recalculation of its GDP led to an overnight $500 per capita jump, putting in motion unexpectedly rapid graduation from the International Development Association (IDA) and ultimately a new relationship with the World Bank. In this week’s Wonkcast, I speak with Todd Moss, vice president for programs and senior fellow at CGD, about his recent trip to the newly categorized lower-middle income country, the implications of IDA graduation, and a sudden influx of oil wealth.
On November 29th, aid donor and recipients will convene in Busan, South Korea at the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness. In this week’s Wonkcast, I speak with Homi Kharas, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Rita Perakis, program coordinator at the Center for Global Development, about the new 2011 Brookings-CGD Quality of Official Development Assistance assessment (QuODA) and how it can help to hold donors accountable to their own aid effectiveness pledges.
Homi explains that he and Nancy Birdsall began work on QuODA after aid effectiveness forums in Paris and Accra drew international attention to the importance of aid quality. Previously the debate had focused almost entirely on quantity and how well recipients used aid, rather than the problems and opportunities in how the aid was delivered.
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.
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.