This paper provides the background to a series of more detailed studies of the policies of European countries as they relate to CGD's Commitment to Development Index.

How do entrepreneurs learn whether they have what it takes to manage larger businesses? It's likely through experimentation. In this paper, Dean Karlan, Ryan Knight, and Christopher Udry develop a model to help understand the impediments to experimentation and the benefits to giving it a try.

Latin America is known for high levels of inequality, which governments can lessen somewhat through smart policy. In this paper, Nora Lustig and others analyze how and whether taxes, subsidies, and social spending reduce inequality across countries in the region and identify which policies are most...

This paper details that results of an experiment in northern Ghana in which small-scale farmers were randomly given different kinds of potentially risk-reducing assistance.

Climate negotiations have focused on reaching a top-down international agreement and on mobilizing a pool of financial resources. This brief explains the urgent need for a new entity to provide nonfinancial services to faciliate and augment climate action that any nations and private actors take. It...

Middle-income countries are now home to most of the world’s extreme poor and to what Andy Sumner calls the “buoyant billions”—those living on between $2 and $10 a day. Sumner follows the trends and implications.

This study surveys the current state of law as it relates to persons displaced by natural disaster, with a specific focus on the 27 member states of the European Union plus Norway and Switzerland.