Global Absolute Poverty Fell by Almost Half on Tuesday
5/2/14
On Tuesday night, the International Comparison Project released the latest purchasing power parity numbers for the world’s economies.
Tag: Economic Growth
Scarcity: Why Having So Little Means So Much, an Interview with Sendhil Mullainathan
4/28/14
My guest this week, behavioral economist Sendhil Mullainathan, is a Harvard professor and non-resident fellow at CGD who is transforming how people think about poverty, and what can be done to support poor people in improving their lives. Sendhil was recently at CGD to discuss his new book, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, in which he explains that limited bandwidth—the ability to stand back from one’s life, assess trade-offs, and make rational choices—is a problem for all of us, but an especially difficult problem for those who live daily with scarcity.
Premature De-industrialization
4/22/14
Professor Dani Rodrik will be at CGD on Thursday, giving the annual Sabot lecture. He will be speaking on African growth, and will likely discuss premature de-industrialization, a topic he first raised in this blog post and has written about subsequently.
The G-20 Development Working Group Agenda – Clare Walsh and Scott Morris
4/14/14
Clare Walsh, a senior official in the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the chair of the Development Working Group of the G-20, recently visited CGD for a round-table discussion with CGD senior staff. Afterwards I hosted her and CGD senior associate, Scott Morris, a former senior US Treasury official, on the Wonkcast.
Nigeria’s Upward Revision of GDP Should Sound Alarm on Tax-to-GDP Ratio
4/9/14
The long-anticipated rebasing of Nigeria’s GDP series was finally made public on Sunday April 6, and the general media reaction has been cautiously celebratory. But the reaction has largely missed one big point: the rebasing establishes that the biggest economy in Africa has the lowest tax revenues of almost any country in the world.
Beyond the Headlines: 3 Under-Reported Stories about Nigeria’s 90% GDP Boost
4/8/14
While I was plowing through Morten Jerven’s enlightening book Poor Numbers last year, my mind concentrated on Nigeria. It stayed with Nigeria. At that time, I was consumed with figuring out what on earth was going on with Nigeria’s poverty figures. How was it possible for the country to experience growth in both its GDP and extreme poverty rates at the same time?
Does Jim Kim Get Water?
4/8/14
Over the past week World Bank president Jim Kim’s mind seems to have been on water and development. But what does he mean by “water” and how does this relate to the huge water-related development challenges faced by the World Bank’s borrowers?
We Americans May Not Have Our White Elephants, but We Do Have Our Bridges to Nowhere
4/1/14
Developing countries are not the only ones that are “capacity” and “governance” challenged when it comes to doing major infrastructure projects.
Latin America Left Behind: "It’s Inequality Stupid”?
3/21/14
Min Zhu, first deputy director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), includes this amazing and terrifying chart of Latin America’s growth record in a recent blog post on the IMF website.