Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
News broke on April 9th of agreement between the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain to pilot “multilateral automatic tax information exchange.” In France, President Hollande went further – announcing a draft law aimed at ‘moralising’ French public life, as former budget minister Jerome Cahuzac was expelled from the governing party for repeatedly denying the existence of his Swiss bank account.
Richard Manning, a highly respected former chair of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) says in the FT that the OECD is "encouraging OECD finance ministries to get away with murder as they seek to massage reported aid upwards at minimum cost."
As expected, the president’s budget includes a request for Congress to approve US participation in the 2010 IMF quota reform agreement. There’s a very strong case for approving the request, and I’ll simply point you here, here, and here to read it in detail. Suffice it to say, the IMF is a bargain for US taxpayers, promoting growth and stability globally in ways that directly benefit the US economy and often working in support of US strategic interests around the world.
Over 100 countries have adopted national renewable power targets, with particular focus on wind and solar power (WSP). WSP offers many socioeconomic and environmental benefits but it has two major drawbacks: 1) it's comparatively costly and 2) it's not always available when we need it (i.e. intermittency).
President Obama is set to release his FY2014 budget request tomorrow and expectations for foreign aid reform are high. At the top of the list is a widely-anticipated overhaul of US food aid that my colleague Kim Elliott says could be a bipartisan proposal that shakes up the status quo (and saves money and lives, too). Meanwhile, USAID has hinted that the budget will show some reductions in country program areas that either no longer need USAID to continue or were too small to have an impact. The request will also matter for the MCC, which has a record number of countries eligible for compacts but could be facing near record low funding. And I’ll be looking for signs that the budget reflects the president’s global development priorities outlined in the Presidential Policy Directive, including a focus on economic growth and results, leadership in the multilateral development banks and progress on food security. More than anything, I’m hoping the budget request shows a smarter way to rethink US foreign aid than the across-the-board sequestration cuts.
I hope you’ll help us read through the budget request tomorrow and share your views on whether it meets, exceeds or falls short of expectations.
Latin America’s distribution of income and wealth has long been the most unequal in the world—but poverty and inequality have been falling consistently since 2000 in most countries of the region. What has changed in Latin America? Are the region’s governments more committed to equality than in the past? Have their tax and spending policies improved? Which governments are most committed? Which least? What policies and programs have been most effective in redistributing income? Are they sustainable? What is holding Latin America back from faster gains?
In this week’s Wonkcast, recorded in the run-up to the institutions’ Spring Meetings, we consider these questions. My guests are Nancy Birdsall, founding president of CGD, and Todd Moss, vice president of programs and senior fellow.
Last week CGD released a new working paper that I’ve been working on—together with my co-authors Tessa Bold, Mwangi Kimenyi, Germano Mwabu, and Alice Ng’ang’a—since I was a grad student in 2007. “Scaling Up What Works: Experimental Evidence on External Validity
Last week saw a series of news stories break around the world, in what may have been the largest ever cross-border journalistic collaboration. The stories, coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), are based on a major leak of files from company formation agents operating primarily in the British Virgin Islands and the Cook Islands.
This post was originally published in The Broker.
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