Decades of research have been unable to conclusively show either a positive or negative effect of aid on economic growth in poor countries. CGD senior fellow Arvind Subramanian and Raghuram G. Rajan use a new technique in their latest working paper that suggests aid slows the manufacturing sector b...

With the Copenhagen climate talks finally underway, a CGD survey of 500 development and climate aficionados in 88 countries finds unexpected agreement about what should be done—and important differences between respondents from developed and developing countries about how an agreement should be fina...

Previous research on post-conflict reconstruction holds that sustainable institution building is an indigenous process. This paper, however, contributes to a new understanding of small-scale external interventions. Through a randomized field study in Liberia, the authors find that the IRC’s communit...

Benjamin Leo, formerly of the U.S. Treasury and National Security Council and a key behind-the-scenes player in the inception and implementation of Multilateral Debt Relief Initiatives, examines the potential risk of renewed debt re-accumulation by countries that have only recently completed the HIP...

In this paper, we introduce FORMA (Forest Monitoring for Action), a prototype system for monitoring real-time deforestation from publicly available satellite data at a resolution of one square kilometer. Maps of the data showing probable areas of deforestation will be available on Google Earth and G...

In this working paper, the authors shed light on systemic problems of variability and valuation in the Penn World Table GDP estimates that distort cross-country comparisons of the data. They propose creating a new chained series that values all data at PPP prices and makes better use of disaggreg...

Zimbabwe faces a daunting array of obstacles to full economic recovery, including a crippling external debt burden. Todd Moss and Benjamin Leo urge that the current government must address the legacy of debt arrears and manage external debt in order to generate opportunities for reconstruction and g...