Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
Last week, U.S. Foreign Aid Czar Randall Tobias kicked off the Society for International Development's 50-year anniversary celebrations with an update on U.S. foreign assistance reform efforts. Eight months in the works, and not much more to report than what was included in our last posting. Interestingly, attendees didn't seem too bothered by this fact. Why?
A quick read of the news coming out of Singapore (see the Financial Times on Setback for Wolfowitz on anti-graft plan) might lead one to believe that some of the World Bank's key shareholders don't like Paul Wolfowitz's tough stance on corruption.
*This post is co-authored by Kaysie Brown
The World Bank's Operations Evaluation Division has just released a lengthy report documenting a rise in the world's "fragile states" and drawing a direct connection between state weakness and transnational threats. As Karen DeYoung reports in today's Washington Post,
“Fragile" countries, whose deepening poverty puts them at risk from terrorism, armed conflict and epidemic disease, have jumped to 26 from 17 since the report was last issued in 2000.
Increased attention to development and stability in fragile states by both the World Bank and the U.S. Government signals the importance of and challenges associated with providing assistance in these critical yet vulnerable states. CGD recently launched the Engaging Fragile States initiative to focus on key unanswered questions for the development community working in these tough environments. A quick read of the Bank report raises a number of issues that our work is focusing on:
Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has posted a response to the 2006 Commitment to Development Index. CGD released the fourth annual edition on August 14. Japan still ranks last. The CDI rates 21 rich countries on how "development-friendly" their policies are in seven areas--aid, trade, investment, migration, environment, security, and technology. The Ministry writes:
"Drowning in Data" (subscription required), an article in the fall issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review, gets at the core of key problems plaguing nonprofit attempts at evaluation.
After years of neglect, agriculture is back on the agenda. In June the World Bank announced that it would prepare a World Development Report on Agriculture for Development for publication late next year.
Hat Tip to the PSD Blog for an intriguing story that the mainstream media almost entirely missed today. The president of McDonald's Europe announced in Brussels plans to issue European McDonald's employees a "McPassport" -- a new type of document that could greatly increase the labor mobility of its 225,000 European employees. Christine Bowers at PSD Blog writes:
Dennis de Tray and I launched the latest CGD report for new leaders of international agencies on September 7th in Tunis, the current headquarters of the African Development Bank.
Last week CGD hosted a talk by 1970 Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug on The Prospects for Bringing a Green Revolution to Africa.
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