Before I get to the origin of CGD I want to say something about the concept of “mission.” I attended Catholic schools straight through college, and though before I left college I had left behind being a Catholic, I had apparently internalized the idea of having a mission in life—as in the missionari...

The story opens in the summer of 1990, when I became the head of a small technical division on environment in the Latin America region of the World Bank. The vice-president of the region told me (in so many words) he wanted an economist to take charge of what he saw as a “too-green” group. I resiste...

I was 26 years old and three months pregnant when I got a job in the summer of 1972 as an “analyst” at a USAID-funded program in Washington, DC, on think tank row (now home of the Brookings Institution, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and the Carnegie Endowment for International ...

Women apparently attribute success to luck; men to competence. I’m a successful woman—family and career and all that, and I don’t discount my own competence. But still the reality is that besides the luck of being born in America (see episode 1 in this series), which American men not just women tend...

The situation in Ukraine today, with over a million people fleeing the Russian advance, reminds me of Emil. I was in sixth grade, 10 years old, in a Catholic parochial school in New Jersey, when Emil joined our class. It was The situation in Ukraine today, with over a million people fleeing the Russ...

Most countries in sub-Saharan Africa have not implemented testing of children’s learning that can be benchmarked regionally or globally, in contrast to almost all countries in Latin America. Our analysis of the political economy of cross-national learning measurement in Latin America suggests ...