Center for Global Development

About: Center for Global Development is a nonprofit organization based out in Washington D.C., District of Columbia, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Poverty & Population. The organization has 1472 authors who have published 3891 publications receiving 162325 citations.

The Political Economy of Bad Data: Evidence from African Survey & Administrative Statistics

Abstract: Across multiple African countries, discrepancies between administrative data and independent household surveys suggest official statistics systematically exaggerate development progress. We provide evidence for two distinct explanations of these discrepancies. First, governments misreport to foreign donors, as in the case of a results-based aid program rewarding reported vaccination rates. Second, national governments are themselves misled by frontline service providers, as in the case of primary education, where official enrollment numbers diverged from survey estimates after funding shifted from user fees to per pupil government grants. Both syndromes highlight the need for incentive compatibility between data systems and funding rules.

Improving Governance from the Outside In

Abstract: The variation in the efficacy of governance-related authority structures is stunning. The focus among scholars primarily on domestic conditions, and only secondarily on the external environment, to explain patterns of political development conforms to the prevailing assumptions of comparativists, international relations scholars, and international lawyers. Over the past decade, however, some scholars have studied the possibility that political institutions within states can be influenced or determined not only by internal factors and the external environment but also by the explicit policies of foreign actors. An emerging body of scholarship examines the efficacy of different policy tools that external actors might use to change the structure of domestic institutions in target states. We review this literature and reach the following conclusions. First, contracting often works, coercion sometimes works, and imposition rarely works. Second, the motivation of initiators matters: to be effective, intervening...

Global Poverty: How Global Governance Is Failing the Poor

Abstract: 1. The History and Geography of Global Poverty 2. Understanding and Explaining Global Poverty 3. The Institutional Landscape for Attacking Global Poverty 4. Doing Global Poverty Eradication: All Change or No Change 5. Strategic Choices for Global Poverty Eradication 6. The Future of Global Poverty: Emerging Issues in an Uncertain World 7. Why Don't we Care About Ending Poverty 8. Moving Forward on Global Poverty: Can we Care?

Organised versus Unorganised Manufacturing Performance in the Post-Reform Period

Abstract: This paper analyses the productivity performance of both the organised and unorganised segments of the Indian manufacturing sector using unit level data. Both partial and total factor productivity measures are employed. Our analysis reveals that labour productivity has increased for the organised sector over time, whereas both labour productivity and capital intensity growth have slowed down in the unorganised sector during the period between 2000-01 and 2004-05. The improvement in TFP growth in organised manufacturing in the post-2000 period as compared to the second half of the 1990s across most states in India is heartening as also the fact that output growth was mostly productivity-driven in the post-reform period. However, the declining TFP and the increasing capital intensity of the unorganised sector are causes of worry and raise several important questions.