Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
The poor quality of education worldwide constitutes a learning crisis; donors and development agencies have been complicit in its creation, but they can and should be part of the solution, not by prescribing changes, but by fostering environments where change is possible.
The Quality of Agricultural Official Development Assistance (Ag QuODA) measures how well donors giving agricultural aid score on the dimensions of aid quality that evidence and experience suggest lead to effective aid. Improvements in the data quality and availability are making sector-specific assessments like Ag QuODA more feasible, but further improvements are needed to allow a deeper understanding of aid effectiveness.
The costs of food aid reform are few, but the benefits would be substantial. Now is the time to bring food aid into the 21st century.
The US economy needs low-skill workers now more than ever, and that requires a legal channel for the large-scale, employment-based entry of low-skill workers. The alternative is what the country has now: a giant black market in unauthorized labor that hinders job creation and harms border security. A legal time-bound labor-access program could benefit the American middle class and low-skill workers, improve US border security, and create opportunities for foreign workers.
Regional trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership could leave some poor countries behind. Here are three policy changes to help Congress and President Obama avoid doing so.
Instead of giving an income transfer, the IFC should provide financing and its expertise in a way that fits what it does best—investing in the private sector—while giving the IFC incentives to accelerate what it should do even better—taking greater risks in poorer countries.
In the face of climate change, land and water scarcity, declining growth in crop yields, and dwindling public budgets, donors will need to be more innovative in how they deliver aid for agriculture.
This brief outlines how to implement a results-based approach in a way consistent with the World Bank’s recent experience with results-based disbursement, including its approval of the new Program for Results (PforR) instrument.
Since the 2010 earthquake, there has been very little direct procurement of goods or services from local businesses, missing a huge opportunity to spur long-term growth. Local procurement not only purchases immediately needed goods or services but helps grow the private sector, create jobs, and encourage entrepreneurs. Spending more money locally can multiply the effect of US assistance.
The transparency and accountability of US spending in Haiti needs to be improved. Despite the large amount of public money disbursed for earthquake recovery in Haiti, it is nearly impossible to track how the money has been spent and what has been achieved.
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 explores one possible path for filling the gap: the creation of a new arm of the World Bank.
Few problems are as pressing and as existential for the world as climate change, and few have proven to be as intractable. Three decades of international negotiations on climate change have yielded little by way of action that would substantially slow, let alone reverse, human-caused climate change. Things can be different.
India’s Universal ID program seeks to provide a unique identity to all 1.2 billion residents. Its successes and potential failures will have far-reaching implications for other developing countries looking to create national identity systems.
The Commitment to Development Index ranks 27 of the world’s richest countries on their dedication to policies that benefit the 5.5 billion people living in poorer nations.
This brief presents a framework for increasing the efficiency of malaria-control initiatives that addresses where to intervene, what interventions are best, and how to deliver them most effectively.
Decisions about which type of patients receive what interventions, when, and at what cost often result from ad hoc, nontransparent processes driven more by inertia and interest groups than by science, ethics, and the public interest. Reallocating a portion of public and donor monies toward the most cost-effective health interventions would save more lives and promote health equity.
Economic growth and improved living standards require access to reliable, affordable, convenient, and safe cooking fuels and electricity. Today, 1.3 billion people lack access to electricity and roughly 2.7 billion are without access to clean, safe cooking fuel.[1] Securing energy, therefore, is a development imperative. But successfully confronting climate change is too: Global warming is already disproportionately affecting the poor and is threatening to reverse hard-won development gains. Fortunately, the two goals of ending energy poverty and protecting the climate are compatible.
This brief summarizes and updates results of the Quality of Official Development Assistance (QuODA) index applied to health aid and compares these results to the overall QuODA assessment. Through quantifying performance on aid effectiveness, we hope to motivate improvements in health aid effectiveness and contribute to the definition of better, more empirically based measures of health aid quality.
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