The Center’s work on aid effectiveness focuses on the policies and practices of bilateral and multilateral donors. It includes analyzing existing programs, monitoring donor innovations, and designing and promoting fresh approaches to deliver aid.
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CGD examines the impacts of financial regulations on capital account volatility, as well as mechanisms to further domestic financial deepening in emerging markets to prevent instability and enable growth. The Center’s research also deals with approaches to crisis resolution and the potential of foreign direct investment to promote growth.
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CGD’s work on climate change examines current and future impacts on developing countries, identifies how rich countries can help developing countries become more climate resilient, seeks policy mechanisms to create low-carbon economies in rich and developing countries, and gathers and discloses emissions-related data to inform the policy dialogue and boost incentives for steep cuts in the emissions of heat-trapping gases.
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CGD was founded in 2001 in part because of the concern our founding chairman, Edward W. Scott Jr., had about the debt burden of the poorest countries. We are uniquely positioned to work both on the intellectual underpinnings of debt relief and the implementation of specific policies. The Center’s first book, Delivering on Debt Relief, by Nancy Birdsall and John Williamson helped to frame the debate and contributed to the structure of the financing arrangements for the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC). Despite the impressive successes of HIPC/MDRI (Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative) in reducing poor-country debt, the issue remains vitally important―and a key part of CGD’s work.
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Though growth is a necessary condition for development, not all growth benefits the poor. CGD’s work on this topic includes exploring strategies for ensuring that economic growth is “pro-poor” and that donor organizations and government agencies encourage broad-based, pro-poor growth.
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Recognizing that education is a linchpin of development, CGD investigates promising new approaches for rich countries to improve education outcomes in the poorer world. CGD research in this area focuses on the benefits of educating girls, the effectiveness of global education programs, strategies for achieving universal primary education, and the potential application of Cash on Delivery (COD) aid to the education sector.
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Financial services—savings, credit, insurance, money transfers—are vital yet intangible aspects of economic infrastructure. CGD’s work on financial services analyzes how to strengthen, deepen, and broaden financial systems in poor countries to maximize the benefits for poor households and improve development prospects. p>
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More than a billion people in developing countries suffer from chronic hunger. Long a neglected topic, the role of agriculture in promoting pro-poor growth is attracting renewed attention in the United States and internationally. CGD’s work in this area focuses on how rich countries’ agricultural policies and practices impact people and economic development in the poor world.
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CGD research on fragile states examines how rich countries and other development actors can best assist fragile states and their citizens; related work focuses on understanding the transition from immediate post-conflict assistance to longer-term development assistance.
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CGD's work on global health aims to improve the effectiveness of policies and actions of donors (bilateral aid agencies, philanthropic foundations, and multilateral organizations) and to enhance the coordination between these public agents and the private sector.
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Globalization has brought many benefits, yet there is growing contention over how these benefits are shared and increasing recognition that globalized markets require greatly improved global governance. CGD examines the types of rules-based international systems needed to tackle global poverty and create a more equitable, stable, and prosperous global economy.
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Efficient and resilient governance systems are essential for ensuring basic public services, fostering trade, attracting private investment, and managing aid flows. CGD’s work on the issue focuses on how rich-country policies and practices strengthen—or inadvertently undermine—developing-country institutions.
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CGD works to reduce the enormous and growing gaps between the richest and poorest countries and to increase the recognition of the social and economic costs of extreme inequality within countries. The Center’s extensive work in these and related areas—including the inequality dimensions of such issues as global health, education, trade, and migration, among others—contributes to reducing poverty and inequality worldwide.
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CGD research examines how the International Financial Institutions or IFIs—the IMF, World Bank, multilateral development banks, and other international development agencies—can become more responsive to the needs of developing countries and ensure that growth opportunities they promote reach the world’s poorest people.
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While most of the rich-world migration debate focuses on how migrants affect the places they move to, CGD conducts rigorous, independent research to examine the effects of labor mobility on migrants themselves and their places of origin.
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Many people know that development shapes population trends—for example, rising incomes usually lead to falling birthrates. But the reverse is also true: population trends can impede or hasten development. CGD's work on population focuses on this often neglected interaction.
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Poverty refers to the condition of not being able to afford basic human necessities such as food, water, housing, and health care. Finding ways to reduce the poverty that afflicts more than half the world’s people is a core part of CGD’s mission and is reflected in the many research topics that directly address the issue, such as health, education, trade, debt relief, aid effectiveness, and migration.
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A thriving private sector is essential to long-term development. CGD research includes examination of donor efforts to help developing countries improve their business climate and foster entrepreneurship, as well as research into ways to increase the positive impacts—and avoid pitfalls—of foreign direct investment.
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CGD’s work is not explicitly organized along geographic or regional lines. Nonetheless, many CGD researchers have significant regional expertise and some CGD intellectual outputs are especially relevant to particular regions listed on the subpages within this topic: Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe-Russia, and Latin America.
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CGD’s research in this area focuses on how rich-country trade policies could be more supportive of poverty reduction and economic growth in developing economies. This work strives to rebuild a foundation for broad support of open trade policies in key developed and emerging markets.
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