National Public Radio interviewed CGD president Nancy Birdsall on the financial crisis' impact on foreign assistance to poor countries.
From the interview:
The Center for Global Development has been calling for such reforms and digging back into history to predict how this crisis might affect development aid.
'When a country is hit by a crisis, there will be a decline in aid in the subsequent couple of years," says Nancy Birdsall, who runs the center, which promotes policies to fight poverty. "There has been a return to trend in the past: Sweden's aid flows declined after its banking crisis in the early '90s, and Japan's aid flows declined when it had its problems in the '90s, but they have come back.'
Birdsall says the United States can help the world's poor in other ways, such as lowering trade barriers. She says it is also time to rethink how the World Bank and other international financial institutions help developing countries.
'In the World Bank, there are about 45 member countries from sub-Saharan Africa and they have just two of the chairs in the 24-member board of directors,' Birdsall says. 'So that's about what is called voice — at least give the Africans a little bit more voice in the board of directors where there are policy decisions made.'
Birdsall would like to see the U.S. and Europe give up, as she puts it, their lock on the presidencies of the international financial institutions. But she did not criticize the current World Bank president, Robert Zoellick, who has called on rich nations not to let the financial crisis turn into a human crisis."