“This important book sets a sensible and specific way forward. It should be read by all involved in economic development and international action on climate change.”
—Lord Nicholas Stern, author of the Stern Review
After 33 years in power, Robert Mugabe is running for yet another term. To put this in perspective, jump forward to the year 2041 and imagine that President Obama is still President, has deployed the FBI, CIA, and US Marines to crush his domestic opponents, and is then running again for another term. Unthinkable? That’s the situation in Zimbabwe today. This is therefore a timely opportunity to shape U.S. policy, not only because Zimbabwe is facing a critical juncture, but also because I am increasingly concerned our government may be sleepwalking down the wrong path. Before making recommendations for U.S. policy, let me make three analytical points.
This paper lists—and attempts to address—the most serious objections to Oil-to-Cash. The response to many objections is to ask about a plausible counterfactual (how do cash transfers compare to the alternative policy options?). Others warrant a clearer articulation of available evidence or ways to mitigate real worries through smart program design.
In just five years, India’s Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY, translated as “National Health Insurance Programme”) has expanded health-care access.
Traditional measures of development divide the world into categories such as developed and developing, rich and poor, and North and South.
In this working paper, Peter Edward and Andy Sumner introduce new model of growth, inequality, and poverty that comparison of a wide range of input assumptions. They find that it is plausible that $1.25 and $2 global poverty will reduce substantially by 2030 and the former – $1.25 poverty – could be very low by that time. However, this depends a lot on economic growth and inequality trends—up to almost an extra billion $2 poor people in one scenario.
This is the data set for Working Paper 327, “The Future of Global Poverty in a Multi-Speed World: New Estimates of Scale and Location, 2010–2030,” in which Peter Edward and Andy Sumner introduce new model of growth, inequality, and poverty that allows comparison of a wide range of input assumptions.
The costs of food aid reform are few, but the benefits would be substantial. Now is the time to bring food aid into the 21st century.
Since beginning the process of reengagement with Myanmar in the last year, many lenders to the country have cut or refinanced its debt. David Roodman finds that the debt relief, by most standards, has been overly quick and large.
In testimony before a foreign relations Senate subcommittee, Todd Moss spoke about the goals and shortcomings of US foreign assistance and outlined three steps to update it for the post-aid world of the 21st century.
Do immigrants create jobs or take jobs away? This report, published jointly with the Partnership for a New American Economy, answers this question for one important sector of the American economy, agriculture, by looking at the case of North Carolina farms.
Using data collected by the North Carolina Growers’ Association (NCGA), the leading employer of workers with H-2 visas, Michael Clemens shows that foreign workers have almost no direct effect on the employment prospects of US workers in H-2 occupations. Instead, they actually a large and positive indirect effect on US employment by contributing to North Carolina’s economy.
When the Global Development Council meets on May 17 it should identify three to five key moments when President Obama, with the advice of the Council, can make a development difference. Among the immediate possibilities: the June G-8 summit in the United Kingdom, the September G-20 summit in Russia, the UN General Assembly meeting, and President Obama’s upcoming trip to Africa.
In Greenprint, Aaditya Mattoo and Arvind Subramanian argued that only radical technological progress can reconcile climate-change goals with those of development and energy access. In this paper, they show how trade policy and trade rules can facilitate action on climate change.
Africa’s industrial progress has been disappointing. Part of the reason is that labor costs are higher than one might expect, given GDP per capita. Alan Gelb, Christian Meyer, and Vijaya Ramachandran distill the policy lessons.
A temporary-worker program that allows Filipinos to work in South Korea sets up unusually good circumstances for measuring the effects of migration. Michael Clemens and Erwin Tiongson take advantage the natural experiment to find that affected households spend more, borrow less, and invest more in their human capital.
Biometric identification is spreading rapidly across the developing world, where it is helping to close the “identification gap” that separates poor countries from rich ones. India’s Unique Identification (UID) project offers important lessons for other countries.
Most of the world’s children now live in countries on track to meet the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary completion by 2015.