Multilateralism is central to the global effort to overcome poverty and inequality. All countries stand to benefit from the stability and confidence that a rules-based global trade system can provide. Developing countries stand to benefit most, as they lack the economic and political power to pursue their demands outside such a system.
Topic:
Development, International Trade and Finance, Markets, and Third World
The emergence and spread of drug resistance is draining available resources and threatening our ability to treat infectious diseases in developing countries. Countering drug resistance requires pharmaceutical companies, government regulators, doctors, and patients to make difficult choices about drug treatment in order to balance efficacy, cost, safety, and sustainability of drugs. These complex tradeoffs are faced along the drug supply chain from the development of new products, procurement of drugs for donor and government distribution, distribution steps to ensure treatment heterogeneity along with quality and availability, and dispensing and use that requires affordability, patient adherence and rational use of drugs and diagnostics. An analysis of the incentives and risks in the drug supply chain reflects that many stakeholders who can influence optimal prescribing of existing drugs; affect higher patient compliance; and ensure the quality of drugs have weak incentives to carry out these activities optimally. This implies a high potential for drug resistance to accelerate. This paper recommends specific measures to better align the incentives of these stakeholders with resistance- countering activities.
Topic:
Development, Health, Human Welfare, and Third World
At the centre of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness is the idea of country ownership. It is meant to change the situation in many aid dependent African countries where donors dominate decision-making over which policies are adopted, how aid is spent, and what conditions are attached to its release. This article assesses the impact of recent aid reforms to put ownership into practice.
Topic:
Foreign Exchange, Poverty, Third World, and Foreign Direct Investment
Although often underestimated, the tourism industry can help promote peace and stability in developing countries by providing jobs, generating income, diversifying the economy, protecting the environment, and promoting cross-cultural awareness. Tourism is the fourth-largest industry in the global economy.
Topic:
Climate Change, Development, Globalization, and Third World
In April 2009, multilateral and bilateral donors pledged $353 million to support the government of Haiti's plan to alleviate poverty, mitigate the effects of natural disasters, and achieve sustained economic growth.
Topic:
Development, Health, Poverty, Third World, and Foreign Aid
So far the private sector has made only small progress in responding to the needs of, and opportunities in, the market segment of small-scale agricultural enterprises, after the widespread withdrawal of the paradigm of government funded and controlled agricultural development. The unmet needs for finance of producer associations and other forms of SMEs (small- and medium-sized enterprises) in agriculture, for transactions in the size range £5,000 to £500,000, constitute the missing middle. The crucial issue is how to overcome the barriers to scaling-up the private sector's response.
Topic:
Agriculture, Development, Poverty, and Third World
The Millennium Declaration included a highly significant innovation – universal, support by the world's governments for a short list of development results to be, achieved by a set date. As the target year of 2015 approaches, the paper compares the, MDG framework that emerged from the Declaration with other ways of measuring, and incentivising progress, sets out some initial hypotheses about its impact and addresses issues about its structure and coverage. This leads to proposals about how to, get the best value from the MDGs over the years to 2015 and five hypotheses about, how the world might approach the issue of what framework, if any, to put in place, to measure and incentivise development progress after 2015.
Topic:
Development, Health, Human Welfare, Humanitarian Aid, International Cooperation, International Political Economy, Third World, and United Nations
The role of regulatory barriers in inhibiting entrepreneurship, investment and employment creation is an old topic in economics. This study utilizes a five-year panel of data on regulations and procedures from the World Bank's Doing Business project, along with Arellano-Bond dynamic panel estimators, looking for evidence that regulatory reforms lead to higher aggregate investment rates (roughly, factor demand) or GDP growth conditional on investment rates (roughly, factor productivity). It looks both at individual regulatory indicators and more aggregate measures of the incidence of reforms, finding some evidence of positive impacts of regulatory reforms in countries which are relatively poor (conditional on governance) and relatively well-governed (conditional on income). Relatively poor and relatively well-governed countries grow about 0.4 and 0.2 percentage points faster in the year immediately following one or more reforms, respectively. In both subsets of countries, investment rates accelerate by about 0.6 percentage points in the subsequent year.
Topic:
Development, Economics, Markets, Poverty, and Third World
The Commitment to Development Index (CDI) ranks 22 of the world's richest countries on their dedication to policies that benefit the five billion people living in poorer nations. Moving beyond standard comparisons of foreign aid volumes, the CDI quantifies a range of rich-country policies that affect poor people in developing countries: Quantity and quality of foreign aid Openness to developing-country exports Policies that encourage investment Migration policies Environmental policies Security policies Support for creation and dissemination of new technologies Scores on each component are scaled so that an average score in 2008, the reference year, equals 5.0. A country's final score is the average of those for each component. The CDI adjusts for size in order to compare how well countries are living up to their potential to help.
Topic:
Development, International Cooperation, Poverty, Third World, International Affairs, and Foreign Aid
Given their vulnerability to external economic events, small developing countries (SDEs) are particularly cognizant of their place in the world economy. Moreover, given their reliance on international trade for prosperity, SDEs are also concerned about the rules and institutions governing the multilateral trading system. In this paper, the author reviews and evaluates the participation of SDEs in the governance of the multilateral trading system, with a particular focus on the WTO. He suggests how SDEs can improve the efficacy of their participation in the WTO's decision-making process, and proposes ways in which the WTO could be adapted to better integrate SDEs in its governance.
Topic:
Economics, Emerging Markets, International Trade and Finance, Third World, and World Trade Organization