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.
China’s presence in Africa is, beyond dispute, large in both trade and what can be called official finance to Africa. But how large, exactly? A new database from the College of William and Mary brings additional resources to help answer the question. This paper describes the new database, its key findings, and its possible applications and limitations of the data, which is being made publicly available for the first time.
Since the 20120 earthquake, there has been very little direct procurement of goods or services from local businesses, missing a huge opportunity to spur long-term growth. Local procurement not only purchases immediately needed goods or services but helps grow the private sector, create jobs, and encourage entrepreneurs. Spending more money locally can multiply the effect of US assistance.
The transparency and accountability of US spending in Haiti needs to be improved. Despite the large amount of public money disbursed for earthquake recovery in Haiti, it is nearly impossible to track how the money has been spent and what has been achieved.
Vijaya Ramachandran and Julie Walz propose changes to the business of aid to Haiti to help develop the capacity of the government there.
This data set categorizes 980 nongovernmental and civil-society organizations operating in Haiti and includes information on sector, budget, location, year founded, number of employees, location of headquarters, and type of organization (when available).
The authors assess the World Bank’s private sector interventions in African fragile states. They summarize and analyze project-level data from IDA, IFC, and MIGA, and introduce a new framework which may assist in the design and implementation of projects in fragile states.
This paper investigates the scale and scope of emerging donors and ways the international donor community could encourage their greater transparency and accountability.
The U.S. military has become substantially engaged in the development and stabilization space and will likely continue to operate in this space for some time to come. This paper proposed five policy changes for the military to improve its development activities.
The U.S. military has become substantially engaged in economic development and stabilization and will likely continue to be for some time to come. This brief takes U.S. military involvement in development as a given and concentrates on five recommendations for it to operate more efficiently and effectively.
This paper addresses the response to historically high rice prices in 2008 first by presenting a historical review of trends in the West African rice sector and, second, by assessing the effect of world rice prices on domestic prices, primarily at the consumer level.
The World Food Programme has world-class logistics, but its ability to manage financial risk is extremely limited. The WFP should consider implementing a targeted hedging pilot strategy for increased predictability. Greater commitments of untied cash from donors and support for the proposed Food Security Trust Fund at the World Bank would help.
This paper examines how the lack of recognition of Somaliland by the international community—and the consequent ineligibility for foreign financial assistance—has shaped the region's political development. It finds evidence that Somaliland’s ineligibility for foreign aid facilitated the development of accountable political institutions and contributed to the willingness of Somalilanders to engage constructively in the state-building process.
CGD senior fellow Vijaya Ramachandran testifies before the House Committee on Financial Services about the World Bank’s disclosure policy. Ramachandran urges policymakers to base future capital increases to all of the MDBs on their progress on project evaluation and product innovation.
Why do so many businesses choose to remain informal? Vijaya Ramachandran and co-authors discover that the answer is more nuanced than often believed. In East Africa, for instance, the difference in productivity between formal and informal firms is often indistinguishable, while in Southern Africa productivity it is more differentiated. Policies to encourage formalization and increase productivity are likely to be more successful in East Africa, whereas an emphasis on job training and vocational skills might be more appropriate in Southern Africa.
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This CGD Brief, based on the book Africa's Private Sector by Vijaya Ramachandran, Alan Gelb, and Manju Kedia Shah, shows how investing in infrastructure and improving access to education can help bring about a broad-based business class in Africa.
What's keeping private business from flourishing in Africa? On the basis of unique enterprise surveys, Vijaya Ramachandran and her co-authors identify poor roads and unreliable power as major physical challenges; ethnic segmentation and the economic predominance ethnic minorities further constrain the business environment. The author show how investing in infrastructure and improving access to education can help bring about a broad-based business class in Africa.
The authors of this CGD working paper analyze what the principal bodies of global government—the Bretton Woods institutions and the UN, the G-20 and the OECD—would like if a country’s membership and roles were contingent upon objective criteria that would better balance representation and effectiveness. They find major disparities between the results of their analysis and the state of affairs today, and they point to the need for changes far more fundamental than the incremental tweaks now being considered.