Views from the Center

This is a joint post with Nancy Birdsall and Bill Savedoff.

During a panel discussion we hosted at the World Bank and IMF annual meetings in Istanbul last month on mutual accountability and outcomes in aid, Max Lawson from Oxfam, in referring to COD Aid, said that CGD appears to have more effective publicity strategies and reach than the European Commission. While we do have a (small but) stellar communications team, our ideas spread far primarily because other organizations are seriously engaged in exploring and debating new ideas like the ones we have proposed (otherwise our tiny team would be sleepless, to say the least!).

One case in point is the recent COD Aid briefing paper issued by the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD) – a large international development organization based in the UK which raises about 75% of its funds from individual supporters.

We tend to think of globalization in the following way: the rich world exports financial capital, technology, sophisticated goods, and entrepreneurial and managerial skills in the form of foreign direct investment (FDI) to developing countries; the latter, in turn, export people, resources, and low-skilled goods to the rich world.

In a recent interview on CNN en Español I discussed the evolving role of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board and its implications for developing countries. People in Latin America are following this issue closely. That’s because the global crisis has reminded everybody that an unstable financial sector in the industrial countries has powerful ripple effects not only on the financial sector of developing countries but also on the real economy, with serious consequences for poverty and inequality.