In this essay, Toby Ord explores the moral relevance of cost-effectiveness, a major tool for capturing the relationship between resources and outcomes, by illustrating what is lost in moral terms for global health when cost-effectiveness is ignored.
How committed are the world's richest countries to the development of Africa, the world's poorest continent? Rich countries are usually compared on how much foreign aid they give as a percentage of their GDP, but helping Africa involves much more than aid. CGD's Commitment to Development Index has long compared 21 rich countries on aid, trade, migration, and other policies that affect the entire developing world. In the new CDI for Africa, research fellow David Roodman trains the CDI methodology on rich countries' links to this one continent. While the results may not be what you expect, one message is clear: all rich countries could do much more to foster development in Africa.
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The argument about whether foreign aid "works" rages on. Recently, Paul Collier sought a practical middle path between William Easterly's development pessimism and Jeffrey Sach's development boosterism. How can smart people draw such contradictory conclusions from the same data? This new working paper by CGD research fellow David Roodman answers this question by describing consensus where it exists and identifying sources of controversy. Roodman concludes that, while aid has eradicated diseases, prevented famines, and done many other good things, given the limited and noisy data available, its effects on growth in particular probably cannot be detected.
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Each year since 2003, the Commitment to Development Index (CDI) has ranked 21 rich countries on their dedication (or not!) to policies that benefit the five billion people living in poor countries. The CDI moves beyond simple comparisons of aid funding and in so doing embodies the mission of CGD, which addresses all government policies that affect poorer countries. This report summarizes the results of this year's Index, discusses key ideas that underpin each component and shows how countries' scores have changed over time.
This CGD brief summarizes the results of the 2007 Commitment to Development Index (CDI), which ranks 21 of the world's richest countries on their dedication to policies that benefit the five billion people living in poorer nations. The Netherlands comes in first on the 2007 CDI on the strength of ample aid-giving, falling greenhouse gas emissions, and support for investment in developing countries. Close behind are three more big aid donors: Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.
In this working paper CGD research fellow David Roodman explains how the four biggest developing countries -- Brazil, Russia, India and China, a group Goldman Sachs dubbed the "BRICs" -- stack up to their rich-country counterparts on the environment component of the annual Commitment to Development Index (CDI). He finds they generally perform well on greenhouse gas emissions, consumption of ozone-depleting substances, and tropical timber imports. Major weaknesses include low gas taxes, Amazon deforestation and heavy fossil fuel use.