The new CGAP book, Access for All: Building Inclusive Financial Systems, provides an optimistic assessment of ten years of microfinance and offers strategies for the future.
A certain amount of corruption is grounded in culture and immune to carrots and sticks.
Owen points us to the foreign aid face-off being run by the LA Times. Or is it a Columbia vs. NYU subway-showdown? Easterly handily won an earlier round.
Aid should be provided with clear targets and aimed at measurable results, and both donors and recipients should be held more accountable for achieved specified goals. This will require specifying up front exactly what a particular aid program is designed to achieve: building so many roads of a particular quality or immunizing a certain number of children. It will also require assessments by independent monitors, not by the aid agencies themselves.
CGAP has released a new note on sustaining microfinance in post-tsunami Asia. A concise and short two pages. Also see disasters and microcredit.
Just released by the World Bank's Independent Evaluation Group.
There is growing literature on how social issues are increasingly impacting business environments and decision making. However, it is a sign of the times to see the latest edition of the McKinsey Quarterly include a clarion call for business leaders to pay attention to social issues.
This Thursday at 2pm CEPR and Friedrich Ebert Stiftung are hosting an event on The Growth and Development Challenge: What are the Main Drivers to Fight Poverty? Speakers include Victor Tokman (ex-econ advisor to the President of Chile), Prabhat Patnaik (Jawaharlal Nehru University), Danny Leipziger (PREM VP, World Bank) and Mark Weisbrot (CEPR). Kathy Schalch of NPR will be moderating. Free for those of you in DC.
From the lecture notes prepared by Raj Nallari and Breda Griffith, this Friday we review the Balance of Payments.