The 15 members of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) are digesting a critical review of the structure and performance of its Secretariat, which describes the overall CARICOM integration initiative as being in crisis. This paper describes elements of the CARICOM integration project, and draws...

This discussion paper is not written by a careers expert. It is rather a work in progress based on my own experiences trying to start a career in development with extensive input from colleagues that have many more years of experience. The objective of this paper is to start a conversation about...

Some 18 million people die annually from poverty-related causes. Many more are suffering grievously from treatable medical conditions. These burdens can be substantially reduced by supplementing the rules governing pharmaceutical innovation. Established by the World Trade Organization's TRIPS...

This paper provides an overview of issues relating to aid effectiveness. It argues that it is impossible to give a definitive answer to the question of whether aid is effective, and that it is more useful to ask what can be done to make aid more effective. The paper then groups the various...

Measuring poverty in the Pacific is important to keep poor people on the policy agenda, to design effective policies and programs and to carry out rigorous evaluation so that we know what works and why. There are various definitions of poverty, ranging from a narrow focus on adequate calorie...

The World Bank's Ease of Doing Business reports have been ranking countries since 2006. However, do improvements in rankings generate greater foreign direct investment inflows? This study is the first to test such a proposition empirically with Arellano-Bond dynamic panel estimators using the...

Fiji is in the midst of a consultation process for a new Constitution on which General Elections are scheduled to be held in 2014. The new Constitution is going to be the fourth one for Fiji. During the first decade of independence, Fiji's economy grew at a rate of more than 5% per annum....

Fragile states are those characterised by problems of weak governance or of conflict, internal or cross border. They are also described, less crisply but more carefully, as countries in fragile and conflict affected situations – hence the acronym used in this paper, FCA countries. For about a...

The Global Sustainability Panel (GSP), formed by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in August 2010, was asked to think big – to come up with a 'new development paradigm' and mechanisms for putting it into practice. Its product was, among other things, meant to help frame the forthcoming third...

This article investigates whether female political representation affects economic growth. Panel estimates for 119 democracies using fixed effects specifications and a system generalized method of moments approach suggest that, over recent decades, countries with higher shares of women in...