Category: Global Development

Megawatts and Malaise

Written by Ryan McGuine // On December 29, 2024 President Jimmy Carter passed away. Elected as a Washington outsider in the wake of the excesses of the Vietnam War and the Watergate Scandal, President Carter had a transformative impact on America's energy policy. While some of the measures taken by his administration are controversial, they shaped much of the energy framework that today's policymakers and industry actors operate within. Continue reading

Tightening the Belt and Road

Written by Ryan McGuine // On an official visit to Kazakhstan in 2013, Chinese president Xi Jinping announced the Belt and Road Initiative. In doing so, he touted the BRI as a “new Silk Road,” recalling the historic trade routes between Europe and Asia. Initially meant to link China with western Europe through physical infrastructure, the Belt and Road Initiative has grown in scope to encompass a vast network of railways, energy pipelines, and highways across countries spanning Oceania, Africa, and Latin America. Continue reading

Institutions All the Way Down

Written by Ryan McGuine // In October, economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.” While the Solow Model explains income differences between countries by the accumulation of physical capital and human capital, and rate of technological progress, Nobel laureate Douglass North wrote that rather than driving economic growth, these factors are economic growth. One thing that actually drives growth is institutions. Continue reading

Doing Less More With Less

Written by Ryan McGuine // In many ways, it feels like the world is changing faster than it ever has, yet measures of economic productivity have been growing more slowly than any time in the last 200 years. Productivity growth has been the main driver of historically-improving living standards, leading to more food, better health, better housing, and more consumer goods. But despite growing at around 2% per year for the past few decades, productivity growth has been slowing in advanced economies around the world. Continue reading

Demography & Development: Fruitful Multiplication

Written by Ryan McGuine // For millennia, there was very little change in the number of humans on earth, but like so many other measures of physical well-being and consumption, the global population skyrocketed in the 19th and 20th centuries. While it seems intuitively obvious that fewer people is good, because fewer people means higher incomes, as well as smaller environmental impact, there is actually good reason to be worried about declining populations. Continue reading

COVID-19 Response: Reflections from the (Virtual) Trenches

Written by Rebecca Alcock // On June 3rd, 2018, a volcano erupted in the heart of Guatemala. At the time of the eruption, I was living and working in Guatemala as a field intern for Engineers Without Borders, supporting the pre- and post-implementation site assessments for infrastructure projects. Our team mobilized to rebuild crucial infrastructure in the communities surrounding the volcano and had the foresight to formally establish a response framework, which would pave the way for the substantial COVID-19 response efforts underway today. Continue reading

Data & Development: A Journey Without Maps

Written by Ryan McGuine // The world is awash in data like never before, which is a good thing for global development — there are increasing returns to both more information, and better linkages across information types and sources. Despite considerable progress, though, it seems likely that a lot of the value associated with plentiful data is related to the ability to ask better questions, rather than the ability to make better prescriptions. Much of that value has yet to be realized. Continue reading

This is America

Sparked by the death of George Floyd, who was killed by police officers in Minneapolis, protesters marched against systematic racial bias and police brutality in cities throughout America last week. This is a site about global development, a field which typically avoids coverage of the USA. Nonetheless, its tools to study poverty and inequity are just as applicable in wealthy countries as they are in low- and middle-income ones. Continue reading