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CGD in the News
July 13, 2018
Article
Contact:
Holly Shulman
Center for Global Development
+1 (202) 674-8757
HShulman@cgdev.org,
Today, Michael Clemens, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, released the following statement responding to the announcement of the finalization of the Global Compact for Migration.
“This is the biggest step the world has taken to cooperatively face the defining policy challenge of our time: how to better regulate international migration in this century. The Compact offers a clear mandate and roadmap for countries to work together to get more of what they want from migration and less of what they do not want.
“Unfortunately, there is currently a political movement ascendant in the U.S., UK, Italy, and elsewhere promising to address the many problems of migration by restricting or eliminating it altogether. This new Compact is the defining alternative to that movement. It is a treasure chest of the best ideas on how to address the many challenges of migration with hard work and a pragmatic cooperative approach.
“While the Compact is now final, the real work is just beginning. As countries prepare to adopt the Global Compact for Migration in December, discussions will revolve around how to operationalize and implement the commitments agreed to in this document. One innovation endorsed by the Compact is the idea to create Global Skill Partnerships. Other innovations should also be piloted and tested out, as countries and their partners work to identify sustainable solutions to today’s migration challenges and opportunities.
“The road ahead will be difficult and many of the challenges and points of contention that arose during the Compact’s negotiations will not disappear with its adoption. Rather, countries will need to tackle these challenges head-on as they work toward pragmatic, evidence-based, and coordinated migration policies and practices that fulfill the objectives and commitments of the Compact. I welcome today’s achievement, and I look forward to supporting countries as they move forward with implementation.”
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July 5, 2018
Article
WASHINGTON — Washington’s candidate to head the United Nations’ migration agency was roundly rejected Friday, coming in last behind candidates proposed by two other countries, and raising fears of retaliation from its largest donor.
Leadership of the International Organization for Migration has historically been considered all but reserved for the United States. Since its founding in 1951, all its leaders bar one, in the 1960s, have been American. But in voting at its Geneva headquarters last week, the 171 member states elected António Vitorino of Portugal as the organization’s new director general. Vitorino, 61, is a former European commissioner for justice and home affairs and former deputy prime minister in a socialist government in Portugal, where he served under António Guterres.
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Jeremy Konyndyk, the former head of the U.S. government’s foreign disaster relief efforts during the Obama administration and a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, argued in a statement that the result represented a rejection of “the Trump administration’s own views on migration — attacking fundamental asylum rights in the United States, banning travel from numerous Muslim-majority countries, devastating refugee resettlement, and most notoriously, separating undocumented migrant children from their parents.”
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Characterizing the election result as a “stinging rebuke” to Washington, Michael Clemens, a senior fellow at CGD, stated, “I would be very surprised if the United States did not take some retaliation” against IOM.
Read the full article here.
July 5, 2018
Article
Although most of us picture refugees living in remote, dusty camps, as many as 2.1 million of the developing world’s working-age refugees reside in major urban areas—where they should have greater access to employment opportunities. However, according to a new report from the Center for Global Development, finding employment remains “one of the major unmet needs identified by refugees.”
To help illuminate this potential workforce, the Center for Global Development created an interactive map tool that displays the locations and sizes of refugee population relative to urban areas within 31 developing countries. Powered by open source mapping platform Mapbox, the map plots refugee populations by size and location (urban or rural). Hovering over a particular country will yield total refugee population, the percentage of working-age refugees, the breakdown between urban and rural populations, and the number of multinational companies and how many people they employ.
Read the full article here.
July 5, 2018
Article
More than a dozen African countries have been weighing the merits of adding the Chinese yuan to their mix of foreign reserves, discussing the idea at a gathering of officials last month in Harare, Zimbabwe.
Adopting the yuan, also known as the renminbi, or RMB, would make it easier for African countries to pay back loans to China.
But it could also increase reliance on an economic and development partner that’s come under increasing scrutiny for the conditions it places on deals with African partners.
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Multibillion-dollar loans to fund Chinese infrastructure projects tied to the Belt and Road Initiative represent sizable portions of some African economies. In Djibouti, for instance, infrastructure loans from China equal 75 percent of GDP, according to the Center for Global Development.
Repaying those loans might not be straightforward.
Read the full article here.
July 5, 2018
Article
By Kimberly Ann Elliott
The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate trade, and for more than a century it did so with gusto. Then, grasping for ways to escape the Great Depression and reverse the downward economic spiral that followed the protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which passed in 1930, Congress delegated some of its trade power to the executive branch. In subsequent decades, Congress provided additional authorities allowing the president to control trade policy. Now, however, with concerns about President Donald Trump’s aggressive trade policy moves—imposing a range of tariffs on close allies and rivals alike, and threatening more—there are calls to shift some of that authority back to Congress.
As the United States celebrates the anniversary of its founding this week, it seems like a good time to review history and see how and why the governance of trade evolved the way it has in Washington. This history suggests strongly that, while some rebalancing is desirable, Congress should exercise great caution in reclaiming its power to regulate trade.
Read the full article here.
July 5, 2018
Article
“At the heart of…USAID’s transformation, is the core belief that each country must lead its development journey, and finance and implement solutions to its development challenges,” said Susan Fine of USAID at a recent Center for Global Development event introducing USAID’s new “Journey to Self-Reliance ” indicators.
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“Using data is always preferable to relying on assumptions,” said Sarah Rose of the Center for Global Development. However, “no set of cross-country indicators is ever going to provide a complete picture or be able to fully answer everything you need to know about development.” The challenge lies in “ensuring that everyone who uses this tool…also utilizes it with a keen focus on some of the limitations as well,” said Rose.
Read the full article here.
July 5, 2018
Article
By Cindy Huang, Kate Gough, Nazanin Ash, Marcus Skinner
Bangladesh should pursue its dialogue with the international community with more ambition
On August 25, 2017, in retaliation to attacks on its local security forces by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), the Myanmar military undertook a campaign of violence and terror against the Rohingya people that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”
Nearly 700,000 people have fled to Bangladesh since August 2017 -- including more than 500,000 in a single month, the fastest refugee exodus since the Rwandan genocide. And while this campaign was most significant in terms of people displaced, it also capped a long history of disenfranchisement and abuse of the Rohingya in Myanmar.
Read the full article here.
July 5, 2018
Article
As you walk from classroom to classroom at Tibba Khara school on the outskirts of Lahore, Pakistan’s second-biggest city, the children seem to disappear. Pandemonium prevails in the first classroom, packed with five- and six-year-olds in their first year of school. But pass through the next few rooms, with progressively older classes, and both the number of pupils and the volume level steadily diminish. By the time you reach the class of ten- and 11-year-olds, there are just a handful of pupils left, silently studying.
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If you want to find an uneducated child in today’s world, argues Lant Pritchett, an economist at Harvard University, “you can find them in school”.
The extent of the failure is immense. According to a survey of three east African countries (Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda) published in 2014, three-quarters of pupils in the third year of primary school could not read a sentence such as: “The name of the dog is Puppy.” In rural India almost the same share could not subtract 17 from 46, or perform similar calculations with two-digit numbers. Research by the Centre for Global Development (CGD), a think-tank, suggests that in half of the developing countries for which they have data, less than 50% of women who left school after the age of 11 can read a sentence. UNESCO, the United Nations body responsible for education and science, estimates that six out of ten children worldwide (a total of more than 600m) do not meet a minimum standard of proficiency in reading and maths. The vast majority of these children are in school.
Read the full article here.
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