Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
We model household investments in young children when parents and older siblings share caregiving responsibilities and when investments by older siblings contribute to young children’s human capital accumulation. Having an older sister rather than an older brother improves younger siblings’ vocabulary and fine motor skills by more than 0.1 standard deviations.
Is research into a Covid-19 vaccine a suitable use of Official Development Assistance (ODA)? This note attempts to tease apart a discussion of “is this ODA” from “is this a global public good?” and then separate out again “is this ODA and/or a global public good?” from “is this an efficient way to spend money?”
Limited resources mean that policymakers must make tough choices about which investments to make to improve education. Although hundreds of education interventions have been rigorously evaluated, making comparisons between the results is challenging. This paper proposes using learning-adjusted years of schooling (LAYS)—which combines access and quality and compares gains to an absolute, cross-country standard—as a new metric for reporting gains from education interventions.
On Wednesday, September 23, CGD Senior Fellow Prashant Yadav appeared before the United States International Trade Commission (USITC) at a virtual hearing examining “COVID-19 Related Goods: The U.S. Industry, Market, Trade, and Supply Chain Challenges.” His testimony focused on trade and supply chain issues for COVID-19 related medical products and he offered recommendations for building more resilient supply chains.
Evidence on ‘what works’ to promote women’s economic empowerment has expanded in recent years but remains geographically unbalanced, with English speaking countries and those with more longstanding research traditions better represented. Recognizing the importance of context specificity in understanding and advancing gender equality, we seek to fill a gap in the literature by reviewing interventions, policies, and broader socio-economic trends within West Africa and the extent to which they have contributed to progress in narrowing economic gender gaps in the region.
Based on the economic sector in which household members work, we use microsimulation to estimate the distributional consequences of COVID-19-induced lockdown policies in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. Our estimates of the poverty consequences are worse than many others’ projections because we do not assume that the income losses are proportionally equal across the income distribution.
How should policies to control the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic differ across countries? We extend recent contributions integrating economic and epidemiological models for the United States to a developing country context, Uganda.
This paper looks at what the UK’s approach to tariffs will mean for developing countries’ access to the UK market, and whether the government will achieve its pledge to improve access post-Brexit.
Using a phone survey of 1,211 households in Pakistan, we examine the effects of COVID-19 on three key domains: education, economic, and health-related.
Development finance is multifaceted, but empathy is a rarely discussed characteristic of the relationship between providers and clients. Sir Suma Chakrabarti and Hannah Brown argue this should be more of a consideration for DFIs.
We construct a fiscal policy dashboard to provide a snapshot of the fiscal system of a country, focusing on macro-sustainability, revenue mobilization, spending composition, and redistributive effects.
COVID-19 creates additional challenges that policymakers need to consider while designing and implementing new social assistance programs. This note describes how Bihar addressed the policy challenges to implement the program and the lessons it holds for India and globally.
This paper advances the concept of budgetary space for health, which explores resources available for health that are generated through higher public expenditure, better budget allocations, and through improved public financial management (PFM).
Area-based approaches treat needs holistically within a defined community or geography; provide aid that is explicitly multisector and multidisciplinary; and design and implement assistance through participatory engagement with affected communities and leaders. Integrating these elements of area-based logic into the humanitarian coordination architecture would better align humanitarian action around the expressed needs and aspirations of crisis-affected people.
We compile a new data set, combining official sources with transaction-level records scraped from the World Bank website, spanning all commitments, disbursements, and payments on all World Bank loans from before the 2008-09 Global Financial Crisis through August 2020, allowing us to compare the Bank’s COVID response to the last comparable global crisis. We find that lending has indeed accelerated in 2020, but the Bank appears to be on track to fulfill only half of its own target of $160 billion in new lending by June 2021.
The Development Assistance Committee (DAC) recently produced a long-awaited set of rules for how debt relief on loans should be scored as Official Development Assistance (ODA). Unfortunately, the rules suffer from a number of statistical problems and the DAC needs to take these rules back to the drawing board, or lose credibility.
Our findings highlight the need to boost the knowledge of health care workers to achieve greater care readiness. Training programs have shown mixed results, so systems may need to adopt a combination of competency-based pre-service and in-service training for health care providers (with evaluation to ensure the effectiveness of the training), and hiring practices that ensure the most prepared workers enter the systems. We conclude that in settings where clinical knowledge is poor, improving drug availability or reducing health workers’ absenteeism would only modestly increase the average care readiness that meets minimum quality standards.
We collected publicly available information, interviewed experts, and used our diverse range of expertise to analyse and model the COVID-19 vaccine portfolio in order to generate predictions about the vaccine portfolio's timeline.
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