Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
This entry was also published on the Huffington Post.
I was going to blog about the illogic of the proposed amendment to health care legislation allowing the importation of lower-priced drugs from Canada, but Ezra Klein of the Washington Post beat me to it. As he notes, referring to floor comments by Senator David Vitter (R-LA):
This is a joint post with Molly Kinder.
This week The New York Times Magazine is dedicated to a single theme: women. The main attraction of this special issue is a stirring essay by journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, who write passionately about the great moral, national security and economic development imperatives of investing in the world’s women and girls. The “women’s crusade” they call for seems already to have begun. A few pages beyond, an interview with Secretary Clinton heralds the start of a “new gender agenda” at the highest reaches of the U.S. foreign policy. Also noted is the growing philanthropic attention to the cause of women and girls – a trend that will be further evidenced next month, when the issue headlines at the annual (Bill) Clinton Global Initiative meetings in NYC.
This blog entry also appeared on the Huffington Post.
John Barton, the George E. Osborne Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Stanford Law School, passed away yesterday.
Gorik Ooms and European colleagues are organizing a small meeting in Brussels in October to be called the Global Responsibilities for Global Health Rights Conference. The Conference is organized by the Helene De Beir Foundation and has the moral or financial support of AIDS Fonds, Netherlands; Parliamentarians for the MDGs, Belgium; International Centre for Reproductive Health, Belgium; International Civil Society Support, Netherlands; Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium and The Lancet, United Kingdom.
The Executive Order signed by President Obama this week creating the White House Council on Women and Girls signals that the Administration recognizes that special consideration is warranted to make sure government policies and programs don't reinforce discrimination against women and girls -- and in some instances should spur extra efforts to overcome gender-related economic and social
Last week, Bill Easterly and colleagues formally launched the new Aid Watch initiative at the Development Research Institute at NYU. Aid Watch is meant to serve as an independent monitor of the aid practices of official development agencies, through research, events, and a blog.
President Barack Obama’s first address to a joint session of Congress on Feb. 24 isn’t officially a State of the Union Address, since he has just recently taken office. But it will look and sound exactly like a State of the Union, and that can mean only one thing: time for CGD’s ever popular State of the Union (SOTU) BINGO!
Eldis, the online aggregator of development policy, practice and research at the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex, is conducting a survey to identify "the most significant new piece of development research of 2008." This strikes me as having roughly the same statistical validity as American Idol does for when it comes to finding new singing talent. Still, as with Idol and other talent shows, the entertainment value of a popularity contest is hard to dispute!
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.
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