Decisions about which type of patients receive what interventions, when, and at what cost often result from ad hoc, nontransparent processes driven more by inertia and interest groups than by science, ethics, and the public interest. Reallocating a portion of public and donor monies toward the most cost-effective health interventions would save more lives and promote health equity.
Economic growth and improved living standards require access to reliable, affordable, convenient, and safe cooking fuels and electricity. Today, 1.3 billion people lack access to electricity and roughly 2.7 billion are without access to clean, safe cooking fuel.[1] Securing energy, therefore, is a development imperative. But successfully confronting climate change is too: Global warming is already disproportionately affecting the poor and is threatening to reverse hard-won development gains. Fortunately, the two goals of ending energy poverty and protecting the climate are compatible.
With the growth in yields for key staple crops falling and global population projected to increase by two to three billion 2050, global agriculture will need to improve to meet demand. "Pull mechanisms" are one tool that could help. Kimberly Ann Elliott examines to what extent donors have embraced them.
This paper conducts a detailed calculation of capital held by the banks in four Latin American countries—known as the Andean countries: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru—and assesses the potential effects of full compliance with the capital requirements under Basel III.
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).
This brief summarizes and updates results of the Quality of Official Development Assistance (QuODA) index applied to health aid and compares these results to the overall QuODA assessment. Through quantifying performance on aid effectiveness, we hope to motivate improvements in health aid effectiveness and contribute to the definition of better, more empirically based measures of health aid quality.
Amid debate about whether adolescent pregnancy is a problem in and of itself or merely symptomatic of deeper, ingrained disadvantage, this paper aggregates recent quantitative evidence on the socioeconomic consequences of and methods to reduce of teenage pregnancy in the developing world.
In this report, John Norris of the Center for American Progress and Connie Veillette of the Center for Global Development identify four flagship reforms that would help U.S. foreign affairs institutions to better reflect national interests and reduce ineffective spending.
This paper introduces and illustrates fCPR (Forest Conservation Performance Rating), a system of color-coded ratings for tropical forest conservation performance that can be implemented for local areas, countries, regions, and the entire pan-tropics.
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?
The reasons why people give to charities vary from individual to individual, but it is clear that large, public gifts to a charity from well-known donors increase the number and size of smaller individual gifts. In this working paper, Dean Karlan and John A. List show that the effect has to do with overcoming the asymmetry of knowledge about the quality of the charity.
Lant Pritchett and Amanda Beatty argue that many education systems are attempting to push children through curricular material faster than their teachers can teach it and their students can learn it. Students fall behind and eventually stop learning. The authors provide a formal model of this phenomenon and provide empirical evidence on its implications.
This paper examines opportunities for improved efficiency in malaria control, analyzing the effectiveness of interventions and current trends in spending. Overall, it appears that resources for malaria control are well spent—however, there remain areas for improved efficiency, including (i) improving procurement procedures for bed nets, (ii) developing efficient ways to replace bed nets as they wear out, (iii) reducing overlap of spraying and bed net programs, (iv) expanding the use of rapid diagnostics, and (v) scaling up intermittent presumptive treatment for pregnant women and infants.
In this joint report, Thomas J. Bollyky, CFR senior fellow for global health, economics, and development, and Amanda Glassman, director of global health policy at the Center for Global Development, propose applying Cash-on-Delivery (COD) Aid as a new incentive mechanism for tobacco control in low- and middle-income countries.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is leading a UN initiative to deploy sustainable energy for all. Ahead of the June Rio+20 summit, Nigel Purvis and Abigail Jones highlight what the United States can do to help fulfill his vision.
In this report, Benjamin Leo, Vijaya Ramachandran, and Ross Thuotte assess the 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 to assist in the design and implementation of projects in fragile states.
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.