Events
Upcoming
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.
Past
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.
Using new data on roads and cities spanning over 50 years in 39 African countries, Remi Jedwab and colleagues document the effect of road construction on city population growth, through the channel of increasing market access. They estimate a 30-year elasticity of city population with respect to market access that is smaller than found in other regions. But they also find heterogeneity in returns within Africa that provides important insights about the potential return to specific transport investments, depending on context.
More than 21 million people around the world are living as refugees. Three-quarters of those do not live in refugee camps, but in urban communities, profoundly altering the social fabric of cities in major host countries. Currently their survival depends on both regular outside assistance from humanitarian agencies and host country governments, and their own support structures such as social network ties. With the average duration of refugee status now more than ten years, this is often an unsustainable solution. Please join the Center for Global Development, in collaboration with the Urban Institute, as we explore how urban refugees can play a greater role in local economies, become more self-reliant and less dependent on outside assistance. What might help them integrate more with host communities? What is the role of social and economic networks?
A protectionist stance from the US looms large as a policy concern for Latin America, where many countries have chosen a growth model based on increased integration with the rest of the world. It may force a major policy revision involving trade and financial sectors. Moreover, the region may be impacted even if protectionist policies are geared to other regions, e.g., China, given that they may result in a deterioration of commodity prices.
What should Latin America’s response be? What are the alternative forms of trade integration and markets creation that the region should explore? What is the role for monetary, fiscal and financial policies? What are the mistakes of the past to be avoided? These are among the key and timely issues that the Latin American Committee on Macroeconomics and Financial Issues (CLAAF) will address.
Private investment in health R&D by pharmaceutical companies, charitable foundations, and venture capital firms, among others, can help to save lives and boost the health of entire regions. But some countries’ health governance infrastructures, management capacities, regulatory processes, and policy conditions are better equipped to utilize this private funding than others. What governance factors promote an investment-friendly environment for the private sector? And how can countries attract more private sector health financing?
While short-terms effects from migration have received much attention over the years, Florence Jaumotte and her co-authors examine the longer-term impact of migration on the GDP per capita, and hence standards of living, of receiving advanced economies. Carefully addressingthe risk of reverse causality, the paper finds that immigration significantly increases the GDP per capita of host economies, mostly by raising productivity. Both high- and low-skilled migrants can contribute to raise productivity, likely through skill complementarity in the case of lower-skilled migrants. They also find the gains from immigration appear to be broadly shared across the population.