Number of results to display per page
Search Results
22. Not Just Aid: How Making Government Work Can Transform Africa
- Author:
- Tony Blair
- Publication Date:
- 12-2010
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- Country ownership has become the new watchword in development. The problem for traditional donors is that ownership is too often code for convincing developing country governments to adopt the donors' agenda as their own: a way of securing influence without imposing conditionality. What is really needed is genuine country leadership. As President Obama said when he announced the United States' new development policy at the UN Millennium Development Goals summit in New York in September, “We will partner with countries that are willing to take the lead. Because the days when your development was dictated in foreign capitals must come to an end.”
- Topic:
- Development, Human Welfare, Humanitarian Aid, and Foreign Aid
- Political Geography:
- Africa, United States, New York, and United Nations
23. Giving Money Away? The Politics of Direct Distribution in Resource Rich States
- Author:
- Alexandra Gillies
- Publication Date:
- 11-2010
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- The governments of resource rich states have several options for how to allocate oil and mineral revenues, including the direct distribution of revenues to their citizens. This paper discusses the political feasibility and political implications of such cash transfers in the specific context of resource-rich states. Identifying the contexts in which this policy is mostly likely to emerge, and understanding the potential governance risks and benefits, will help policymakers to consider the desirability of cash transfers as an allocation choice.
- Topic:
- Development, Humanitarian Aid, Poverty, Foreign Aid, and Foreign Direct Investment
24. Think Long Term: How Global AIDS Donors Can Strengthen the Health Workforce in Africa
- Author:
- Nandini Oomman and Christina Droggitis
- Publication Date:
- 09-2010
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- For the past decade, global AIDS donors—including the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEFPAR), the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (the Global Fund), and the World Bank's Multi-Country HIV/AIDS Program for Africa (the MAP)—have responded to HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa as an emergency. Financial and programmatic efforts have been quick, vertical, and HIV-specific. To achieve ambitious HIV/AIDS targets, AIDS donors mobilized health workers from weak and understaffed national health workforces. The shortages were the result of weak data for effective planning, inadequate capacity to train and pay health workers, and fragmentation and poor coordination across the health workforce life-cycle. Ten years and billions of dollars later, the problem still persists. The time has passed for short-term fixes to health workforce shortages. As the largest source of global health resources, AIDS donors must begin to address the long-term problems underlying the shortages and the effects of their efforts on the health workforce more broadly.
- Topic:
- Development, Globalization, Health, Human Welfare, Humanitarian Aid, and Foreign Aid
- Political Geography:
- Africa
25. AIDS Treatment in South Asia: Equity and Efficiency Arguments for Shouldering the Fiscal Burden When Prevalence Rates Are Low
- Author:
- Mead Over
- Publication Date:
- 02-2009
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- The slower spread of AIDS in South Asian countries, combined with the fact that most South Asian countries have higher per capita incomes than the most severely affected countries of other regions imply that the various impacts of the disease will be smaller in South Asia than in the worst affected countries in other regions. While justified with respect to the impact of the disease on economic output, on poverty, or on orphanhood, this conclusion does not follow with respect to the health sector, where the relatively minor public role in health care delivery and the entrepreneurial and heterogeneous private health and pharmaceutical sectors combine to magnify the potential impact of the epidemic.
- Topic:
- Health and Humanitarian Aid
- Political Geography:
- South Asia and Asia
26. Rice Crisis Forensics: How Asian Governments Carelessly Set the World Rice Market on Fire
- Author:
- Tom Slayton
- Publication Date:
- 03-2009
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- The world rice market was aflame last spring and for several months it looked as if the trading edifice that had exhibited such resilience over the last two decades was going to burn to the ground. World prices trebled within less than four months and reached a 30- year inflation-adjusted high. Many market observers thought the previous record set in 1974 would soon be toast. The fire was man-made, not the result of natural developments. While the governments in India, Vietnam, and the Philippines did not to set the world market on fire, that was the unintended result of their actions which threatened both innocent bystanders (low-income rice importers as far away as Africa and Latin America) and, ultimately, poor rice consumers at home. This paper describes what sparked the fire and the accelerants that made a bad situation nearly catastrophic. Fortuitously, when the flames were raging at peak intensity, rain clouds appeared, the winds [market psychology] shifted, and conditions on the ground improved, allowing the fire to die down. It remains to be seen, however, if the trading edifice has been seriously undermined by the actions of decision makers in several key Asian rice exporting and importing countries. In describing the cascading negative effects of these seemingly rational domestic policies, this paper aims to help policy makers in the rice exporting and importing nations to avoid a repeat of the disastrous price spike of 2008.
- Topic:
- Agriculture, Economics, Health, Humanitarian Aid, Markets, and Political Economy
- Political Geography:
- Africa, India, Asia, and Latin America
27. Coping with Rising Food Prices: Policy Dilemmas in the Developing World
- Author:
- Nora Lustig
- Publication Date:
- 03-2009
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- Rising food prices cause considerable policy dilemmas for developing country governments. Letting domestic prices adjust to reflect the full change in international prices generates inflationary pressures and causes severe hardship for poor households lacking access to social safety nets. Alternatively, governments can use food subsidies or export restrictions to stabilize domestic prices, yet this exacerbates global food price increases and undermines a rules-based trading system. The recent episode shows that many countries chose to shift the burden of adjustment back to international markets. The use of corn and oilseed for the production of biofuel will result in a recurrence of such episodes in the foreseeable future.
- Topic:
- Agriculture, Development, Humanitarian Aid, and Markets
28. The End of ODA: Death and Rebirth of a Global Public Policy
- Author:
- Jean-Michel Severino and Olivier Ray
- Publication Date:
- 03-2009
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- The world of international development assistance is undergoing three concomitant revolutions, which concur to the emergence of a truly global policy. First, it is living through a diversification of the goals it is asked to pursue: to its traditional objective of ushering convergence between less and more developed economies have progressively been adjoined those of financing access to essential services and protecting global public goods. Secondly, faced with this new array of challenges, the world of development aid has demonstrated an impressive capacity to increase the number and diversity of its players, generating a governance conundrum for this eminently fragmented global policy. Thirdly, the instruments used by this expanding array of actors to achieve a broader range of policy objectives have themselves mushroomed, in the wake of innovations in mainstream financial markets. Yet surprisingly, this triple revolution in goals, actors and tools has not yet impacted the way we measure both the financial volumes dedicated to this emerging global policy nor the concrete impacts it aims to achieve. This paper argues for the need to move from the conventional measure of Official Development Assistance to the construction of clearer benchmarks for what ultimately matters: resources and results that concur to 21st century international development.
- Topic:
- Development, Humanitarian Aid, Post Colonialism, Poverty, and Third World
29. Estimating Fully Observed Recursive Mixed-Process Models with cmp
- Author:
- David Roodman
- Publication Date:
- 04-2009
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- At the heart of many econometric models is a linear function and a normal error. Examples include the classical small-sample linear regression model and the probit, ordered probit, multinomial probit, Tobit, interval regression, and truncated-distribution regression models. Because the normal distribution has a natural multidimensional generalization, such models can be combined into multi-equation systems in which the errors share a multivariate normal distribution. The literature has historically focused on multi-stage procedures for estimating mixed models, which are more efficiently computationally, if less so statistically, than maximum likelihood (ML). But faster computers and simulated likelihood methods such as the Geweke, Hajivassiliou, and Keane (GHK) algorithm for estimating higher-dimensional cumulative normal distributions have made direct ML estimation practical. ML also facilitates a generalization to switching, selection, and other models in which the number and types of equations vary by observation. The Stata module cmp fits Seemingly Unrelated Regressions (SUR) models of this broad family. Its estimator is also consistent for recursive systems in which all endogenous variables appear on the right-hand-sides as observed. If all the equations are structural, then estimation is full-information maximum likelihood (FIML). If only the final stage or stages are, then it is limited-information maximum likelihood (LIML). cmp can mimic a dozen built-in Stata commands and several user-written ones. It is also appropriate for a panoply of models previously hard to estimate. Heteroskedasticity, however, can render it inconsistent. This paper explains the theory and implementation of cmp and of a related Mata function, ghk2(), that implements the GHK algorithm.
- Topic:
- Development, Humanitarian Aid, Poverty, and Third World
30. What Is Poverty Reduction?
- Author:
- Owen Barder
- Publication Date:
- 04-2009
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development
- Abstract:
- There is a healthy debate about how to achieve poverty reduction in developing countries, but not enough discussion of what we mean by “poverty reduction.” “Poverty reduction” is often used as a short-hand for promoting economic growth that will permanently lift as many people as possible over a poverty line. But there are many different objectives that are consistent with “poverty reduction,” and we have to make choices between them. There are trade-offs between tackling current and future poverty, between helping as many poor people as possible and focusing on those in chronic poverty, and between measures that tackle the causes of poverty and those which deal with the symptoms. Because donors focus on just one dimension of poverty reduction (growth) they marginalise other legitimate objectives such as reducing chronic poverty or providing social services in countries that cannot otherwise afford them.
- Topic:
- Development, Environment, Humanitarian Aid, Poverty, Third World, and Foreign Aid