Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
Robert Mugabe wants your money again. After years of failing to repay Zimbabwe’s staggering debts, repeatedly blaming the United States for its problems, and shamelessly courting China, the nonagenarian president is now seeking a rapprochement.
There have been numerous estimates of future poverty to 2030 based on projections of growth and inequality that rely on informed assumptions and guess work. With that method, no matter how carefully done, you’re almost certain to get it wrong. So Peter Edward and I decided to do something different: look back at growth and its distribution since 1990 and see what it would have taken to have ended global poverty by now based on the actual data.
Last week we were in Dar es Salaam and attended a dinner with a small group of about 15 of Tanzania’s policy, business, and political elite.
I have argued that tobacco taxes are the single best health policy that any country could implement. The World Bank is the most prominent organization in the world with the skills, mandate, and network to support raising tobacco taxes in developing countries where the number of smokers and shortened lives is increasing every year. Yet, the World Bank has committed far too little to this effort. One of the key reasons is that World Bank management has let this best-buy for development fall between the cracks – tobacco is a health issue and taxes are a fiscal policy issue.
How can poor countries beat the resource curse? CGD research fellow Justin Sandefur returns to the Podcast hotseat to update us on a project that posed this question to ordinary people in Tanzania. CGD teamed up with REPOA to bring hundreds of Tanzanians to Dar es Salaam to debate what to do with that country’s newly-discovered natural gas deposits. This week, Justin is back to share the project’s results.
Experts worry letting ordinary citizens manage resource windfalls will lead to populism. We ran a randomized trial in deliberative democracy in Tanzania to find out.
Yesterday evening, in the beautiful city of Bath, CGD’s Matt Juden was awarded the prize for best MSc dissertation at the annual dinner of the UK’s Development Studies Association.
Alongside National Ants on a Log Day, Andorra’s National Day, and Bernie Sanders’ birthday, September 8 is International Literacy Day. This year, UNESCO has chosen the theme “Literacy and Sustainable Societies” to correspond with the upcoming adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals at the United Nations.
Last week, CGD released a working paper by Jonah Busch and Jens Engelmann on the future of the world’s forests. At first glance, the predictions are dire: an area of tropical forest the size of India gone by 2050, one-sixth of the world’s carbon budget spent in the next 35 years, a world more prone to storms and natural disasters. But there is hope.
No one said creating development impact bonds (DIB) was going to be easy, but that hasn’t stopped the development community from trying to get them off the ground. The Fred Hollows Foundation, based in Australia, has been hard at work on a DIB to address cataract blindness in Africa. As the Foundation attracts partners to help fund and implement a pilot of the cataract bond, Dr. Lachlan McDonald, the Foundation’s senior health economist, and Alex Rankin, their Global Lead for Policy, Advocacy & Research, shared some lessons learned so far. With Lachlan and Alex’s permission, we’re turning some of those lessons over to you – we hope they’re useful to others seeking to move ahead with their own DIB.
Commentary Menu