This paper proposes the creation of a "Stability and Social Investment Facility" (SSF) to be housed either at the IMF or the World Bank. It would be a long-term facility to help high-debt emerging market countries cope with and ultimately overcome what will otherwise remain a chronic structural...

Too many African state-owned enterprises (SOEs), particularly those in infrastructure sectors, have a long history of poor performance. African governments and donors labored through the 1970s and 1980s to improve SOE performance through "commercialization" - i.e., methods short of ownership...

How can the international community save more children's lives faster and more effectively in the 21st century? This working paper analyzes the extent to which quot;frontloadingquot; and predictable vaccine funding, as proposed by the International Finance Facility for Immunization (IFFIm), is...

How do firms decide to provide HIV/AIDS prevention services? In this CGD Working Paper, Visiting Fellow Vijaya Ramachandran analyzes data from 860 firms and 4,955 workers in Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya. She finds that larger firms, and those with more highly skilled workers invest more in AIDS...

Does openness in trade and the free flow of capital promote growth for the poor? In this Working Paper, Nancy Birdsall discusses the inherent asymmetries in globalization, and the implications those inequalities have for poverty reduction. She suggests that global trading rules work less well...

Does economic development depend on geographic endowments like temperate instead of tropical location, the ecological conditions shaping diseases, or an environment good for grains or certain cash crops? Or do these endowments of tropics, germs, and crops affect economic development only through...

In rural areas of developing countries, education programs are often implemented through community teachers. While teachers are a crucial part of the education production function, observing their effort remains a challenge for the public sector. This paper tests whether a simple monitoring...

Many existing classifications of developing countries are dominated by income per capita (such as the World Bank’s low, middle, and high income thresholds), thus neglecting the multidimensionality of the concept of ‘development’. Even those deemed to be the main ‘alternatives’ to the...

Over 755 million adults worldwide are unable to read and write in any language. Yet the widespread introduction of information and communication technology offers new opportunities to provide standardized distance education to underserved illiterate populations in both developed and developing...