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“February 2021. It’s a cold blustery morning in Washington. The newly inaugurated president of the United States is on his way to the office of the Chinese managing director of the IMF to sign the agreement under which the IMF will provide 3 trillion dollars in emergency financing to the U.S. and the conditionality to which the U.S. will have to adhere.”

Sound like science fiction? To Arvind Subramanian, a joint-fellow at the Peterson Institute and the Center for Global Development, it’s more like economic inevitability – a world in which the United States has no choice but to cede global leadership to China—and accept it’s terms, which in this imaginary case includes withdrawal from the Western Pacific. Arvind joins me on this week’s Wonkcast to explain the careful quantitative analysis that underpins that startling opening passage from his new book Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance.

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.

It’s not often that the United Nations sees fit to officially declare a food crisis a famine. That’s a testament to the severity of the ongoing suffering in Somalia, a disaster of biblical proportions that has already claimed the lives of tens of thousands. But evidence abounds that famines are not only the result of natural occurrences. On the contrary, most are the shocking result of human error or, in the worst case, deliberate neglect.



This was the message Owen Barder drove home to me in this week’s Wonkcast. Owen acquired an intimate understanding of the realities of food scarcity when he traveled to Ethiopia during the food crisis of 1984-85, and more recently while spending three years in the capital, Addis Ababa. To him, governance and information are central components of food emergencies.

The American media is abuzz with stories of doom and gloom as tensions mount over stalled efforts to raise the U.S. debt ceiling. Europe, meanwhile, has its own debt woes, with mounting fears that a default in Greece could spill over into Ireland, Portugal and Spain. So far, however, there has been relatively little discussion about what these twin crises would mean for the 5 billion people living in developing countries. Sadly, those with the least influence over the issue could pay the highest price.

On this week’s Wonkcast, I invite senior CGD fellow and global finance expert Liliana Rojas-Suarez to explain why it’s important to the rest of the world that Europe and the United States put their financial affairs in order. The showdown in the U.S. is especially worrying, Liliana says, because of the U.S. dollar’s role as the international reserve currency.

 

Every year, billions of dollars are spent on food assistance to provide lifesaving sustenance to millions of people. That’s a lot of money, and an important cause, so it was encouraging to learn last week that the United States and the G-20 are starting to seriously scrutinize food aid policy. Recent developments in Washington and Paris show a growing consensus that it’s about time to overhaul outdated approaches to feeding the hungry.

Joining me this week to discuss these developments is Connie Veillette, director of CGD’s Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance Program and CGD research fellow Ben Leo. Having closely tracked U.S. and international food aid, both have concluded that reforms in financing, procurement and delivery can help ensure that food aid reaches more people who need it at lower cost.

My guest on this show is Amanda Glassman, research fellow and director of CGD’s Global Health Program. I recorded this Wonkcast with her last week, just ahead of the first pledging session for the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (GAVI). 

GAVI is a coalition of private foundations and donor country governments who work to increase the availability of vaccines, a highly cost-effective health intervention that is chronically under provided. Among other mechanisms, GAVI buys the vaccines at discount by purchasing in bulk, then passes the savings onto poor countries and expanding coverage. Over the past 10 years, GAVI estimates it has saved 5 million children from vaccine vaccine-preventable diseases, an accomplishment which Amanda considers to be remarkable.

The sudden resignation of Dominique Strauss-Kahn has sparked a global debate over the selection of the next head of the International Monetary Fund. French finance minister Christine Legarde, Europe’s nominee, has launched a round-the-world tour to promote her candidacy. Meanwhile, Agustin Carstins, the governor of the Bank of Mexico and the lone challenger so far to Europe’s renewed claim to lead the IMF, is seeking backing from European debtor nations and others by calling for greater flexibility in IMF bailout programs.

Against this background, CGD is pushing ahead with a survey on the selection process, qualifications and candidates for the IMF top job. I asked CGD president Nancy Birdsall, who has been arguing for a more open, merit-based selection process without regard for nationality, to join me on the show to share her views on the IMF leadership selection battle and the initial results from our survey.