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Blog Post
July 06, 2023
USAID administrator Samantha Power’s aim to advance localization—with at least a quarter of funds going directly to local partners—has been widely lauded. A recent USAID report on localization indicates progress towards this goal, but major operational and contractual directions about how to impleme...
Blog Post
March 09, 2023
Dana Hyde showed tremendous leadership and wisdom as the fourth head of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), serving for nearly three years during President Obama’s second term. These brief notes on her leadership are our way of providing a tribute to her major contributions to MCC’s effectiv...
POLICY PAPERS
October 28, 2021
Results-based financing (RBF) is one of several broad approaches to finance official development assistance (ODA) “that attempt[s] to connect at least a portion of payment to the verified achievement of results.” Despite some relatively high-profile programs and pilots—and broad interest and curiosi...
Blog Post
October 15, 2019
Efforts to make aid more effective in the last two decades have given prominence to "country ownership." With true country ownership, aid is supposed to follow the priorities of recipient countries, rather than those of the funders. Yet funders have their priorities too. So recipients and ...
WORKING PAPERS
October 11, 2019
This paper illustrates the tradeoff between country ownership and funders’ priorities with a formal model in which aid is governed by a contract to produce a jointly desired outcome. The model generalizes the Principal-Agent approaches for studying aid which treat countries as having multiple ...
Blog Post
July 26, 2019
In the world of foreign aid flows, the idea of paying for outcomes rather than inputs has a long history. Yet despite regular proclamations of interest in such approaches, the share of funding that is linked to outputs or outcomes instead of activities and processes remains quite small.
Blog Post
March 26, 2019
At the end of 2018, the world had seven development impact bonds (DIBs) and more in the pipeline. Yet questions remain about the potential of DIBs—still a new financing instrument—compared to other pay-for-performance arrangements. With a dearth of standard and transparent evaluation met...
POLICY PAPERS
December 14, 2018
Using publicly available information, we describe all seven DIBs, and evaluate the three “health DIBs” in more detail, comparing their stakeholders, implementation, and outcome structures. We offer three recommendations to improve evaluation and inform development of DIBs in the future.
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Blog Post
April 25, 2018
A large proportion of revenue gains over the last two decades has come from countries’ efforts to improve the design and compliance of consumption and other indirect taxes, particularly the VAT (value-added tax); in doing so, the objective has been to minimize VAT’s regressive effe...