Climate negotiations have focused on reaching a top-down international agreement and on mobilizing a pool of financial resources. This brief explains the urgent need for a new entity to provide nonfinancial services to faciliate and augment climate action that any nations and private actors take. It explores one possible path for filling the gap: the creation of a new arm of the World Bank.
Reliance on natural resource revenues, particularly oil, is often associated with bad governance, corruption, and poverty. Worried about the effect of oil on Alaska, Governor Jay Hammond had a simple yet revolutionary idea: let citizens have a direct stake. Thirty years later, Hammond’s vision is still influencing oil policies throughout the world.
In her presentation at the Centre for Policy Research in New Dehli on November 6, 2012, CGD President Nancy Birdsall outlines the likely rise of a new struggling middle class in India and the challenges and opportunities it presents.
J. Brian Atwood, chair of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC), analyzes the process and achievements of the Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, held in Busan, South Korea, in 2011.
In this essay, adapted from a speech delivered to the UN General Assembly, Nancy Birdsall argues that in the absence of an activist global political entity to address these issues, global citizens should press their own governments to adopt policies that address these problems, domestically and internationally.
This course introduces students to the relations among growth, inequality and globalization of economic markets, with a focus on implications for the developing world.
This paper documents the methodology underpinning CARMA v3.0, released in July 2012.
This is the data set underlying Policy Paper 009, “A Commitment to Vaccination Index: Measuring Government Progress toward Global Immunization.”
In this paper, Nancy Birdsall sets out basic information on the growing middle class in Latin America and the Caribbean and provides grounds for optimism that such expansion might reinforce the inclusive politics that sustain broadly shared growth.
Staff update of the 2011 report Beyond Bullets and Bombs: Fixing the US Approach to Development in Pakistan, based on the deliberations of the CGD Study Group on a US Development Strategy in Pakistan.
Nancy Birdsall discusses the future role of the World Bank in addressing global commons problems, using the example of climate management and financing to set out the principal-agent problem facing the global development and climate communities.
Nancy Birdsall offers Deputy Secretary of State Thomas R. Nides three recommendations on strengthening Pakistan's civil society.
In this paper, written as the introduction to New Ideas on Development after the Financial Crisis (JHU Press, 2011), Nancy Birdsall discusses two themes. The first is the pre-crisis subtle shift in the prevailing model of capitalism in developing countries—away from orthodoxy or so-called market fundamentalism—that the crisis is likely to reinforce. The second theme is better framed as a question than a prediction: will the financial crisis, which is likely to be remembered as marking the end of Western economic dominance, be a trigger for a new twenty-first-century approach to collective action on global problems?
This report presents the results of the second edition of the Quality of Official Development Assistance (QuODA) assessment, with a focus on the changes that have occurred in donor performance since the first edition (2008).
Nancy Birdsall and Michele de Nevers propose a system for climate adaptation finance that builds off the lessons learned in development assistance.
In this working paper, the authors investigate the relation between class (measured by the position in the income distribution), values, and political orientations using comparable values surveys for six Latin American countries.
Nancy Birdsall offers Deputy Secretary of State Thomas R. Nides three recommendations on strengthening the Pakistani private sector.
This brief provides a summary of the forthcoming second edition of the Quality of Official Development Assistance (QuODA) Assessment sponsored by the Brookings Institution and the Center for Global Development.