Publications

While China and India plan to use coal to meet energy demands, Kevin Ummel notes the incredible potential for concentrating solar power (CSP) in the region, using spatial data to identify areas for solar power growth.

Severino and Ray envision a new conceptual framework to manage the complexity of current international collaboration in development assistance.

Scarce resources. Climate change. Population growth. Rising food prices. Feeding the world’s hungry will require a giant leap in agricultural innovation. In a new working paper, senior fellow Kimberly Elliott explores how advance market commitments could pull the private sector into producing for the world’s poor.

Nancy Birdsall, Augusto de la Torre, and Felipe Valencia Caicedo analyze the Washington Consensus, from its early beginnings to failure as a reform agenda.

Over 60 percent of Africans have access to a cell phone, a simple technology that many believe will fundamentally change the dynamics of agricultural markets, banking, and government service delivery. In a new paper, Jenny Aker and Isaac Mbiti separate the hype from the reality.

The World Food Programme has world-class logistics, but its ability to manage financial risk is extremely limited. The WFP should consider implementing a targeted hedging pilot strategy for increased predictability. Greater commitments of untied cash from donors and support for the proposed Food Security Trust Fund at the World Bank would help.

Nancy Birdsall argues that the concept of inclusive growth should go beyond the traditional emphasis on the poor (and the rest) and take into account changes in the size and economic command of the group conventionally defined as neither poor nor rich, that is, the middle class.

This working paper re-releases a 2005 CGD analysis of failed World Bank aid to Pakistan in the 1990s and identifies the lessons that are relevant today, as aid to Pakistan surges again.