Category: E. Economic Development
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A CGD Note. LICs are not only home to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people, they are also fragile states at high risk of conflict, with limited capacity to provide global public goods from security to biodiversity and pandemic control. Providing coordinated support in areas from finance through market access and migration opportunities, the…
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A policy paper for CGD. This paper examines the changing shape of Chinese investment in Africa, as it evolves from large scale infrastructure toward small scale manufacturing. It looks at the opportunity for the region in the context of a deepening manufacturing labor shortage in China; discusses barriers to that opportunity in both China and…
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A CGD Working Paper with Sogtao Duan and Zack Gehan. This paper tests the hypothesis that the growing proportion of World Bank contracts granted to Chinese firms, particularly in the infrastructure sector, may undermine results by exposing projects to lower standards of work. We find that such concerns are unfounded. We create a dataset of…
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A CGD note. “Two Futures” presents two scenarios—a reasonable best- and worst-case version of the world in 2050 based on the culmination of a wide-ranging CGD research project that forecasts demographic and education trends, sectoral change and the decline of global manufacturing jobs, climate change impacts, and the changing face of development finance and aid—and…
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A CGD Working Paper. The World Bank’s extreme poverty line has been a huge marketing success, motivating widespread discussion of global poverty. At the same time, it has growing weaknesses. For measuring progress, we want a fixed-definition indicator. The extreme poverty line is not that. For measuring or guaranteeing access of a basic bundle of…
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A CGD Working Paper with George Yang. This paper explores the potential implications of a declining absolute labor force on economic outcomes. It explores key macroeconomic variables during periods of negative and positive prime age (15-65) population growth (PAPG). These variables include 10-year bond yields, consumer price indices, female labor force participation, GDP, government expenditures,…
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A speech at the Oxford Martin School. Richer countries are rapidly ageing and productivity is stagnating. Meanwhile, industry – the motor for rapid economic development in the past – employs ever fewer people worldwide. And yet there is still hope for greater, and shared, global prosperity. Declining working age populations in rich countries are demanding…
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A CGD Working Paper with Zack Gehan. In absolute dollar amounts official development assistance (ODA) reached an all-time high in 2021. But as a percentage of recipient country GDP, aid (and broader public investment) flows have been declining for some time. This paper looks at the scale of ODA and official financial flows (including multilateral…
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A CGD Working Paper with Brian Webster and Ranil Dissanayake. We develop a simple empirical model of sector employment and output shares which, coupled with long-term projections of GDP per capita, provide indicative projections of the evolution and peak of manufacturing in lower income countries to 2050. These indicative projections suggest that cross-country income convergence…
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This was an evidence submission to the UK Parliament's International Development Committee. I argue that while BII (British International Investment) has been a leader amongst development finance institutions (DFIs) in important respects, and has a strong staff and management focused on improving development outcomes, it still suffers from constraints that limit the impact of DFIs…