Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala Joins CGD
It’s been almost 10 years since I sat down for coffee with Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala in Davos. So it is a thrill for me that Ngozi is now joining CGD as a distinguished visiting fellow.
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It’s been almost 10 years since I sat down for coffee with Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala in Davos. So it is a thrill for me that Ngozi is now joining CGD as a distinguished visiting fellow.
I was delighted to learn this morning that the Nobel Committee awarded this year’s peace prize to not one but three highly effective female leaders: Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, activist Leymah Gbowee of Liberia and rights activist Tawakkul Karman of Yemen.
This is a joint post with Wren Elhai.
What everyone was expecting is now official. On July 9th, South Sudan will become the world’s newest country. But while the date is certain, there are still plenty of details to be worked out. There is no deal as of yet on sharing Sudan’s oil wealth, or on its nearly $40 billion in external debt. Successful resolution of the debt issue acceptable to both north and south and the international community is crucial to the success of the new nation and to avoiding a resumption of the long and bloody civil war.
Twelve months after the devastating earthquake, some of the fresh ideas CGD policy experts proposed to help Haiti through non-aid channels have gained traction, while others remain relevant, but have yet to be tried. The anniversary is a time to revisit progress and shine a light on untapped opportunities to assist Haitians in their reconstruction efforts through U.S. policies on trade, debt, migration, and more:
Following the devastating earthquake in January, CGD experts offered fresh ideas on how the U.S. and the international community could help Haiti rebuild, particularly through non-aid channels. Several recent developments in the U.S. legislative branch reflect or build upon these ideas:
Trade
When I was writing about third world debt a decade ago, I watched Jubilee 2000 and other debt cancellation campaigners pound their way to victory with simplistic claims about the importance of debt cancellation, such as that principal and interest payments were diverting enough government revenue from poor countries' health budgets to kill 19,000 children per day. I wondered: are they naive or am I?
In a huge step forward, this week Liberia slashed its foreign debt by buying back $1.2 billion in commercial debt -- about one-quarter of its foreign debt -- from its private foreign creditors, including banks, hedge funds, and other “distressed debt” investment funds.
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.
The IMF's 2007 World Economic Outlook has a chapter on inequality and globalization (Chapter 4), which concludes that globalization in the last two decades has contributed to increased inequality in most countries. Bravo to the IMF for daring to move, on globalization, from apparent unencumbered globaphile to concerned realist!
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