A piece for Vox on the barely progressive arguably regressive tax and spending systems of poorer developing countries.
A piece for Vox on the barely progressive arguably regressive tax and spending systems of poorer developing countries.
A CGD Working Paper on policy coordination to help meet the SDGs. TLDR: Important, but hard.
This paper discusses the role for policy integration to speed progress towards delivering the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This is required because the goals set very ambitious targets for progress across a range of interlinked areas, encompassing both synergies and tradeoffs. Lessons of policy integration at the national level suggest that it is usually at best partially successful, requiring significant commitment from the highest levels of government. Policy integration regarding foreign affairs has proven even more challenging. This paper suggests a mechanism for prioritizing coordination and the use of coordination tools including regulation, safeguards, taxes, and subsidies. It also suggests re-orienting ministerial responsibilities where possible from input control to achievement of outcomes as well as tools to promote innovation by subnational governments and the private sector.
Inside the Portfolio of the International Finance Corporation: Does IFC Do Enough in Low-Income Countries? with Jared Kalow and Vijaya Ramachandran is a CGD Policy Paper. Between 2001 and 2016, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) committed $127 billion through 3,343 projects across the developing world. During this period, the bulk of IFC’s portfolio has moved lower middle-income countries to upper middle-income countries. Between 2001 and 2004, IFC’s portfolio was dominated by lower-middle income countries. Between 2013 and 2016, Turkey, China, and Brazil received $3.8, $2.9, and $3.0 billion in investments respectively, making them some of the largest recipients of IFC investment. The portfolio shift from lower-middle to upper-middle income countries is in significant part due to recipient countries graduating out of lower-middle income status. Our analysis shows that IFC’s portfolio is not focused where it could make the most difference. Low income countries are where IFC has the scale to make a considerable difference to development outcomes. These are the countries with the greatest need for investment and (implicit) guarantee mechanisms for private investment. And these are the countries receiving the bulk of advisory services support. While an excessive portfolio shift might imperil IFC’s credit rating, the evidence suggests that there is considerable scope for increasing commitments to low income countries without significant impact to IFC’s credit scores.
Comparing Five Bilateral Development Finance Institutions and the IFC with Jared Kalow , Ben Leo and Vijaya Ramachandran is another policy paper. Development Finance Institutions (DFIs)—which provide financing to private investors in developing economies—have seen rapid expansion over the past few years. A recent estimate is that annual commitments from DFIs as a whole grew from $10 to $70 billion between 2002-2014. Many DFIs have ambitions to play an even greater role going forward, continuing expansion and working more in fragile states. DFIs remain a comparatively under-studied set of development institutions in terms of their activities and impacts. Much of the information about DFIs is presented in forms that make aggregation and comparison difficult and time-consuming. This paper describes and analyses a new dataset covering the five largest bilateral DFIs alongside the IFC which includes project amounts, standardized sectors, instruments, and countries. The aim is to establish the size and scope of DFIs and to compare and contrast them with the IFC.
A working paper for CGD with Mallika Snyder. The Sustainable Development Goals are an ambitious set of targets for global development progress by 2030 that were agreed by the United Nations in 2015. Amongst the 169 targets are a number that call for universal access, universal coverage, or universal eradication. These include ending extreme poverty and malnutrition alongside preventable under-5 deaths, ending a number of epidemics, providing universal access to sexual and reproductive health services, primary and secondary education, a range of infrastructure services, and legal identification. These have often been labeled “zero targets.” A review of the literature on meeting these zero targets suggests very high costs compared to available resources, but also that in many cases there remains a considerable gap between financing known technical solutions and achieving the outcomes called for in the SDGs. In some cases, we (even) lack the technical solutions required to achieve the zero targets, suggesting the need for research and development of new approaches.
A CGD policy note with Tanvi Jaluka and Michael Brown on IMF Article IV negotiations since gender was declared 'macrocritical.' In short, there has been increased attention to the issue as reflected in word counts and discussion of women’s labor force participation, but there is still a long way to go.
Estimating the SDGs' Demand for Innovation is a CGD Working Paper written with Dev Patel. How much innovation will be needed to meet the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals? We model shifts in the cross-country relationship between GDP per capita and achievement in key development indicators as “technological gains” and convergence to the best performers at a given income as “policy gains.” Assuming that the United Nations’ income growth projections for low- and middle-income countries are met, we estimate the residual demand for technology and policy innovation needed to meet several critical targets of the SDGs. Our results suggest that (i) best performers are considerably outperforming the average performance at a given income level, suggesting considerable progress could be achieved through policy change but that (ii) the targets set in the SDGs are unlikely to be met by 2030 without very rapid, ubiquitous technological progress alongside economic growth.
Time to revisit the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act. For the Economist.
For US News and World Report --the world is getting more peaceful and collaboration is increasingly important to US and global well-being.
For the Economist. Old people stand in the way of policies that can deal with the problem of too many old people.
A CGD Working Paper with Dev Patel. This paper analyzes six waves of responses from the World Values Survey to understand the determinants of beliefs about women’s roles in society and their relationship with the legal system and outcomes. Using survey data for 300,000 individuals, we find that characteristics of an individual’s home country only explain about a fifth of the variation in values, and a single individual can report strongly different norms about women’s equality across different domains. There is a strong correlation between norms, laws and female labor force participation and between norms and the proportion of legislators who are women—but not between norms and relative female tertiary education. There is some suggestive evidence that laws may be more significant than norms in determining female employment outcomes, but the available evidence does not allow for strong causal statements at the cross-country level.