Events
Upcoming
In The Shadow List, State Department crisis expert Judd Ryker is chasing an American banker who’s disappeared after falling for a Nigerian scam. Meanwhile, his CIA wife Jessica is hunting a notorious Russian mob boss. Little do they know, they’re pulling on opposite ends of the same dangerous thread. Throw in Chinese oil companies under attack, corrupt American politicians, a kidnapped NBA star, and an undercover FBI sting operation and it’s the latest diplomatic thriller ripped from the headlines by CGD senior fellow Todd Moss.
Strengthening institutions is a foremost priority in fragile states and building fiscal capacity is especially important in the effort to exit fragility. In its recent paper Building Fiscal Capacity in Fragile States, the IMF draws on analysis of 39 fragile states and eight country case studies to describe its approach to fiscal reforms in fragile states and to draw lessons going forward. Participants will bring both advisory and policymaker perspectives to the panel discussion.
Past
The 2014-2015 Ebola epidemic broke out and affected thousands of people at a time when there were no medicines approved to treat or prevent Ebola. Poor infrastructure, capacity gaps, widespread mistrust, and disagreements over the design and ethical nature of any clinical trials complicated efforts to conduct research on investigational drugs and vaccines. In the wake of the outbreak, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine tasked a committee with analyzing the clinical trials carried out during the outbreak and developing recommendations to improve the implementation of such trials in the future. In this session, committee members Gerald Keusch and David Peters will discuss findings from the committee’s recently released report and the kind of governance structures that need to be in place for effective international coordination and collaboration.
More than a billion Indian residents now have a biometric digital identity: Aadhaar. Its use across various sectors is increasing rapidly. The State of Aadhaar Report 2016-17 aims to provide a comprehensive overview of Aadhaar’s technological and operational architecture, legal and governance framework, uses in financial inclusion and social protection, and emerging applications in other sectors. Given the large scale and complicated nature of Aadhaar and its uses, the purpose of this report is to provide a holistic picture of the Aadhaar landscape over the last decade, to encourage evidence-informed discourse and decision making in the public and private sectors, and to spur future policy-relevant research projects.
As part of its national health reforms, El Salvador assigned community health teams to 98 of its poorest municipalities. While some municipalities received traditional (input-based) aid to support the program and others received national funding, some municipalities received funding through the Salud Mesoamerica Initiative (SMI), a results-based aid (RBA) program focused on maternal and child health targets. In this seminar, Sebastian Martinez will present on his new research with Pedro Bernal and Pablo Celhay, which uses a difference-in-difference design to assess whether municipalities that received RBA funding were more effective at delivering health services. Martinez will also discuss the program's spillover effects on men and the elderly, as well as its implications for population health.
To coincide with the launch of the IMF’s latest global economic forecasts, and following the G-20 Summit, please join IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde and CGD president Masood Ahmed for a conversation about challenges and trends ahead for the global economy.
What is the role of the IMF in ensuring inclusive growth and stability in the years to come, and how should it respond to ongoing and emerging issues, including fragile states, rising inequality, technological innovation, and the future of international economic cooperation? The discussion will focus on issues related to the future of the international economy.
In their new paper, Markus Goldstein and co-authors examine the effects of land title registration in Rwanda using a national-level randomized control trial. They concluded that the program resulted in a significant shift of labor from agriculture to non-farm enterprises and wage work, with an improvement in welfare.
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).