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.

Who Protected and Why? Tariffs the World Around 1870-1938

Abstract: This paper uses a new database to establish a set of tariff facts that have not been well appreciated: tariff rates in Latin America were far higher than anywhere else in the century before the Great Depression; while lower than Latin America, tariffs were far higher in the European periphery and the Englishspeaking new world than they were in the European core; tariff rates rose everywhere in the periphery up to 1900, and then moderated a bit up to WWI; and the great anti-global leap during the 1930s in Latin American and the European periphery was not new policy territory since these two regions had plenty of previous experience with very high tariffs. These world tariff facts need an explanation, especially since economic historians have pretty much ignored them while devoting so much attention to Europe. As we search for the explanations, we find that modern endogenous tariff theory isn’t quite up to the task. The paper uses this world wide sample of 35 countries as a panel to explore competing hypotheses as to what drove policy in the century before WWII: revenue motivation; optimal tariffs; strategic tariffs; deindustrialization fears; Stolper-Samueson forces; and many more. The world environment mattered. Trading partners mattered. Domestic geography, factor endowments, institutions and politics mattered.

Global HIV/AIDS Policy in Transition

Abstract: In 2007, the United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) concluded that “Global HIV incidence likely peaked in the late 1990s” ( 1 ), due to “natural trends in the epidemic as well as the result of prevention programmes” ( 1 ). The slow decline in new infections together with a recent rise in antiretroviral therapies (ARTs) halted the rise in the estimated number of AIDS deaths at about 2.2 million per year—equivalent to 4% of all global deaths ( 2 ). Among adults 15 to 49, the proportion currently infected with HIV (HIV prevalence) plateaued at just under 1% before declining to 0.8% worldwide ( 1 , 3 ). These trends raise the question of how global health funding should be rebalanced between AIDS treatment and HIV prevention, as well as other health-care investments.

The Financial Burden of Non-Communicable Chronic Diseases in Rural Nigeria: Wealth and Gender Heterogeneity in Health Care Utilization and Health Expenditures

Abstract: Objectives Better insights into health care utilization and out-of-pocket expenditures for non-communicable chronic diseases (NCCD) are needed to develop accessible health care and limit the increasing financial burden of NCCDs in Sub-Saharan Africa. Methods A household survey was conducted in rural Kwara State, Nigeria, among 5,761 individuals. Data were obtained using biomedical and socio-economic questionnaires. Health care utilization, NCCD-related health expenditures and distances to health care providers were compared by sex and by wealth quintile, and a Heckman regression model was used to estimate health expenditures taking selection bias in health care utilization into account. Results The prevalence of NCCDs in our sample was 6.2%. NCCD-affected individuals from the wealthiest quintile utilized formal health care nearly twice as often as those from the lowest quintile (87.8% vs 46.2%, p = 0.002). Women reported foregone formal care more often than men (43.5% vs. 27.0%, p = 0.058). Health expenditures relative to annual consumption of the poorest quintile exceeded those of the highest quintile 2.2-fold, and the poorest quintile exhibited a higher rate of catastrophic health spending (10.8% among NCCD-affected households) than the three upper quintiles (4.2% to 6.7%). Long travel distances to the nearest provider, highest for the poorest quintile, were a significant deterrent to seeking care. Using distance to the nearest facility as instrument to account for selection into health care utilization, we estimated out-of-pocket health care expenditures for NCCDs to be significantly higher in the lowest wealth quintile compared to the three upper quintiles. Conclusions Facing potentially high health care costs and poor accessibility of health care facilities, many individuals suffering from NCCDs—particularly women and the poor—forego formal care, thereby increasing the risk of more severe illness in the future. When seeking care, the poor spend less on treatment than the rich, suggestive of lower quality care, while their expenditures represent a higher share of their annual household consumption. This calls for targeted interventions that enhance health care accessibility and provide financial protection from the consequences of NCCDs, especially for vulnerable populations.

Population growth, factor accumulation, and productivity

Abstract: In research on how population growth affects economic performance, some researchers stress that population growth reduces the natural resources and capital (physical and human) per worker while other researchers stress how greater population size and density affect productivity. Despite these differing theoretical predictions, the empirical literature hs focused mainly on the relationship between population growth and output per person (or crude proxies for factor accumulation). It has not decomposed the effect of population through factor accumulation and the effect through productivity. The author uses newly created cross-country, time-series data on physical capital stocks and the educational stock of the labor force to establish six findings: There is no correlation between the growth of capital per worker and population growth. The common practice of using investment rates as a proxy for capital stock growth rates is completely unjustified, as the two are uncorrelated across countries. There is either no correlation, or a weak positive correlation, between the growth of years of schooling per worker and the population growth rate. Enrollment rates are even worse as a crude proxy for the expansion of the educational capital stock, as the two are negatively correlated. There is no correlation, or a weak negative correlation, between measures of total factory productivity growth and population growth. Nearly all of the weak correlation between the growth of output per person and population growth is the result of shifts in participation in the labor force, not of changes in output per worker.