Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
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¿Qué tan resilientes serían las economías emergentes si ocurriese otra recesión global? En este caso, las debilidades del pasado podrían ser buenos predictores de vulnerabilidades futuras.
In his post, John Simon, a former CGD visiting fellow, politely disagreed with our suggestion that donors are mainly using the wrong instrument to support private-sector investment. John made some excellent points (which we urge you to read in full). And, as we stressed in our first post, we all agree that private investment is crucial for delivering social returns in developing countries.
Elizabeth Littlefield, President and CEO of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, sits down with me to discuss the agency's success in leading the transition from aid to private finance (despite its modest size), as well as what it has in store for the remainder of the Obama presidency.
Meeting the SDG targets for infrastructure in developing countries is going to cost around USD 1 trillion a year. With official development assistance at around $150 billion, other official flows at $27 billion, and investment in infrastructure with private involvement at about $181 billion, it is clear that the majority of infrastructure finance will have to come from domestic resource mobilization in developing countries (which comes to about $9.2 trillion per year).
In an earlier blog post, we explained why we think that donors and development finance institutions are getting it wrong by issuing guarantees and cheap loans to the private sector. We argue they should instead be increasing the returns for firms when they succeed. Today, a former CGD Visiting Fellow, John Simon, disagrees.
We are enthusiastic about the growing interest in supporting private investment in developing countries, but it matters a lot how this is done. The sorry history of failed and distortionary partnerships should tell us something about how donor countries can do a better job of working with the private sector.
Here’s an obvious truth: tax lost to trade misinvoicing in Africa does not equal tax lost to transfer mispricing by multinational corporations in Sierra Leone, which does not equal lost health-care spending. Unfortunately, a policy paper released on Tuesday by Oxfam makes exactly these equivalences. This sort of imprecision is widespread, and it’s not going to help the poor.
The US failure to approve governance reforms at the IMF is what led China to create the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Ben Bernanke is the latest prominent voice to employ this narrative.
After a successful replenishment earlier this year, the board of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, is thinking through how to maximize the impact of the money it has raised. One hot issue is graduation from Gavi support. Currently, the Alliance uses an income cutoff loosely based on eligibility for IDA — soft loans from the World Bank.
During the Queen’s Speech, newly re-elected British Prime Minister David Cameron proposed an extended counter-extremism bill in order to confront “head-on the poisonous Islamist extremist ideology.” A press release from the Prime Minister’s office said that the Bill would give new powers to the UK’s Charity Commission to identify charities that use their income to fund extremism and terrorism.
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