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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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 Lawrence MacDonald is vice president for communications and policy outreach at the Center for Global Development. Full Bio Follow @lmacdonaldDC
Showing posts on the Views from the Center blog. View author posts on: José Antonio Ocampo Makes His Case to Be President of the World BankApril 12, 2012By Lawrence MacDonald in International Financial Institutions, Latin America, World Bank Tags: International Financial Institutions, Latin America, World Bank
The challenge posed by developing countries to the U.S. grip on the World Bank presidency will test industrial nations’ commitment to an open selection process, former Colombian finance minister and nominee Jose Antonio Ocampo, said Tuesday at an event (full video) organized by CGD and Washington Post Live Comment »Okonjo-Iweala Appeals to U.S. “Cherished Values” in Selection of World Bank PresidentApril 10, 2012By Lawrence MacDonald in Global Development, International Financial Institutions, World Bank Tags: International Financial Institutions, World Bank
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former managing director of the World Bank and the coordinating minister for the economy and minister of finance in Nigeria, made her case for her bid to be the next president of the World Bank at a CGD-Washington Post Live event on Monday, showing the persuasive powers and qualifications she would use to lead the world’s top development institution. 3 Comments »Allow Time for Countries to Evaluate Candidates for World Bank PresidentMarch 30, 2012By Lawrence MacDonald in International Financial Institutions, World Bank Tags: International Financial Institutions, World Bank
Why the unseemly rush to select the next president of the World Bank? Three candidates have now been nominated: Jim Yong Kim (nominated by the United States); Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (nominated by Nigeria); and José Antonio Ocampo (the former finance minister of Colombia, nominated by the Dominican Republic). The World Bank board has announced that it will interview each candidate and make a selection ahead of the Spring Meetings of the World Bank and the IMF on Saturday, April 21. That’s when finance ministers and central bank chiefs from around the world will in Washington meet as the “Development Committee”—the body that officially oversees the workings of the World Bank. 5 Comments »Squeezing Assad – Don’t Ditch Diplomacy YetMarch 20, 2012By Lawrence MacDonald in Global Development, Trade, Weak and Fragile States Tags: Odious Debt, Syria
This post is joint with Jenny Ottenhoff As the violent crackdown on protesters in Syria intensifies, so does the international search for an effective response that stops short of military intervention. Meeting in Washington last week, U.S. President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron called on their governments and allies to ratchet up pressure on the Bashar al-Assad regime, but they offered no new diplomatic options and stopped short of endorsing mounting calls for military action, leaving many in the international community wondering: what else can be done? 1 Comment »For Gender Equality, Start with a DaddyMarch 8, 2012By Lawrence MacDonald in Women & Gender Tags: Women & Gender
This week I was privileged to chair a panel discussion at the World Bank on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). In celebration of International Women’s Day today, I want to share what I learned and a suggestion for what just might be a new and promising intervention for furthering full equality for women and girls. 1 Comment »Keystone Pipeline Delay Opens the Way to Consider Climate and Development ImpactsNovember 11, 2011By Lawrence MacDonald in Climate Change, Environment Tags: Climate Change, environment
Yesterday’s U.S. government decision to re-consider the proposal for the Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring oil from the Alberta tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico, opens the way for policymakers to include consideration of the climate and development impact of decision. Unfortunately, announcements of the decision suggest this is not necessarily part of the plan. Comment »Cannes G-20 Summit Founders on Europe’s Woes (Will Los Cabos Be Better?)November 8, 2011By Lawrence MacDonald in Economic Development Tags: G-20, Gates Foundation
This is a joint post with Owen Barder Whether future historians remember last week’s G-20 Summit in Cannes will depend on what happens in the weeks and months ahead. If the eurozone problems spiral out of control, Cannes will be to the coming crash as the 1933 London Economic Conference was to the Great Depression: a lost chance to avert calamity. If Europe muddles through, the brief association of Cannes with the G-20 will be soon forgotten and the resort will again be famous for its film festival. Comment »Development and the Cannes G-20 SummitNovember 1, 2011By Lawrence MacDonald in Global Development Tags: G-20, global development
It’s G-20 time again, and once again the attention of the leaders of the world’s biggest economies will be largely preoccupied with shoring up the financial sectors in countries that are home to the world’s top billion. This is unfortunate but under the circumstances not entirely unreasonable. Financial crises in the rich world can have far-reaching consequences for poor people in the developing world, including weak demand for developing-country exports, sagging tourism and remittances, and tighter credit, which among other things makes it harder to finance trade. Addressing the crisis in Greece, and Europe more broadly, is in everybody’s interest. Whether the G-20 can help to stabilize the global financial sector and get the world economy growing remains the most important question for development. 1 Comment »Lagarde and the Dragon: The IMF’s New Head Confronts a Rapidly Changing WorldSeptember 15, 2011By Lawrence MacDonald in China, Financial Crisis, International Monetary Fund Tags: China, Christine Lagarde, Financial Crisis, IMF
Judging from her first public speech since taking office last July, Christine Lagarde is all that her many supporters say she is: tough-minded, articulate, charming. In a talk hosted by the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington’s Ronald Reagan International Trade Center, she deftly laid out key challenges facing the global economy: “an anemic and bumpy recovery with unacceptably high unemployment” in the high-income countries, the debt crisis in Europe, and mounting public debt in the United States. Related Content Her solutions, neatly summed up in four Rs—repair, rebalance, reform, and rebuild—were balanced and nuanced. She urged Europe and the United States to adopt “credible measures that deliver and anchor savings in the medium term … to help create space in the short term for growth.” And she mentioned repeatedly the need to minimize the social costs of the economic downturn, warning of the risk of a “lost generation” of youth unable to find jobs. Lagarde was also frank—and balanced—in her warnings about global imbalances, calling for a switch in global demand “from external deficit to external surplus countries.” While she did not name China, the audience could have had no doubt that China was on her mind when she said: 2 Comments »Obama Set to Lob Canadian Carbon Bomb at IndiaAugust 22, 2011By Lawrence MacDonald in Climate Change Tags: Climate Change, India
President Obama is widely expected to approve this year the construction of a massive new oil pipeline from the tar sands in Alberta, Canada, to Texas refineries along the Gulf of Mexico. The resulting boost in the emissions of heat-trapping gases has been called the world’s biggest carbon bomb. India would be among its primary victims. 5 Comments »The Lingering Effects of the U.S. Debt Showdown: Q&A with Liliana Rojas-SuarezAugust 2, 2011By Lawrence MacDonald in Capitol Flows/Financial Crisis Tags: debt crisis, Financial Crisis
The spectacle of U.S. politicians pushing the country to the brink of default is likely to have lingering effects on global financial markets and hence on development, the eleventh-hour compromise notwithstanding. In the near-term, however, the main issue is the U.S. economic slump and the increased likelihood that the world’s biggest economy will fall back into recession. 2 Comments »Crunching the Numbers on Think Tank Gender BalanceJuly 15, 2011By Lawrence MacDonald in Global Development Tags: Gender
“Why Think Tanks Hate Women” was the inflammatory subject line on Foreign Policy’s email newsletter this morning. The misleading packaging aside, the relevant FP article by Micah Zenko contained some interesting numbers. In the ten foreign policy-focused think tanks for which Zenko crunched the numbers “women constituted only 21 percent of the policy-related positions (154 of 723) and only 29 percent of the total leadership staff (250 of 874).” Some tanks really are male bastions (for tank-specific numbers, see here). Our friends at the Peterson Institute, for example, can boast only six women among the 38 policy staff, or 16 percent. 1 Comment »IMF Process Stinks but Lagarde Scores Well on CGD SurveyJune 28, 2011By Lawrence MacDonald in International Monetary Fund Tags: Christine Lagarde, IMF, Managing Director
The IMF announced today that French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde has been chosen as the new managing director—the first woman to lead the institution in a selection process that for the first time had an element of competition. With the selection process complete, we have closed the CGD IMF leadership selection survey, which in the past few weeks attracted nearly 800 responses from people in about 50 countries. My colleague David Wheeler is analyzing the numbers and will provide a careful analysis of the results in the next few weeks. In the meantime, here’s a quick back-of-the envelope summary of a few of the key takeaways (with thanks to colleagues Jonathan Karver and Will McKitterick for crunching the numbers and helping to manage the survey). Comment »Zedillo Warns of a “Frightening Failure” of Global InstitutionsJune 14, 2011By Lawrence MacDonald in Economic Development, Global Development, Globalization Tags: Antoinette Sayeh, BRIC, Ernesto Zedillo, G-20, Globalization, James Wolfensohn, Kemal Dervis, Multilateral Institutions, Nancy Birdsall
The wake-up call came as a bit of a shock. Ernesto Zedillo, the highly regarded former president of Mexico and director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, was discussing the record of international institutions and the powerful countries that run them. On their response to unprecedented international cooperation and coordination challenges, he was in no mood to mince words. “I would say that the balance in terms of concrete achievements is not only discouraging but frightening,” he told the audience of some 200 development policy experts and practitioners gathered at Washington’s exquisite St. Regis Hotel for the CGD@10 Prosperity Policy Breakfast marking the Center’s 10th Anniversary. 1 Comment »What in the World Is Getting Better? (With Prizes!)March 3, 2011By Lawrence MacDonald in Global Development Tags: Getting Better
Been discouraged about the state of the world recently? (Me, too.) Charles Kenny’s new book should be at the top of our reading lists. In Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding–And How We Can Improve the World Even More, Charles argues that the quality of life–health, education, access to infrastructure, fundamental rights—has progressed at a staggering pace in recent decades, even in the very poorest countries. The spread of ideas and new technologies mean that living standards, even in countries that have failed to grow economically, are much higher today than they’ve ever been before. Comment »Top 20 Posts for 2010 for CGD’s Views from the Center blogJanuary 5, 2011By Lawrence MacDonald in Global Development
Inspired by David Roodman’s list of his 20 most popular blog posts for 2010, we have done something similar for CGD’s Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance blog, and the Global Health Policy blog. Below the 20 most popular posts for Views from the Center. Enjoy! Comment »G-20 as a Second Best SolutionDecember 8, 2010By Lawrence MacDonald in Global Development Tags: G-20
Economists are fond of speaking about second best solutions so it was perhaps not surprising that my friend and former colleague Shahrokh Fardoust, one of three editors of a new World Bank volume on the G-20 development agenda, invoked this familiar idea in the face of a friendly but pointed critique of the G-20 by CGD/Peterson joint fellow Arvind Subramanian. The occasion was yesterday’s launch of Post Crisis Growth and Development: A Development Agenda for the G-20, the conference volume from a June 2010 gathering in Busan, South Korea, jointly organized by Korea’s Presidential Committee on the Seoul Summit and the World Bank. I kicked off and chaired the session, drawing on CGD work, including my own reporting and analysis of the Seoul Summit. Read More… Comment »At Cancun Climate Talks, First the Pillars, Then the RoofNovember 22, 2010By Lawrence MacDonald in Global Development Tags: Cancun, Climate
With less than a week to go until the start of the next round of global climate negotiations, in Cancun, Mexico, climate policymakers see further work on ambitious finance pledges made at the Copenhagen climate talks last year as key to progress towards collective action to avert runaway climate change. Mexico’s ambassador to Washington has stressed the value of such incremental progress. And in one of the few bright spots in an otherwise dismal landscape, a senior World Bank official told a private meeting at CGD that developing countries are acting on their own to increase climate resilience and to slow emissions growth, without waiting for a global agreement. Comment »Three Seoul Sleepers and a Damp SquibNovember 16, 2010By Lawrence MacDonald in Global Development Tags: Corruption, duty free quota free trade, G-20, Trade, World Bank
Perhaps predictably, media coverage of the G-20 Seoul Summit focused on the currency wars, and assessments of impact of the meeting were decidedly mixed (though, interestingly, more negative in the United States than in the big emerging markets). But global imbalances were hardly the only item on the agenda. Three summit documents have the potential to become more important with the passage of time, especially if the development community seizes upon them as opportunities to press the big economies for pro-development policies and spreads the word. Here, then, is my list of three Seoul sleepers: Read More… 2 Comments »Owen Barder on UK Drop in Commitment to Development IndexNovember 11, 2010By Lawrence MacDonald in Global Development Tags: Commitment to Development Index
Leave it to Owen Barder, a CGD visiting fellow who writes an eponymous blog in Ethiopia, to notice something surprising about this year’s Commitment to Development Index that had escaped my notice: the UK has fallen from 5th place when the Index was launched in 2005 to 16th place today:
Ouch! Owen’s post has elicited some interesting comments, including questions about the U.S. rankings on Index security component. Comment » |
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