Ideas to action: independent research for global prosperity
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Blog Post
December 11, 2023
In past years, the UK Government has undertaken substantial assessments of each multilateral’s effectiveness to inform UK funding decisions. In this blog, we explore how these major assessments of Value for Money (VfM) affected the UK’s multilateral aid allocation. To do this, we’ve accessed previou...
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...
Blog Post
April 20, 2022
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...
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
September 06, 2021
The need for effective evidence-informed priority-setting in global development is more urgent than ever, with widespread global challenges and reduced funding due to both COVID-19 related public spending and economic slowdowns. This blog explores three key barriers to using value for money evi...
Blog Post
July 23, 2020
A new ICAI report issued this week suggests that large parts of UK aid spending on research and development remain hampered by a design that favors British researcher interests over urgent research topics and capacity prioritized by the world’s poorest countries. The next few months are a perfect op...
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 ...