Views from the Center

ICAI has just entered its third four-year phase. ICAI is a major asset in ensuring aid is well-spent. Having reviewed ICAI’s prior work, we think ICAI could should focus more on “results claims”—that is, whether the estimates of expected benefits that underpin decision-making by Ministers are well-evidenced.

What if there were a way to reduce the nursing shortage in the UK in a way that is good for the National Health Service (NHS), good for developing countries, and good for nurses? We believe this is possible, with something called a Global Skills Partnership, that uses UK aid in a win-win partnership with developing countries. In this blog post we explain exactly how it could work to relieve the strain on the UK’s beloved NHS, and how such an idea might be replicated in other countries and other contexts.

Attention UK political parties: we know you are pretty busy right now, what with Prime Minister Theresa May calling a snap general election in a few weeks. So, we wrote an election manifesto on development for you. Feel free to plagiarize it; in fact, we’ve written it so you can just copy/paste parts of it if you want. To M Macron and Mme Le Pen, your manifestos are written, but you will find some good ideas here too. Needless to say, not all our CGD colleagues will agree with all our ideas, nor will many readers. So please let us know what we have missed or got wrong, in the comments below.

By triggering Article 50, the UK Government has started the process of leaving the EU and will end ‘free movement’ between the EU and UK. But what then on migration? Free movement and EU expansion were behind substantial increases in migration to the UK in the last decade, and likely led to policies which reduced non-EU migration. Our new analysis also suggests the UK now accepts hardly any migrants from the poorest countries.