CGD Policy Blogs

Migrant advocates rarely say a good word about guest-work visas. Many harshly criticize the conditions and wages of authorized US guest workers as economic exploitation comparable to slavery. Often that’s where their comments end.

At the Inter-American Development Bank’s (IDB) recent annual meeting in Panama, the two richest men in the world –Carlos Slim and Bill Gates- discussed their contributions to a little known public-private partnership that aims to improve the health status of the poorest Central Americans and Mexicans – Salud Mesoamerica 2015 or SM2015.

Over the decade, donors have publicly declared that they would improve how they operate in order to make aid work better. They would coordinate better, let recipient countries take more ownership of project design, and so on. Ten years and ten days ago, there was the Rome Declaration.

This week Senate appropriators failed to include an OK for an International Monetary Fund quota increase in the Senate version of the continuing resolution—the spending bill to keep open the US government for the remaining six months of the fiscal year 2013. The administration had requested Senate appropriators approve a transfer of previous US commitments from one IMF account to another -- a transfer involving virtually no cost for US taxpayers.