Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
Amartya Sen’s famous study of famines found that a nation’s people died not because of a food shortage but because some people lacked entitlements to that food. In a new CGD working paper with Chris Hoy, we ask if a similar situation is now the case for global poverty: are national resources available but not being used to end poverty?
When the Upper House of India’s parliament recently passed the landmark Goods and Service Tax (GST) legislation, India finally, after more than six decades of independence, became a truly common market. That could be a game changer for India’s development in the coming years.
Depending on who you listen to, the World Bank has either just launched an unprecedented reach into the domestic political affairs of sovereign nations, or it has gutted the rules that have helped define its essential character as a global norm-setter. Both can’t be right, and most likely, neither is. To better understand the objectives of the bank's newly adopted “safeguards” regime, and why I’m somewhat encouraged by it, it’s worth looking more closely at the arguments of critics on both sides.
I’ve been working on the idea of Cash on Delivery (COD) for some years under the hypothesis that if we could define good outcome indicators, someone would step forward to buy them. So what would happen if an organization came forward with a plan to supply a verified outcome in return for a set unit payment after delivery? In a sense, this is what Dispensers for Safe Water, an Evidence Action program, is currently doing.
A yearlong project of the Ford Foundation has asked a simple question—“What is inequality?”—to CGD’s Michael Clemens along with a group including Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz, Gloria Steinem, Sir Richard Branson, and Sir Elton John. Many spoke about rising domestic inequality. But to Clemens, #InequalityIs global. And innovative policy can tap the power of migration to reduce inequality while minimizing its risks.
Should patients be paid to seek lifesaving services? Should patients receive lifesaving service free of charge? While these two questions have typically been studied separately, we decided to take a look at them together. In our new study, published in Health Services Research, we find that not charging pregnant women for health services mattered less than paying them.
Got 27,000 Canadian dollars? If so, why not sponsor a family of refugees? In this week's CGD podcast, Senator Ratna Omidvar discusses Canada’s experience of migration and refugees, and its unique program of private sponsorship.
The biometrics revolution has allowed more countries to create strong ID systems for their citizens. These systems have mostly relied on fingerprinting, but with the advent of low-cost, highly effective iris readers this is about to change.
Aid for countries after a disaster is rooted in our best impulses, but the way we provide it urgently needs to be reformed. We spend too little on reducing the costs of future disasters, aid shows up too late, and calls for reform are met with replies of “too bad” because the poorest people bear the greatest costs. But this is a problem that we can fix.
Female genital mutilation/cutting rates have fallen in some countries but risen in others, despite a global ban. A new paper looks at the success story of Burkina Faso and the role of legal reform in decreasing FGM/C.
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