Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
One of President Biden’s foreign policy campaign commitments was to hold a “Summit of Democracies” in the first year of his presidency. While skeptics have raised valid concerns—not least which countries should appear on the guestlist— a summit could spur useful reforms at home and abroad.
Makhtar Diop, former minister of finance in Senegal and current vice president for infrastructure at the World Bank, has been tapped to be the next head of the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank Group’s private sector investment arm. This is welcome news: Diop’s experience and talents can help steer IFC towards greater development impact during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.
Three ways that COP-26 could deliver for those countries are to properly define what counts as “new and additional” climate finance, make sure carbon markets rather than aid pays for the additional costs of mitigation in poorer developing countries, and agree to exempt the poorest countries from carbon tariffs.
Drugs created with billions in government support, bought almost exclusively by governments and international agencies are shrouded in secrecy: who is paying how much for delivery of what by when is a matter of guesswork and estimate.
The slogan “build back better” has become widespread during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to the extent it is used to promise a recovery that ensures less risk of a repeat, greater equality and more opportunity, that’s a wonderful thing. But the term comes with a history—and not a great one
Charles Kenny launches his latest book The Plague Cycle: The Unending War Between Humanity and Infectious Disease.
Future generations are (currently) blameless, our actions leave them in peril, but we can do something about it. All of this is utterly true of climate change, and it is why rich countries (that disproportionately pollute) should take the lead in paying for climate change mitigation and adaptation.
In a paper and blog, Charles Kenny discusses the idea of the declining marginal utility of income and its potential use in allocation decisions.
In a paper and blog, the authors examine the distribution of aid among countries at different income levels and focus on the aid going to middle-income countries (MICs).
What impact do development finance institutions (DFIs) like the IFC have on actual development? Today, George Yang and I release a paper that tries to take a sectoral approach to impact: does an IFC electricity investment lead to more power production per capita in a country, or financing provided to local banks lead to a larger proportion of people with a bank account?
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