Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
This essay lays out the story of how the UNDP team with its development partners achieved universal ID registration in Malawi, the challenges we faced, the roadblocks, how UNDP coordinated with other stakeholders and community development partners, and highlights the synergies that helped us achieve success.
Countries across Africa continue to face major challenges in education. In this review, we examine 142 recent empirical studies (from 2014 onward) on how to increase access to and improve the quality of education across the continent, specifically examining how these studies update previous research findings.
We study the impact of a multi-faceted social protection program, often referred to as a “graduation” model program, in Yemen during a period of civil unrest. After four years we find positive impacts on asset accumulation and savings behavior, albeit substantially less than the amount the household originally received.
How does immigration affect incomes in the countries migrants go to, and how do rising incomes shape emigration from the countries they leave? The answers depend on whether people who migrate have higher or lower productivity than people who do not migrate.
Many governments seek to reduce emigration from low-income countries by encouraging economic development there. A large literature, however, observes that average emigration rates are higher in countries with sustained increases in GDP per capita than in either chronically poor countries or established rich countries.
Governments have long faced pressure to address the climate crisis by increasing taxes on fossil fuels, which are the source of more than three-quarters of the world’s anthropogenic carbon pollution.
Pay levels for public sector workers—and especially teachers—are a constant source of controversy. In many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, protests and strikes suggest that pay is low while simple comparisons to average national income per capita suggest that it is high.
The prime minister’s most influential advisor, Dominic Cummings, is a champion of “effective altruism”—the use of evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to maximize the good with a given unit of resources. With the UK government in the midst of a major “Integrated Review” of its foreign, development, and defence policy—and the recent the formation of a merged Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office confirming it isn’t afraid of change—now’s a good time to consider whether the effective altruism movement can or should find great traction in UK aid programmes.
Two out of five low-income countries were in the grips of, or moving rapidly toward, unsustainable debt levels before the global pandemic. But the economic, financial, and fiscal effects of the pandemic have brought the day of reckoning for many countries much closer. The global financial community is likely entering another period of messy, prolonged, costly, and contentious debt defaults and restructurings. It does so with no more—and in some ways less—consensus on the principles that should govern collective action by public and private creditors, debtor governments, and the IFIs.
Being a force for good in the world is more than about branding, or even good intentions: it requires impact and an organisation capable of it. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s vision offers a good starting point for being a values-driven force for good in the world, but within that vision there are potential tensions that need to be managed, rather than left to seethe.
Domestic revenue mobilization (DRM) is critical for developing countries to finance the spending necessary to enable sustainable development.
This note lays out calculations of the UK’s net fiscal contribution to the EU budget between the years 2008 to 2018, and quantifies the support provided to other EU countries to promote their economic growth, regional convergence and rural development, but which is not classified as aid.
Development finance institutions (DFIs) suggest that transparency is important to their development impact, and many aim to be in a leadership position on reporting about their work, but actual practice on transparency varies significantly between DFIs.
In this note, we review Colombia's handling of the COVID-19 crisis. The first line of policy response slowed down the pace of contagion and avoided excess deaths, providing additional time to strengthen the health system and increase ICU capacity. However, the challenges that remain are significant. We provide some policy recommendations for the next stages of the pandemic.
On July 23, 2020, CGD Senior Fellow Prashant Yadav appeared before the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Trade at a hearing titled “Trade, Manufacturing, and Critical Supply Chains: Lessons From COVID-19.” Yadav’s testimony noted the vulnerabilities in supply chains for medical products clearly exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and outlined key considerations for US policy toward medical supply chains moving forward.
Globalization is under attack.US isolationism is part of a worldwide phenomenon: anti-globalizers have risen to power in countries from Brazil and Hungary to the UK. And they led efforts to build walls real and virtual against trade and exchange. From the intellectual right, globalization is blamed for cultural decay. From the left it is attacked as a source of inequality and repression.
The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global shock that hit Latin America particularly hard.
The World Bank’s non-concessional borrowing (NCBP) policy for IDA countries was introduced in 2006 following major rounds of debt relief and debt cancellation for a large subset of these countries through the Heavily Indebted Poor Country Initiative and the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative.
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