Demonetization is yesterday’s news. The India of today is going full steam ahead towards a digital economy powered by financial inclusion, the mobile revolution, and Aadhaar—the biometric ID system that now covers 90 percent of its 1.3 billion population. And the social compact of the future will restructure subsidies and provide a basic income for the poor.
There is still a considerable global agenda to improve three interlinked components of achieving gender equality—attitudes, laws, and outcomes, particularly in the marketplace—and no time like right now to start.
The global refugee crisis will undoubtedly be top of mind this week as representatives from ministries of finance and development, international finance institutions, the private sector, civil society, and academia descend on Washington, DC to discuss issues of global concern. As conflicts and crises continue to burn on, forcibly displacing more and more people worldwide, 2017 must be about turning rhetoric into action. This week’s spring meetings of the World Bank and IMF therefore come at an opportune moment—one where key actors can reflect on progress against last year’s commitments; determine and learn from what is and isn’t working well; and put measures in place to ensure that efforts moving forward lead to a real and positive impact on the lives and livelihoods of refugees and their host communities. Our new report, Refugee Compacts: Addressing the Crisis of Protracted Displacement, the result of a study group co-chaired by CGD and the IRC, is one input towards this end.
Sub-Saharan African countries are at a critical juncture. With China's slowdown and the collapse in commodity prices, growth slipped to 3.4 percent in 2015, on average just over half what it has been for the past 15 years. Estimated growth for 2016 is below the population growth rate of about 2 percent, thus negative in per capita terms.
We need an international assessment that will pinpoint educational challenges by providing consistent information on the status of all youth, not just those who have somehow stayed in formal schooling into adolescence. Think of a universal test of nine-year-olds in basic math, reading, and problem solving skills.
Adesina, Birdsall, Brown, Georgieva, Gillard, Miliband, Ngozi, Subramanian—these are some of the development heavyweights speaking at CGD at a series of events in the run up to the World Bank/IMF Spring Meetings. We hope you will join us—either in person or online—for timely conversations on some of the most pressing development challenges—and their potential solutions.
The world of business is still extremely gender-unequal. Across the countries in the World Bank’s enterprise surveys, less than one in five firms are run by a woman, for example. Governments could help fix that problem by using their immense purchasing power (close on $10 trillion a year in procurements) to foster the growth of women-owned enterprises. But at the moment—at least in the US—the government is a laggard rather than a leader when it comes to awarding contracts to women owned business. It’s time for that to change.
Financial transparency has been promoted as a key solution to improving governance and accountability. Some approaches are targeted such as open contracting (focused on public procurement), and regulations requiring extractive industry companies to ‘publish what they pay.’ Other proposals cast a much broader net such as calls for company owners to be listed on registers of beneficial ownership and mandatory publication of ‘country-by-country’ reports by all multinational corporations.
UN agencies are blocking reforms to aid to Syrian refugees. The donors should hold firm. Here’s why, and what they should do.
Energy wonks will gather in New York City on April 3 for the third annual Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All) forum to discuss progress on SDG7, whose aim is “By 2030, [to] ensure universal access to affordable, reliable and modern energy services.” The target is wonderful. The details are where this gets a little kinky.