Cross-Post: The Rush for the Entrances in Myanmar
3/14/13
On CGD's Voices from the Center, I just reviewed a good report on the coming aid boom in Myanmar.
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CGD Policy Blogs
Four Arguments against the Elimination of Child Labor
3/8/13
Don't get me wrong: sarcastic headline aside, I'm not in favor of the exploitation of children. However, I feel moved to speak against a recent push, I guess led by Hugh Sinclair, to insert a ban on child labor into the lending policies of microfinance institutions (MFIs), microfinance investors, and such accrediting programs as the Smart Campaign and the Seal of Excellence.
The Nine Ladies Snap Back
3/7/13
The nine client-members on the board of the Grameen Bank, all women, have made a sassy public response to the interim report of the commission investigating the Grameen Bank. (Hat tip to the Grameen Foundation.)
I have to admire the pointed prose:
A Concrete Abstract
3/4/13
Business training programs are a popular policy option to try to improve the performance of enterprises around the world. The last few years have seen rapid growth in the number of evaluations of these programs in developing countries. We undertake a critical review of these studies with the goal of synthesizing the emerging lessons and understanding the limitations of the existing research and the areas in which more work is needed. We find that there is substantial heterogeneity in the length, content, and types of firms participating in the training programs evaluated.
Much Grameen Bank Investigation, Signifying What?
2/27/13
The machinations around the Grameen Bank over the last two years have a had a paradoxical, dreamlike quality. Harsh words have been spoken by mighty leaders. Eminent dignitaries have rushed to the defense. Court battles have been fought. Crimes have been alleged. The mighty Muhammad Yunus has fallen.
Will the Next Microcredit Implosion Happen in Chiapas?
2/19/13
In November 2009, some guy nobody had heard of, Daniel Rozas, wrote an article asking whether there was a microcredit bubble in south India:
The State of Microcredit
2/6/13
If I had had the stamina, I would have inserted into my book a chapter on the history of the microfinance movement.
Cross-post: Cato Tops New CGD Index of Think Tank Profile
1/14/13
On CGD's main blog, Julia Clark and I just posted a ranking of noted American think tanks based on their ability to generate public profile: press mentions, academic citations, web traffic, and social media followers. The effort is aimed at providing some healthy methodological competition for another ranking of think tanks, this one looking at institutions around the world, which experts have mostly criticized.
Global Health in 2012: A Year in Links
12/20/12
The global health legacy of 2012 will be twofold, a year of both increased commitments to health and flat lining budgets. Just look at this past summer: world leaders made a call to end preventable child deaths, the London Summit on Family Planning has resulted in $2.6 billion of commitments, and the International AIDS Conference saw a commitment to the “beginning of the end of AIDS.” While these are all great news, it is still uncertain as to who will pay for these ambitious goals: biggest donors are already scaling down their health aid budgets, and there remains a tremendous resource gap to reach the end of AIDS.
Ich bin ein Über-Geek
12/18/12
One popular statistical software package in academia is Stata. CGD has always used it, and thus so have I. As my colleague Mead Over pointed out, Stata's business model is an interesting mix of private and public goods provision. The private corporation profits by cultivating a public free-software community on top of its core product. Stata sells you the main program, which includes commands to perform all sorts of analyses.