Governments sometimes struggle to take a firm line on corruption overseas. On the one hand governments recognize the damage that corruption does, particularly in developing countries where the proceeds from corrupt payments can sustain unaccountable governments and divert resources that are desperately needed for public services. On the other hand, Read more…
Shadow Chancellor George Osborne has announced that the Conservatives would spend at least £500 million a year on fighting malaria. He also confirmed that the Conservatives will increase aid spending to 0.7% of GDP by 2013. This is a welcome announcement in a number of respects. It affirms that there Read more…
I mentioned earlier this year the need to be rational about "food miles" – that is, the pressure to buy locally produced food. Interesting to see this article in the Metro today: Too much attention is being paid to how vegetables and flowers imported by air from Africa cause greenhouse gas Read more…
There is a debate about whether we should buy food from poor countries – which helps farmers, but might damage the environment. Well-meaning people are torn. Ideally, the price of food in the shops would reflect the full social marginal cost of producing it and transporting it. So beans from Read more…
Laurie Garrett writes in the current edition of Foreign Affairs about the Challenge of Global Health: Few of the newly funded global health projects, meanwhile, have built-in methods of assessing their efficacy or sustainability. Fewer still have ever scaled up beyond initial pilot stages. And nearly all have been designed, Read more…
This paper, by me and Nancy Birdsall, recommends that donors should consider linking aid to the progress that recipient countries make towards a small number of high-level goals (eg the number of children in school). The payments would be guaranteed, with no strings attached about how the recipient could use Read more…
Spare a thought for Treasury officials, who are today sending off a cheque for £45 million to the United States Treasury, in the last payment of British war debt to our American, ahem, allies. I suppose very few British people know that we are still repaying the United States for Read more…
I said in June that the national identity register should be a federation of connected computer systems, not a single database. Very sensibly, that is what the Home Office has now announced in the Strategic Action Plan for the National Identity Register. So far so good. There is one protection, Read more…
Ruth Levine, writing at CGD, is spot on (as ever): That's why we have to do better this time, learning from history that to succeed will require big-time funding over the long haul, and a willingness to pay attention to emerging evidence about which combination of strategies is working or Read more…
Mohammaed Yunus, accepting his 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, said: I believe that we can create a poverty-free world because poverty is not created by poor people. It has been created and sustained by the economic and social system that we have designed for ourselves; the institutions and concepts that make Read more…