Commentary

The Millennium Challenge Corporation celebrated its 20th birthday last January, but Congress’s gift to the agency didn’t arrive until late December. It came in the form of the MCC Candidate Country Reform Act, signed into law as part of the FY 2025 National Defense Authorization Act. The measure pro...

My recently published note on the East Asian Miracle made me wonder why South Asian “turtles”¬—economies that have shown relatively slow growth—show no signs of overhauling East Asian “hares.” Starting from roughly comparable levels of per capita GDP in the mid- 1960s, South Asian countries have lag...

In this blog we introduce the findings from our new policy paper, in which we examine the mounting pressures on development agencies and outline five key dimensions of agency effectiveness. This paper marks the first piece of our new research series on “agency effectiveness” and lays the groundwork ...

In 2021 alone, AMR killed an estimated 1.14 million people annually—and if countries stick to a business-as-usual approach, it could claim 39 million lives between 2025 and 2050. Beyond the human toll, rising resistance rates could drive health costs up by US$ 325 billion and shrink the global econo...

This is the fifth and final in a series of five blogs on the Biden administration’s global development agenda over the past four years. This blog focuses on the Biden administration’s record on humanitarian response and offers an assessment of how the new Trump administration could affect Biden’s le...

Official Development Assistance (ODA) is facing mounting pressure as global challenges such as climate change, pandemics, and humanitarian crises demand increasing resources while development budgets are shrinking. With less than five years remaining to achieve the UN sustainable development goals, ...

As President Trump takes office, we examine the US approach to international partnerships, look at the foundations of the so-called “special relationship” between the US and the UK, and undertake new analysis of US non-military financial assistance to the UK following the Second World War. We fin...