Private Investment

Using a comprehensive data set of working conditions and wage compliance in Cambodia’s exporting garment factories, the authors explore the impact of foreign ownership on wages and working conditions, whether the relationship between wages and working conditions more closely resembles efficiency...

Guillermo Perry assesses whether arguments in favor of such MDB direct support are valid and whether MDBs are living up to priorities coherent with such arguments and finds that they do so only partially.

Private sector lending by international financial institutions (IFIs) is soaring. Guillermo Perry finds it’s a mixed bag and suggests improvements, including more support to small and medium firms and avoidance of procyclical lending.

International extractive companies and their governments should work to make the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI) require all EITI-compliant countries to require individual company-by-company reporting.

In this report John Simon and Julia Barmier assess past and current efforts to indicate whether direct development investment is worth promoting as a matter of public policy.

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...

This paper focuses on the role that bilateral investment treaties (BITs) can play in promoting development in sub-Saharan Africa.

Africa remains extremely difficult for entrepreneurs. Donors are increasingly targeting assistance to address the investment-climate constraints that hinder private-sector growth. This report lays out the case for promoting investment climate reforms more strategically, various options for...

What happens when capital and sophisticated goods flow uphill, from poorer to richer countries? With a new dataset of foreign direct investment and a measure of the sophistication of exports, CGD senior fellow Arvind Subramanian and his co-author Aaditya Mattoo find that developing countries...

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.

Senior fellow David Wheeler and Kevin Ummel argue for rapid, very large-scale deployment of existing solar thermal technology. Using maps of solar radiation and project finance calculations, they show that with modest subsidies solar power generated in North Africa and the Middle East could meet...

This CGD brief summarizes the results of the 2007 Commitment to Development Index (CDI), which ranks 21 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 2007 CDI on the strength of...

CGD visiting fellow Vijaya Ramachandran and co-authors Manju Kedia Shah and Gaiv Tata used firm-level survey data from more than 1,500 enterprises in six African countries to discover how and why African firms lobby. Their working paper concludes that larger, entrenched firms lobby to protect their...

For the past decade, U.S. attention to Latin America has focused mainly on promotion of free trade and opposition to narcotics trafficking and security threats. But there are signs that Washington is beginning to recognize the importance of helping the region tackle longstanding poverty and social...

Sierra Leone, where a brutal decade-long civil war finally ended in 2002, has just held remarkably fair, peaceful and well-organized elections. CGD visiting fellow Carol Lancaster, a former deputy administrator of USAID, was there as an election observer. In a new CGD Essay, she reflects on what...

Africa receives only a tiny fraction of global investments in emerging markets. But the problem is not that fund managers are scared away by a seemingly steady stream of bad news out of Africa, nor is a general marketing of Africa to global investors the solution. Instead the authors of this new...

The Investment Climate Facility (ICF) for Africa was launched in June to help Africa tackle problems that hinder domestic and foreign investment. It aims to raise $550 million for promotion of property rights and financial markets, anti-corruption efforts, and reform of regulations, taxation, and...

Development refers to improvements in the conditions of people’s lives, such as health, education, and income. It occurs at different rates in different countries. The U.S. underwent its own version of development since the time it became an independent nation in 1776. Learn more about Rich...

In this new CGD working paper John Nellis takes stock of fifteen years of privatization in developing and post-communist countries. He finds that a surprisingly large amount of assets remain in state hands. And while technical assessments of the impact of privatization are often positive, public...

The Commitment to Development Index (CDI), which ranks 21 countries across six policy areas, is widely seen as the most comprehensive and substantive measure of rich country policies towards development. In response to requests from other would-be index builders, CDI architect David Roodman...

African state-owned enterprises, particularly those in infrastructure, have a long history of poor performance. But moves in the 1990s to rely instead on private-sector participation and ownership have yet to deliver the hoped-for improvements. Is the solution to return to a strategy of improving...

The G-8 has endorsed sweeping efforts to combat bribery and corrupt payments by international investors. Are these efforts effective? A new working paper by Theodore H. Moran says no. In How Multinational Investors Evade Developed Country Laws, Moran presents evidence that multinational...

In this CGD Brief, Todd Moss and Vijaya Ramachandran analyze the survey results of 300-400 manufacturing firms in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Their main finding? Foreign firms perform better than local firms in generating jobs, increasing the productivty of their workers, and in skills transfer.

Most studies of privatization look at what happens to companies. Reality Check, a new volume of case studies from Latin America, Asia, and the former Soviet Union, examines the impact on people. Surprise: privatization has often been a reasonably good thing, even for the poor. Read a Q&A with lead...

Bill Easterly challenges a central rationale of the push for the 2015 Millennium Development Goals: the idea that poverty can be overcome with a big push in foreign aid and investment. Instead, change must come from the bottom up, he says.

The British proposal to create an International Finance Facility in order to 'frontload' $50 billion in aid per year until 2015 has generated a lot of attention and will likely be a major topic at the G8 meeting this July. But the IFF has also been shrouded in confusion and misconceptions. This...

After more than a decade of financial sector liberalization, both of domestic markets and of international financial transactions (capital account liberalization), policymakers in many developing countries remain concerned about the effects that large and highly volatile capital flows have on their...

Does Foreign Direct Investment Promote Development?, gathers together the cutting edge of new research on FDI and host country economic performance and presents the most sophisticated critiques of current and past inquiries.

This paper ties together the macroeconomic and microeconomic evidence on the competitiveness of African manufacturing sectors. The conceptual framework is based on the newer theories that see the evolution of comparative advantage as influenced by the business climate—a key public good—and by...

This paper considers what role pull instruments or challenge programs (such as the World Bank's Poverty Reduction Support Credits or the United States' Millennium Challenge Account) could play within the overall framework of foreign aid, asking how they could be designed to function as effective...

This paper argues that regional public goods in developing countries are under-funded despite their potentially high rates of return compared to traditional country-focused investments. In Africa the under-funding of regional public goods is primarily a political and institutional challenge to be...

The historic 2002 United Nations Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico, overlooked a crucial question: regionalism. Financing Development: The Power of Regionalism is designed to correct this omission.

In 1999, the United States and other major donor countries supported an historic expansion of the heavily indebted poor country (HIPC) debt relief initiative. Three years after the initiative came into existence, we are beginning to see the apparent impact that HIPC is having, particularly on...

The Commitment to Development Index of the Center for Global Development rates 21 rich countries on the “development-friendliness” of their policies. It is revised and updated annually. In the 2004 edition, the component on foreign assistance combines quantitative and qualitative measures of...

The world has increasingly recognized that private capital has a vital role to play in economic development. African countries have moved to liberalize the investment environment, yet have not received much FDI. At least part of this poor performance is because of lingering skepticism toward...

This brief examines the potential positive synergies between globalization, development, and labor standards. It argues that certain core labor standards can be applied globally without undermining comparative advantage, and that doing so would be good for development. The issues are also examined...

This policy brief is a preview to the analysis and recommendations on privatization in the second edition of Washington Contentious: Economic Policies for Social Equity in Latin America, to be published in 2004 by the Center for Global Development and Inter-American Dialogue.

In Latin America, privatization started earlier and spread farther and more rapidly than in almost any other part of the world. Despite positive microeconomic results, privatization is highly and increasingly unpopular in the region. While privatization may be winning the economic battle it is...

This paper applies a new approach to the estimation of the impact of policy, both the levels and the changes, on wage differentials using a new high-quality data set on wage differentials by schooling level for 18 Latin American countries for the period 1977–1998. The results indicate that...

At the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000 the nations of the world committed to join forces to meet a set of measurable targets for reducing world poverty, disease, illiteracy and other indicators of human misery—all by the year 2015. These targets, later named the Millennium Development...

The Burnside and Dollar (2000) finding that aid raises growth in a good policy environment has had an important influence on policy and academic debates. We conduct a data gathering exercise that updates their data from 1970-93 to 1970-97, as well as filling in missing data for the original period...

Sub-Saharan African states urgently need expanded and more dynamic private sectors, more efficient and effective infrastructure/utility provision, and increased investment from both domestic and foreign sources. The long-run and difficult solution is the creation and reinforcement of the...

What should the World Bank optimally do with the US$10 to $20 billion it can loan each year? Has it, in fact, done what is optimal? This study suggests a simple framework within which to measure the World Bank against an optimal international public financier for development. It goes on to argue...

Global private capital flows have barely touched the poorest nations; the rich invest mostly with the rich. It is possible that failures in the global capital market prevent capital from exploiting high returns in poor countries; it is also possible that fundamental returns to investment are lower...

Public policy on financial crises in emerging markets has implicitly been grounded in economic theory calling for lender-of-last-resort intervention when the country is solvent, and on theory recognizing that reputational damage is the quasi-collateral enabling lending to sovereigns with no...

We assess the dynamic behind the high net resource transfers of donors and creditors, IDA, bilaterals, IBRD, IMF and other multilateral creditors to the countries of sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. Analyzing a panel of 37 recipient countries over the years 1978-98, we find that net...

While many analysts decry the lack of sufficient investment in Africa, we find no evidence that private and public investment are productive, either in Africa as a whole (unless Botswana is included in the sample), or in the manufacturing sector in Tanzania. In this restricted sense, inadequate...

The welfare of the poor turns in large measure not only on technocratic development "policies", but the effective delivery of key public services, core elements of which require thousands of face-to-face discretionary transactions ("practices") by service providers. This paper presents eight...

The IMF uses its well-known "financial programming" model to derive monetary and fiscal programs to achieve desired macroeconomic targets in countries undergoing crises or receiving debt relief. Financial programming is based on monetary, balance of payments, and fiscal accounting identities. This...

I present here a proposal for constructing a global patent regime, which could be a reasonable compromise to the current bitter dispute fueled by TRIPS. It allows the right line to be drawn between prices and incentives because different lines can be drawn for different products.

This study examines the impact of the principal financial crises in emerging markets in recent years on the incidence of poverty in the countries in question. The growth impact is first identified by comparing average per capita growth in the two years prior to the crisis to that in the crisis year...

While most technical assessments classify privatization as a success, it remains widely and increasingly unpopular, largely because of the perception that it is fundamentally unfair, both in conception and execution. We review the increasing (but still uneven) literature and conclude that most...

This paper analyzes privatization and enterprise reform of three major countries in the transition region; Poland, Czechoslovakia (subsequently the Czech Republic), and the Soviet Union (subsequently Russia). For each, it discusses the prevailing ideologies of advisors prior to and during the...

At the end of the 1990s the future of Latin America seemed grim in the face of four devastating problems—slow and unsteady economic growth, persistent poverty, social injustice, and personal insecurity. For 10 years Latin America had pursued—with considerable vigor—the 10 economic policies...