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Blog Post
November 02, 2023
International finance is under considerable pressure: originally prioritized toward economic growth in poorer countries, it is now meant to deliver broad-based sustainable development including global public goods such as climate and pandemic response—to say nothing of refugee hosting costs. In a fu...
Blog Post
March 20, 2023
In the next few weeks, the OECD will release its estimate of ODA—Official Development Assistance—provided by member countries, and will no doubt claim yet another record high. But this inflated measure has lost its credibility, in large part because its definition is governed solely by ODA-providing...
Blog Post
February 13, 2023
Official Development Assistance (ODA) isn’t what it used to be: each aid dollar is worth a lot less in terms of development outcomes. In large part that’s because the Development Assistance Committee (DAC), the donor club within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that ...
Blog Post
December 12, 2022
What’s to love about the Effective Altruism movement (beyond the fact that it is a bunch of people who are committed to working to make things better for others) is that it thinks about everybody worldwide equally when looking for problems to solve. What’s to love a little less is that, when it come...
Blog Post
September 23, 2022
Once you’ve looked at policy as a source of societal progress and regress, especially over the long term, it is hard to look at anything else. As a result, I hope ever-more people in the EA community in town this week decide to work in government, or work on making government work better.
Blog Post
August 25, 2022
The existing MCC income cutoff is based on the robust principle that the best buys in global development are concentrated in the world’s poorest countries. (Indeed, when the Corporation started, it only worked in low-income countries for that reason). There is a declining marginal utility of a dolla...
Blog Post
June 28, 2022
But to the extent the overall foreign assistance system is poorly managed to deliver, it is worth looking at who bears responsibility for those failures. The answer, surely, is the institutions implementing the programs—the ones who buy the goods and services ultimately purchased with US funding. It...