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Independent research & practical ideas for global prosperity
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Independent research & practical ideas for global prosperity
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Global Prosperity Wonkcast
Archive for August, 2011Holiday in Harare: Alan GelbAugust 30, 2011Posted by Lawrence MacDonald in Africa Tags: Africa, Zimbabwe
“Zimbabwe had the second highest hyper-inflation registered in history,” says Allan. “At the peak of the crisis, prices were increasing many times every day or every hour.” Eventually the government stopped issuing Zimbabwe dollars and legalized several other currencies, including the U.S. dollar, which now circulates freely—though often in a very tattered form. Shops in affluent parts of Harare, the capital, are well stocked, though prices are high, even by U.S. standards, he says. “You really wonder how people are able to make ends meet at all,” he adds. Podcast: Play in new window | Download Comment »Hail the Scholar-Practitioners: Nora LustigAugust 22, 2011Posted by Lawrence MacDonald in Global Development Tags: Global Develompent, Practitioners
Thankfully we have Nora Lustig, a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development, Samuel Z. Stone Professor of Latin American economics at Tulane University, and non-resident fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue. Nora has just written a working paper on the role of scholar-practitioners in the creation, design, evaluation, and political survival of Mexico’s Progresa/Oportunidades anti-poverty program, which has become a model for both impact evaluation and for conditional cash transfer programs around the world. On this week’s show, she draws on her new paper to tell me the story of scholar-practitioners and Protgresa/Oportunidades. Podcast: Play in new window | Download Comment »Turning the Tide in the War on Tobacco: Bill SavedoffAugust 15, 2011Posted by Lawrence MacDonald in Global Health Policy Tags: Global Health Policy, Tobacco
Here to breathe some fresh air into the fight to curb smoking is senior fellow Bill Savedoff, who joins me this week to discuss his latest blog post, Death by Tobacco: A Big Problem Needs Bigger Action. Upon returning from a meeting on tobacco control in New York City last month, Bill set out to raise the alarm about something he found to be shockingly little-known: the shockingly low cost of highly effective tobacco controls. Podcast: Play in new window | Download Comment »Famine in the Horn of Africa: Owen BarderAugust 9, 2011Posted by Lawrence MacDonald in Africa, Food Crises Tags: Africa, Food Crises
This was the message Owen Barder drove home to me in this week’s Wonkcast. Owen acquired an intimate understanding of the realities of food scarcity when he traveled to Ethiopia during the food crisis of 1984-85, and more recently while spending three years in the capital, Addis Ababa. To him, governance and information are central components of food emergencies. Podcast: Play in new window | Download Comment »Jenny Aker: Mobile Phones for Development—Hope vs. HypeAugust 2, 2011Posted by Lawrence MacDonald in Africa, Private Investment Tags: Africa, Private Investment, Technology
Mobile phone use has spread across Africa at a stunning pace. The percentage of Africans who could access a mobile phone leapt from only 10% in 1999 to more than 60% by 2008—far outstripping improvements in other infrastructure (roads, clean water, or indeed landline telephones). In a new CGD working paper, to be published later this summer in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Jenny and her co-author Isaac Mbiti describe four main ways phones have been applied to the problems of the poor. In the Wonkcast, we discuss these four applications: Podcast: Play in new window | Download Comment »
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What does extreme hyperinflation look like? Consider a pile of currency tall enough to encircle our entire galaxy. That’s how many Zimbabwean dollars you would have needed by the end of the country’s extraordinary inflationary crisis to equal one pre-crisis Zim dollar, according to CGD senior fellow 
It’s not often that the United Nations sees fit to officially declare a food crisis a famine. That’s a testament to the severity of the ongoing suffering in Somalia, a disaster of biblical proportions that has already claimed the lives of tens of thousands. But evidence abounds that famines are not only the result of natural occurrences. On the contrary, most are the shocking result of human error or, in the worst case, deliberate neglect.
The Wonkcast is taking a brief summer vacation. We’ve selected this show from our archives- it was originally posted on June 1, 2010.
