Here is part of my piece on the Guardian website today welcoming moves from the US and Europe towards a global standard for publishing aid information: Go to the website of any aid agency and you’ll find a cornucopia of information about the good work that it is doing. The Read more…
A View from the Cave has a survey on the best blogs on aid and development. Register your views here.
A perennial question in development economics is whether economic growth, by itself, is enough to reduce poverty. The question came up in the most recent edition of Development Drums. Claire Melamed argued that the fact that so many of the world’s poor now live in middle income countries (which, by Read more…
Andy Sumner has published a new paper which argues that the global poverty problem has changed because the countries in which most of the world’s poor liver are no longer classified as low-income countries (LICs). In 1990, about 93 per cent of the world’s poor people lived in LICs. Today, there Read more…
Shanta Devarajan, the World Bank Chief Economist for Africa, describes in an important new blog post the evolution of development policy in terms of changing ideas about market failures and government failures. In the 1950s and 1960s, he says, development was about addressing market failures by providing public goods, Read more…
During the mass migration between the middle of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of the first world war, about a third of Europeans migrated from their country of birth, mainly to America. Today levels of migration are proportionately lower, because nation states have imposed much tighter restrictions on the Read more…
This is the fourth post in a series providing non-technical advice about affordable and practical IT for people working in developing countries, especially where internet access is not great. The previous posts have been: tech tips 1: the basic set-up – getting a computer and setting it up. tech tips 2: blogs Read more…
Tim Harford had an interesting article in the FT in August arguing that we are better off in most walks of life if there is experimentation and a multiplicity of approaches. But how do we value diversity in the aid business, when the prevailing consensus, embodied in the Paris Declaration, is Read more…
Judging by the 2010 Commitment to Development Index, the UK is doing a better job at securing and spending a rising aid budget than it is at getting the rest of government to pursue development-friendly policies.
