Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
With rigorous economic research and practical policy solutions, we focus on the issues and institutions that are critical to global development. Explore our core themes and topics to learn more about our work.
In timely and incisive analysis, our experts parse the latest development news and devise practical solutions to new and emerging challenges. Our events convene the top thinkers and doers in global development.
CGD works to reduce global poverty and improve lives through innovative economic research that drives better policy and practice by the world’s top decision makers.
CGD experts offer ideas and analysis to improve international development policy. Also check out our Global Health blog and US Development Policy blog.
CGD President Nancy Birdsall praised the intent of new legislation (S. 2166) to expand debt relief to additional poor countries, but cautioned against the bill in its current form last week at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. She urged the U.S.
A Washington Post editorial today ( A Fight Over Corruption ) says that the new report by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker on the effectiveness of the World Bank's anti-corruption department, (the Institutional Integrity Department or INT)) "reserved its toughest language for the bank bureaucracy itself." The editorial then quotes from the report:
Arvind Subramanian's op-ed in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, A Farewell to Alms has reignited a long-running debate about whether foreign aid works—a debate that NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof tried to put to rest recently in an elegant defense (subscription required) of some aid for some purposes.
Yesterday Robert Zoellick was elected by unanimous vote by the Board of the World Bank to become its next president. He now assumes The Hardest Job in the World, as we called it in a 2005 CGD report to the then-incoming president, Paul Wolfowitz. Mr. Zoellick is an avid reader -- and absorbs ideas and issues like a sponge. This bodes well for the Bank and for Bank staff. Informal meetings he has had with officials around the world, activists, and Bank watchers in Washington's leading think tanks indicate Mr.
The British Conservative party issued a statement today aimed at the upcoming G-8 summit and citing CGD's Commitment to Development Index (CDI). (Coverage in the Guardian is here.) The CDI rates 21 rich countries on how much their foreign aid, trade, and other policies help or hurt people in the developing world.
In Tuesday's editorial on "Mr. Wolfowitz and the Bank", The New York Times referred to three issues that need his leadership:
"giv[ing] more of a voice to less wealthy and poor countries;…find[ing] new ways to mobilize private sector financing; [and] addressing global challenges like epidemics, sustainable energy and post-conflict reconstruction."
The World Bank announced Friday that it was suspending all loans to Chad, including one that helped finance a $4.2 billion oil pipeline, on the ground that it had broken an agreement to largely dedicate its oil revenues to alleviating the country's extreme poverty. According to the Celia Dugger in the NYT
Commentary Menu