Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
I was delighted to see that the eminent development economist Paul Romer, a non-resident fellow of CGD, will become Chief Economist of the World Bank, and I'll be interested to see how the world’s leading development institution is inspired by Paul’s imagination.
The World Bank opened in 1946 to finance a global economy just emerging from colonization and warfare and just embarking on the Cold War. Today the global development landscape is radically different, and capital circles the globe at volumes unthinkable back then. Why keep the World Bank now?
In a few days, the board of the World Bank will choose a new president. There are three candidates: an American physician and anthropologist (Jim Yong Kim), a Colombian economist (José Antonio Ocampo), and a Nigerian economist (Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala). All 12 presidents in the 66-year history of the World Bank have been American.
On Friday, President Obama surprised the international development community with the news that Jim Yong Kim would be his choice for the presidency of the World Bank. Kim is a distinguished medical doctor and anthropologist, the president of Dartmouth College, and the co-founder and former executive director of Partners in Health.
A version of this blog also appeared on the Huffington Post.
Back in 2004 a major new development project started in Bar-Sauri, Kenya. This Millennium Village Project (MVP) seeks to break individual village clusters free from poverty with an intense, combined aid package for agriculture, education, health, and infrastructure. The United Nations and Columbia University began the pilot phase in Bar-Sauri and have extended it to numerous village clusters in nine other countries. They hope to scale up the approach across much of Africa.
But wait: Before we consider blanketing a continent with any aid intervention, we have to know whether or not it works. For example, we have to know if different things have happened in Bar-Sauri than have happened in nearby Uranga, which was not touched by the project. And we have to know if those differences will last. This matters because aid money is scarce, and the tens of millions slated for the MVP are tens of millions that won’t be spent on other efforts.
Here I discuss a new research paper that I wrote with Gabriel Demombynes of the World Bank.
Good question as the world prepares for the September summit to assess progress. But this is a slightly odd debate here at The Africa Report. The UN Millennium Promise’s Charles Abugre Akelyira seems to think the MDGs are a rejection of economic policy reform:
As I blogged Monday, the Haiti government owes the rest of the world about $1.25 billion. Seems like a lot of money.
We are at the start of what promises to be an unusually difficult year in the global economy. Policy decisions in the United States and other rich world countries will matter immensely for poor and vulnerable people living in developing countries.
We at CGD warmly welcome president-elect Barack Obama's appointments of Timothy Geithner as Secretary of Treasury and Lawrence Summers to head the National Economic Council. Both are members of the CGD Board of Directors. This is no coincidence.
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