Ideas to action: independent research for global prosperity
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Blog Post
July 20, 2020
Over the last sixty years, we have seen many changes in what constitutes a "rich" country, but little difference in what counts as a poor country requiring significant development assistance. While donor status appears more closely tied to relative income, significant recipient status appears to hav...
Blog Post
July 25, 2019
The UK’s development agency, DFID, has stated that it views research as the best way to spend aid and that it intends to place high quality research central to its aid strategy. In a new paper, we find significant problems with the way that UK aid is being used to back rese...
POLICY PAPERS
July 25, 2019
The UK has considerably increased the amount of aid it spends on research in recent years. We suggest reporting reforms that will increase transparency and allow greater scrutiny of the way UK research aid is spent. We also call for the UK to live up to its reporting to the OECD that all British aid...
Blog Post
July 09, 2019
The UK government has recently ramped up the amount of aid that is directed towards research and development. While this can be positive in ensuring a sound research base for UK aid funds, this should not be seen as an opportunity to plug UK university funding deficits, or to "tie aid" to ...
WORKING PAPERS
February 05, 2018
This paper attempts a first-cut listing of global public goods and international spillover activities, as well as providing some data on their global distribution alongside basic correlational analysis. Few if any goods are “pure” global public goods and there is a spectrum of the extent...
Blog Post
January 25, 2018
Since the publication of our paper on the IFC’s project portfolio last week, we have received several helpful comments from readers. They plausibly suggest that the portfolio may be (even) less risky than we suggested, with even more space to pivot towards the low income countries wh...
Blog Post
January 17, 2018
Vijaya Ramachandran, Ben Leo, Jared Karlow and I have just published two papers looking at where and in what capacity the IFC, OPIC, and selected European development finance institutions (DFIs) are investing their money. The core of the papers is a dataset that Jared painstakingly put together by s...
Blog Post
January 17, 2018
The IFC is designed to catalyze investments in countries that investors might consider too risky to invest in alone. But our recent analysis of IFC’s portfolio found that it is shying away from risky investments, raising serious questions about whether the IFC is focusing on the...
POLICY PAPERS
January 17, 2018
Development Finance Institutions (DFIs)—which provide financing to private investors in developing economies—have seen rapid expansion over the past few years. This paper describes and analyses a new dataset covering the five largest bilateral DFIs alongside the IFC which includes projec...
POLICY PAPERS
January 17, 2018
IFC’s portfolio is not focused where it could make the most difference. Low income countries are where IFC has the scale to make a considerable difference to development outcomes. While an excessive portfolio shift might imperil IFC’s credit rating, the evidence suggests that there is co...