Events
Past
Please join us to celebrate the launch of Charles Kenny's latest book, Results Not Receipts: Counting the Right Things in Aid and Corruption. This work illustrates a growing problem: an important and justified focus on corruption as a barrier to development has led to policy change in aid agencies that is damaging the potential for aid to deliver results. Donors have treated corruption as an issue they can measure and improve, and from which they can insulate their projects at acceptable costs by controlling processes and monitoring receipts. Results Not Receipts highlights the weak link between donors’ preferred measures of corruption and development outcomes related to our limited ability to measure the problem. It discusses the costs of the standard anti-corruption tools of fiduciary controls and centralized delivery, and it suggests a different approach to tackling the problem of corruption in development: focus on outcomes.
RISE is a large scale, multi-country research programme developed to answer the question: “How can education systems be reformed to deliver better learning for all?” The objective of this year’s conference is to bring together high profile academics and policy makers to discuss the RISE research agenda. The conference will feature a range of invited and contributed talks and panels, as well as three sessions focused on our six Country Research Teams (CRTs), including the announcement of our two newest CRTs. The RISE Programme is a collaboration between the Center for Global Development in Washington DC, the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, and Oxford Policy Management in Oxford, UK, and our CRTs include Tanzania, India, Pakistan, and Vietnam, with two further countries to be announced shortly.
Public-private partnerships (PPPs) in education that combine public finance to provide free or subsidized access to privately delivered education are expanding in many developing countries, either to increase access where government capacity is limited or to improve learning outcomes—often with limited evidence on their success. This panel will bring together experts from the policy and research spheres to review what we know about the design of effective partnerships, the hazards to be avoided, and the frontiers for new research.
A central issue in designing performance incentive contracts is whether to reward the production of outputs versus use of inputs: the former rewards efficiency and innovation in production, while the latter imposes less risk. But the promise of output-based contracts may remain unmet if providers lack the requisite skills to innovate and increase performance. In this seminar, Manoj Mohanan will present on new research that uses a field experiment in Karnataka, India to explore three questions: How does an input versus an output incentive contract affect maternity care, as measured by rates of postpartum hemorrhage, pre-eclampsia, sepsis, and neonatal survival? Do providers under input incentive contracts use different strategies and input combinations than providers under output incentive contracts? And, finally, does the skill level of the provider make a difference for their performance under the input versus output incentive contracts?
The early days of this new administration are a critical time for bipartisan exchange among leaders of previous administrations. Please join CGD for a conversation with three former Treasury Under Secretaries for International Affairs who played central roles in the Bush II and Obama administrations’ formulation and execution of international economic policy. The panel will discuss the outlook for the global economy, international structural changes and challenges that have emerged since their time in office, the critical issues that will confront the next Under Secretary for International Affairs, and the nature of the job and lessons learned. We hope you can join us for this stellar panel, as we continue to build understanding of global economic challenges and how the United States, working with others, can best meet them.
With cuts to foreign aid on the horizon, the United States, now more than ever, needs to sharpen its tools to operate in a constrained budget environment. Key to this approach is a strong development finance institution that can leverage private investment to achieve development outcomes, as well as create opportunity for American companies abroad—all at less than no cost to the US taxpayer.
Energy has fueled economic and social development worldwide. From the US to China to South Africa, energy has enabled countries to increase incomes and standards of living. In turn, expanding middle classes have increased their energy consumption. How can developing countries, especially middle-income countries, dramatically scale up energy use, and provide access to modern energy services to the billions who lack them, while keeping GHG emissions within the global goal of limiting dangerous temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, or even better 1.5 degrees?
Today’s newest recruits will determine tomorrow’s development agenda—and in this highly interactive, first-of-its-kind event, CGD research assistants and communications staff invite other young professionals and students to consider the future of global development.
Emergencies cause poverty, drive displacement, and exacerbate insecurity. Aid to tackle natural disasters is generous, but mainly arrives when needs are acute rather than when it would do most good. Responding effectively is hard because budgets are uncertain and funding gets promised but not delivered. Please join us for the launch of a new CGD report Payouts for Perils: Using Insurance to Radically Improve Emergency Aid setting out how we can use the principles and practice of insurance to save lives, money and time when catastrophes strike.
With current investment trends, by 2030, more than half the world’s children will not achieve a quality education. So, this year, global education financing is high on the agenda – at the G20, with the G7 accountability report, the World Bank’s World Development Report, and the upcoming replenishment conference for the Global Partnership for Education (GPE).
The Center for Global Development and the International Rescue Committee invite you to a high level discussion of how the world can find realistic, workable solutions to the global refugee crisis. The event will mark the launch of a new joint report, Refugee Compacts: Addressing the Crisis of Protracted Displacement.
The first Economic Inclusion Strategy for the EBRD, to be officially launched in May 2017, builds on four years of implementing inclusion concepts through the Bank’s operations. Economic inclusion, the opening up of access to labour markets, entrepreneurship and, more generally, economic opportunities to all is integral to achieving a transition to sustainable market economies. The strategy covers the period of 2017 – 2021 and reflects the experience and lessons learned from the EBRD’s distinctive private sector focused inclusion approach as well as evolving inclusion challenges and best international practices across sectors and geographic regions.
Following more than a decade of healthy growth based on good economic policy and improved governance, African economies are now growing much more slowly. Potential investment returns remain high, however, and investment, especially in infrastructure, is critical to restoring growth and ensuring its sustainability in the region with the poorest and most fragile states in the world. How can the African Development Bank (AfDB) help unlock more funds for investment on the continent — in infrastructure, where the bank has a good record, and in education, where its leadership could help trigger critical reforms? And what is the role of the AfDB relative to the other multilateral development banks (MDBs)?
According to The Economist, India's proposal to give every citizen a cash transfer using the digital platform Aadhar could reduce absolute poverty from 22 percent to 0.5 percent. For a country that is home to a third of the world's poor, could Universal Basic Income (UBI) fundamentally change the picture of poverty, health and well-being in India and the world?
The World Development Report for 2017 is on Governance and the Law. The report fits into (and helps address) two linked debates about development and the role of the World Bank: first is the tension between best practices, rankings, and learning across economies with the ideas of going with the grain and problem-driven iterative adaption that have culminated in the President of the World Bank, Jim Kim, suggesting “we will never go back to the bad old days when the World Bank and other organizations told countries what to do. We don’t do that anymore.” Second is a debate over the strategic role of the Bank –building consensus and backing holistic endeavors like the SDGs or being more adversarial and pushing prioritization. Luis-Felipe Lopez-Calva, co-director of the Report will discuss these issues with Michael Klein, former vice president for financial and private sector development at the World Bank and a driving force behind the World Bank’s Doing Business indicators. An open discussion will follow.