From the ashes of the global economic crisis, rose a stunning number of calls this week to avoid U.S. protectionism and isolationism through sustained engagement in international development initiatives and efforts to modernize foreign assistance.
Much sooner than we expected a week ago, the multilaterals (or International Financial Institutions -- IFIs) must be ready to step in with emergency lending.
Though today's financial crisis began in the world's richest nation, there is good reason to worry about how it will affect the world's poor. A recent series of posts explores the implications. The contagions of freeze-up and slowdown will spread through many channels: trade, investment, migration, and more.
Yesterday, I spoke at the 2008 U.S.-Africa Infrastructure Conference, Connecting the Continent, organized by the Corporate Council on Africa. I spoke about the infrastructure constraints faced by the private sector in Africa, particuarly the lack of a reliable supply of electricity.
Doing research on migration and development is tough. Some of the most basic questions can't even get off the whiteboard because data on migration are so limited. If the government of Kenya wants to know how many doctors went last year from Nairobi to London, or vice versa, no one can tell. If a hard-working economist wants to know how many Pakistanis have temporary labor contracts in the Gulf countries, good luck.
Migration is shaping global development, but much of it is inscrutable. Even legal movements occur in the shadows.
IMF and Participants at the upcoming meetings of the IMF and World Bank in early October are bound to promise with considerable conviction an increase and an improvement in international coordination of domestic financial regulators -- just as U.S. Treasury and Fed officials are now promising, with considerable conviction, to revisit and reform the rules and the coordination of a currently fragmented regulatory set-up within the U.S.
Few analysts think that we’ll escape from the financial crisis without a recession, and top power industry executives have wasted no time in spinning the implications for carbon emissions regulation in the US.
Sen. Robert Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on International Development and Foreign Assistance, Economic Affairs and International Environmental Protection, said he was proud to support any initiative highlighting the global development agenda for the next U.S. president during CGD’s Capitol Hill discussion of The White House and the World: A Global Development Agenda for the Next U.S.
I have been following the lively exchanges begun by Liliana Rojas-Suarez’s post on the development impacts of the U.S. financial crisis, especially Michael Clemens's provocative post and Nora Lustig’s thoughtful reply.
