
May the Best Woman Win at the World Bank
Like the US, the World Bank needs its next president to save it—in this case from a slide into irrelevance and obscurity if this century’s new global challenges are not addressed head on.
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.
Like the US, the World Bank needs its next president to save it—in this case from a slide into irrelevance and obscurity if this century’s new global challenges are not addressed head on.
Finally, after many years, I understand how truly revolutionary Pratham is.
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize, awarded last week to Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad, calls attention to sexual violence during war and civil conflicts—a horror too often unstated and wished away. There’s another largely hidden horror the world needs to reckon with: the toll that civil conflicts, some so local that they rarely make the news, takes on children.
There is much to cheer about in last week’s announcement by the World Bank’s shareholders to increase its paid-in capital by $13 billion. It is a healthy signal that multilateralism is alive and well, at least in the development space. And on a practical level it is sufficient to ensure that at a minimum World Bank lending to sovereign borrowers can be sustained at current levels, and private sector operations can continue to grow.
A large proportion of revenue gains over the last two decades has come from countries’ efforts to improve the design and compliance of consumption and other indirect taxes, particularly the VAT (value-added tax); in doing so, the objective has been to minimize VAT’s regressive effects by exempting sales of small businesses below a threshold (where the poor typically tend to buy) as well as imposing zero tax on certain food and other products which take up a large proportion of consumption of poor households. Less attention has gone to expanding the coverage of potentially more progressive taxes, such as personal income and property taxes.
I’m disappointed by the update. But I’m also hopeful. Here are three concrete issues that the group could raise regarding the MDBs.
Globalization of the economic sort is often maligned. But then there is globalism: of norms, values, culture, and attitudes. Are norms and values, even “culture”, being globalized? Is the idea, for example, that women have equal rights, as in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), gaining ground as a universal norm? And might changing norms and values affect legal regimes and behavior (sometimes, maybe)?
Mohamed Bouazizi is the man whose protest sparked the Arab Spring in December 2010. Bouazizi was a typical “struggler,” as in the title of my keynote speech at the Australasian Aid conference several weeks ago: “Strugglers: This Century’s New Development Challenge.” Below is a rough summary of my talk.
Many of the world’s poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa have shown they can reform and improve governance. But the momentum is fizzling out. In a new round of tough reforms, African leaders will need to do the heavy lifting. Africa is still poor, and not yet able to finance the investments critical to a new round of growth and poverty reduction. Here’s what donors could do.
Modern contraception may be the single most important technology for development—it liberates women to think ahead, as men have always been able to do. Last month, CGD hosted the Third Annual Birdsall House Conference on Women: “Reproductive Choices to Life Chances: New and Existing Evidence on the Impact of Contraception on Women’s Empowerment.” The conference featured presentations from some of the world’s top scholars.
Commentary Menu