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December 12, 2011

To Be or Not To Be? That Is the Question for the Doha Round Now

How many readers were even aware that a meeting of trade minsters is happening in Geneva later this week? How many care? Two years ago, I wrote a blog post about the 2009 ministerial meeting headlined “to blog or not to blog…” because nothing was expected to happen, and nothing did. This year, I’m reverting to the original expression because it is (past) time for a decision on what to do with the Doha Round—finish it or bury it and move on.

Kimberly Ann Elliott
December 5, 2011

Aid Alert: China Officially Joins the Donor Club

Several thousands gathered in the port city of Busan in Korea (the fifth largest port in the world) this past week at the Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (#HLF4 on twitter). More than 100 ministers (mostly of development cooperation) attended.  UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, President Lee of Korea, President Kagame of Rwanda and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke at the opening plenary. Clinton is the first U.S. secretary of state to attend an aid forum.

Nancy Birdsall
November 28, 2011

Will Donors Hide behind China?

This post was originally featured on Owen Barder’s Owen Abroad: Thoughts on Development and Beyond blog.

Will the largest aid donors hide behind China to excuse their inability to make substantial improvements in foreign aid? How can Busan balance the desire to be more universal with the pressing need for real changes in the way aid is given?

Rita Perakis
September 15, 2011

Lagarde and the Dragon: The IMF’s New Head Confronts a Rapidly Changing World

Judging from her first public speech since taking office last July, Christine Lagarde is all that her many supporters say she is: tough-minded, articulate, charming.  In a talk hosted by the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington’s Ronald Reagan International Trade Center, she deftly laid out key challenges facing the global economy: “an anemic and bumpy recovery with unacceptably high unemployment” in the high-income countries, the debt crisis in Europe, and mounting public debt in the United States.

Lawrence MacDonald
August 25, 2011

Learning to Live With China’s Economic Dominance

Arvind Subramanian is a joint senior fellow at the CGD and the Peterson Institute. This post appeared originally on the Peterson Institute’s China Economic Watch blog.

Is China poised to take over from the United States as the world’s most economically dominant power?

This is an essential question, and yet it has not yet been taken seriously enough in the United States, where, this central conceit still reigns: the United States’ economic preeminence cannot be seriously threatened because it is the United States’ to lose, and sooner or later, the United States will rise to the challenge of not losing it. China may be on its way to becoming an economic superpower, and the United States may have to share the global stage with it in the future. But, the argument goes, the threat from China is not so imminent, so great, or so multifaceted that it can push the United States out of the driver’s seat.

Arvind Subramanian
April 1, 2011

Development’s Next Top “Model”: China? India? Rwanda? Ghana?

In a recent piece published in Foreign Affairs, Francis Fukuyama and I argue that, post global economic crisis, we are witnessing a shift away from the Western free-market or neo-liberal economic model in the developing world.  In an essay in our forthcoming book (New Ideas on Development after the Financial Crisis), I suggest that developing country political leaders, particularly in low-income countries, co

Nancy Birdsall
March 21, 2011

New Chinese Regulations Reflect Growing G-20 Appetite for Anticorruption

The G-20 is not ordinarily considered a major player in the drive against corruption in international business transactions, but that may be changing.

The Toronto Summit in June 2010 established a working group “to make comprehensive recommendations on how the G-20 can take practical steps to combat corruption.” During the Seoul Summit in November, a coalition of emerging market members of the working group (including Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, and Mexico) quietly joined with the United States to urge China to adopt an anti–foreign bribery law.

Theodore Moran
February 11, 2011

Mubarak Is Out: What Lessons for China, Africa, and Western Donors?

Mubarak has resigned.  Next steps in Egypt are uncertain, but it’s certain that authoritarian rulers around the world are watching these events with great trepidation.

What’s the lesson that China and the 102 of 160 developing countries around the world that are “partly free” or “unfree” (see Freedom House) are taking from Egypt and Tunisia? And is there a lesson for Western donors?

Nancy Birdsall
January 27, 2011

Restoring U.S. Financial Markets in a Credible Way: Comments on Feldstein and Yellen

From January 6-9, I participated in the annual ASSA (Allied Social Science Associations) conference in Denver, Colorado.  I was part of a high-level panel discussion with a number of distinguished economists including Janet Yellen, the Federal Reserve’s Vice-Chair; Martin Feldstein, of Harvard University; Andrew Brimmer, former Governor of the Federal Reserve Board; and Alan Krueger, former Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy, among others.

Liliana Rojas-Suarez

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