Countries in the developing world face numerous health and population related challenges. This course will examine these issues with an emphasis on how you as an actor in the health and population sector can intervene to improve health conditions for the poor.
The US Agency for International Development (USAID)--the largest bilateral donor to family planning programs in developing countries--has played a dominant role among donors as a source of money, information and ideas about family planning. In this Essay, CGD director of programs and senior fellow Ruth Levine assesses USAID's many accomplishments, as well as the political debates that have diminished the Agency's efforts to improve family planning.
Ghost towns dot the West of the United States. These cities boomed for a period and then, for various reasons, fell into a process of decline and have shrunk to a small fraction of their former population. Are there ghost countries—countries that, if there were population mobility, would only have a very small fraction of their current population? This paper carries out four empirical illustrations of the potential magnitude of the "ghost country" problem by showing that the "desired population" of any given geographic region varies substantially.