This paper provides the background to a series of more detailed studies of the policies of European countries as they relate to CGD's Commitment to Development Index.
The Commitment to Development Index ranks 27 of the world’s richest countries on their dedication to policies that benefit the 5.5 billion people living in poorer nations.
David Roodman he offers practical recommendations to those involved in providing microfinance services, including donors, social investors, and microfinance leaders.
Readers of David Roodman's Microfinance Open Book Blog will immediately recognize his thorough, straightforward, and trenchant analysis of whether microfinance is the boon many think it is.
The Commitment to Development Index ranks 22 of the world’s richest countries on their dedication to policies that benefit the 5.5 billion people living in poorer nations. Moving beyond standard comparisons of foreign aid volumes, the CDI quantifies a range of rich-country policies that affect poor people in developing countries.
The Commitment to Development Index (CDI) ranks 22 of the world’s richest countries on their dedication to policies that benefit the five billion people living in poorer nations. Moving beyond standard comparisons of foreign aid volumes, the CDI quantifies a range of rich country policies that affect poor people in developing countries.
The Jubilee 2000 movement, which called for the cancellation of the foreign debts of the poorest nations, became one of the most successful international, nongovernmental movements in history. David Roodman provides thumbnail assessments of Jubilee 2000 from several perspectives, deemphasizing anecdotes and statistics in favor of major themes.
The United States ranked 17th in the 2009 Commitment to Development Index with strengths in trade and security but weaknesses in aid and environment. This CGD Note describes how the United States could boost its score.
David Roodman testifies before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on International Monetary Policy and Trade about supporting Haiti's private sector
This course explores the role of microfinance in economic development. It will discuss how poor people in poor countries use financial services such as credit and savings; the history and practice of delivering such services; what is known about their contribution to development; and how stories and statistical studies shape public perceptions of microfinance.
The 2009 Commitment to Development Index ranks 22 of the world's richest countries on their dedication to policies that benefit the five billion people living in poorer nations. Moving beyond simple comparisons of foreign aid, the CDI ranks countries on seven themes: quantity and quality of foreign aid, openness to developing-country exports, policies that influence investment, migration policies, stewardship of the global environment, security policies and support for creation and dissemination of new technologies.
CGD fellow David Roodman and Jonathan Morduch a landmark evaluation of the impact of microcredit on poor households in Bangladesh. They replicate the study's statistical analysis and put an end to the controversy surrounding it by showing that it fails to rule out reverse causation. A positive association between microcredit and household spending, for example, may merely indicate that richer families borrow more. With these studies in doubt, solid academic evidence that microcredit reduces poverty is even scarcer than previously understood.
This working paper by CGD research fellow David Roodman provides an original synthesis and exposition of the statistical theory behind one of the most influential studies of the impact of microcredit on borrowers (Pitt and Khandker, Journal of Political Economy, 1998). The present paper also documents Roodman’s program, called cmp which for the first time makes it easy for other researchers to apply these methods. The program implements a "maximum likelihood" estimator for "fully observed, recursive, mixed-process systems of equations," and runs in the commercial statistical analysis package, Stata.
This CGD brief summarizes the results of the 2008 Commitment to Development Index (CDI), which ranks 22 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 2008 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: Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.
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 econometric quest for evidence on aid effectiveness continues. Practitioners in the $80 billion-a-year aid enterprise care about their work and hanker for objective evidence that they are helping. In this working paper, CGD research fellow David Roodman argues that there is a clear aid-growth relationship, but instead of being positive and running causally from aid to growth, it is negative and runs from growth to aid--aid, that is, as it is usually measured: as a fraction of GDP. Roughly speaking (and not surprisingly!), when GDP goes up, aid/GDP goes down. Roodman argues that choices that economists commonly make in running the numbers often flip the apparent sign and direction of the aid-growth link, making it appear that aid is raising growth.
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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.