Publications

This paper outlines the proposed governance arrangements for the TFFF. The performance payments would be allocated as part of a global offer, available to all countries with extensive tropical forests that meet the performance standards.

This paper outlines the proposed financing strategy for the pay-for-performance financing facility. The performance payments would be distributed as part of a global offer, available to all countries with extensive tropical forests.

The Tropical Forest Finance Facility is an attempt to generate significant new finance to fund pay-for-performance incentives for tropical forest conservation. The TFFF proposal includes two key innovations: 1) the way it will raise funds, by converting low-cost sovereign credit from mission-driven investor countries and companies into cash that can be used to drive change in developing countries, through an instrument similar to a sovereign wealth fund; and 2) the way it will distribute funds, using the Cash-On-Delivery aid approach that supports country ownership and only pays for results as they are achieved and verified.

Individuals do escape poverty during periods of overall rise in the poverty rate; they also transit into poverty during periods of overall decline in the poverty rate. In this paper, I explore six sweeps of household surveys of Nigeria (1980–2010) in an attempt to address these concerns. In addition, I test whether different processes are at work in determining chronic and transient poverty. 

Policymakers and voters reasonably want to know what the effects of immigration are, to help them decide how much immigration there should be. But the effects of immigration are highly contingent on where, when, how, and who. We must ask a more fruitful question: how can different policy choices generate positive economic effects from immigration and avoid negative ones? Immigration is not inherently “good” or “bad.” Its effects depend on the context and the policy choices that shape it.

This brief essay explores a key but often overlooked hurdle to using blockchain solutions, which is the complexity that decentralized solutions necessarily introduce. At times, the benefits of such solutions appear to exceed the added cost of complexity but often they do not. With this tradeoff in mind, the paper considers two use cases, digital ID and health supply chain management.

The international family planning community has made impressive gains in increasing global access to high-quality, voluntary family planning services. However, significant challenges remain with maintaining current support and meeting the growing need projected for family planning services and commodities across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

The paper critically reviews the arguments for and against both employment guarantees and income guarantees when viewed as rights-based policy instruments for poverty reduction in a developing economy, with special reference to India. Evidence on India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act does not suggest that the potential for either providing work when needed or reducing current poverty is being realized, despite pro-poor targeting. Instead, work is often rationed by local leaders in poor areas, and the poverty impact is small when all the costs are considered.