Center for Global Development - Events

Bringing Methods to Scale: New Perspectives in the Changing World of TB

2010-03-18T14:45:00-04:00

This year's World TB Day marks the halfway point for the Global Plan to Stop TB. We must scale up efforts and continue to seek innovative ways to stop TB if we are to achieve our targets. Join us for a discussion of TB and drug-resistant TB, including the impact on global health and the current state of surveillance, diagnosis and treatment around the world.

Do Bilateral Donors Give Aid to Influence Elections?

2010-03-18T12:00:00-04:00

Understanding the effectiveness of foreign aid is a top priority for development research. But effectiveness at what? Research has focused on how foreign aid affects poverty or growth, but anecdotal evidence suggests that donors often use aid for other ends. We test whether donors use bilateral foreign aid to influence elections in developing countries. We find that recipient country administrations closely aligned with a donor receive more aid during election years, while those less aligned receive less. Consistent with our interpretation, this effect holds only in competitive elections and U.S. aid to non-government entities follows an opposite pattern. (This work is joint with Michael Faye.)

Cash on Delivery: A New Approach to Foreign Aid

2010-03-16T16:00:00-04:00

Donor countries have committed to major increases in development assistance but doubts remain over how effective this aid is. At this launch of their new book, authors Nancy Birdsall, William Savedoff, and Ayah Mahgoub present Cash on Delivery Aid, an approach that links aid directly to outcomes in ways that promote accountability and strengthen local institutions. It builds on existing initiatives that strive to disburse aid against results, but it takes the idea further by linking payments more directly to a single specific outcome; giving the recipient country full authority to achieve progress however it sees fit and without interference of any kind from donors; and assuring that the recipient country's progress is transparent and visible to its own citizens. These features could rebalance accountability, reduce transaction costs, and encourage local innovation and learning. Please join us, along with our panelists, to discuss this new approach to aid.