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My guest this week is Rachel Nugent, deputy director for global health here at the Center for Global Development. Rachel directs the Center's work looking at the links between population, poverty, and economic growth and serves as the coordinator of the Population and Poverty Research Network, which held its fourth annual conference recently in Cape Town, South Africa.

Many of us are familiar with how development influences population growth: as incomes rise, fertility rates and average family size tend to fall; populations grow more slowly. Rachel explains that while this relationship is important there are many important unanswered questions about how population policies affect development outcomes. For example: if a poor country slows population growth by actively encouraging family planning, will the families involved and the nation reap economic benefits? Under what circumstances?

I'm joined this week by Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development. Nancy introduced Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when Clinton came to speak to CGD last week. On the Wonkcast, she shares her impressions of Clinton's speech and places it in the broader context of U.S. development policy reform—including two ongoing assessments, the White House Presidential Study Directive or PSD and the State Department’s first Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review or QDDR.

In the second half of the interview, Nancy reviews the past year in development and offers a policy wish for 2010.

This week on the Global Prosperity Wonkcast, I'm joined by Nandini Oomman, director of the Center's HIV/AIDS Monitor. Our conversation focuses on the new 5-year strategy laid out earlier this month by Ambassador Eric Goosby, the new U.S. global AIDS coordinator and head of PEPFAR (the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief).

Nandini praises the evidence-based framework PEPFAR has laid out and its move towards much greater openness and transparency. She stresses that the challenge ahead will be in designing concrete plans that implement the strategy effectively and measure its impacts.

On this edition of the Wonkcast, I am joined by senior fellow Liliana Rojas-Suarez, who discusses her work as co-chair of the CGD Task Force on Access to Financial Services. Financial regulation—and access—is a hot topic right now, as countries try to reduce the chance of future financial crises, while also ensuring access to financial services. The US House and Senate are currently wrestling with exactly what a revamped US regulatory system should look like.

In CGD’s first Global Prosperity Wonkcast I interview senior fellow Todd Moss on his innovative proposal for managing Ghana’s anticipated $1 billion per year oil windfall: money to the people. Subscribe to the podcast if you have iTunes; read Moss’s executive memo to Ghana’s President John Atta Mills, or get the full story in Saving Ghana from Its Oil: The Case for Direct Cash Distribution.

In this telephone press conference, CGD research fellow David Roodman teases out the some trends from the 2008 Commitment to Development Index.