The UK’s Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) predicts that Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s famous two-test decision rule for increasing the UK’s aid budget back to 0.7 per cent of Gross National Income (GNI) is expected to be met next year. If that holds true, it means that the UK has a little less than ...

In Stefan Dercon’s new book, Gambling on Development, he distils the lessons from some 30 years of research into global development and a decade as a senior technocrat in the UK’s development architecture. I discuss four implications of the book for how we think and do development (the CGD mission, ...

Recently, the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) published the annual statistics summarizing how much foreign aid its 30 member states, including Austria, provided in 2021, loudly trumpeting the all time high levels of ODA achieved. It’s a good time to reflect on the uncomfortable tension...

Someone in a high-income country is 11x more likely to have been fully inoculated than someone in a low-income country. We set out here how the OECD plans to count COVID vaccines, why this reduces the UK’s overall spending on ODA, and how MPs think we should count them.

As the year draws to a close, the temptation to claim wisdom from adversity and experience becomes irresistible. We did it last year, by exploring what we learnt while the world burned around us. 2021 was perhaps a marginal improvement: not quite the best of times, but not quite the worst of times, ...

The UK government has announced that it anticipates a return to spending 0.7 percent of gross national income (GNI) on official development assistance (ODA) in three years’ time. It is confident enough in this that the just-published Spending Review, which sets departmental budgets up to the 2024/25...

There are a plausible set of circumstances under which the UK’s status as a serious bilateral donor would be under existential threat. They would take the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) from having slightly more than £8 billion in 2019 over which it has full flexibility to spe...