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.
Last week, I showed how the US has fallen far behind its peers in terms of negotiating bilateral investment treaties (BITs) in Sub-Saharan Africa.
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.
Yesterday in a blog about the World Bank and open contracting, I mentioned the bank had put out more data on contracts that it finances. The covered contracts are those that were large enough for World Bank procurement procedures to mandate “prior review” by bank staff before they were awarded, a designation that covers the considerable majority of bank-financed contract value.
What do Argentina, India, and South Africa have in common with Jersey, Cayman and the Turks and Caicos? They’ve just agreed to share financial information with each other, for tax purposes.
A $1 trillion financing partnership to support ending extreme poverty, stopping avoidable child deaths, and meeting other widely supported post-2015 development goals sounds far-fetched. But improbable action is what will be needed if we’re going to come close to making such historically unprecedented progress. Indeed, delivering on proposed zero goals is going to take a broad and deep global partnership that’s about far more than aid.
This blog was originally posted on March 7, 2011.
Regulators at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland, are hard at work designing regulatory standards to avoid future financial meltdowns like the global financial crisis of 2008. Joining them for two months is Liliana Rojas Suarez, a CGD senior fellow and the founding chair of the Latin American Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee.
The World Bank’s Africa Health Forum: Finance & Capacity for Results during its 2013 Spring Meetings brought together ministers of finance and of health from 30 African countries in a unique opportunity for mutual listening between countries and partners. One recurring theme in forum and in the first panel was that results-based financing (RBF) – where financing is conditioned on achievement of results in health – is a key approach to driving value for money. In short: RBF = more money for more health. (You can watch the recorded ministerial discussion here.)
My guest on this Wonkcast is Alan Kyerematen, Ghana's former Minister of Trade, Industry and President’s Special Initiatives and one of nine candidates to be the next head of the World Trade Organization (WTO). In our interview, Minister Kyerematen tells me he possesses the skills and vision needed to lead the WTO.
In December, members of the Latin American Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee (CLAAF) convened at CGD to discuss global financial and monetary developments affecting Latin America. The CLAAF, which meets here twice a year, usually offers policy and regulatory recommendations for finance ministers. central bankers and financial regulators in the region. This time the committee proposed something quite different: the five-page statement CLAAF issued after two days of deliberation recommended the creation of a new regional financial institution—a Latin American Liquidity Fund, to supplement the efforts of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) when the next global financial crisis hits.