Development Assistance and Governance Initiative Media Mentions

The United Kingdom’s Department for International Development has been given enough heft that it can influence other government policies. Over the long term that will make Britain an even more progressive force in the world.

The United States, the locomotive of the world, is growing at a reasonable pace. However, this pace is not enough to trundle a world in which Europe and Japan are growing at very low rates and the Chinese economy is cooling-off rapidly.

[I applaud USAID Administrator Raj] Shah’s focus on agricultural productivity such as improved fertilizer techniques and drought-resistant seeds, an emphasis that fell out of favor in development circles after the 1990s.

Uruguay and its traditions of moderation and dialogue, changed president José Mujica. His transformation is basically a triumph for liberal democracy.

I think there’s a moral obligation to get a better handle on the condition of the poorest people in the country.

While the estimates we obtain vary, the fact that even some have millions of Americans living under $2 a day is alarming.

If we measured poverty in the United States as if it was a developing country, we would conclude that no-one falls under the $2 threshold.

The poor living in middle income countries, do have some advantages. They’re living in economies that are moving fast. So even if the poor are poor today, there’s probably fairly good prospects that they won’t be poor in five to ten years time, or their children won’t be poor.

It’s a much cruder attempt to obtain [Gallup's self-reported household income data], and yet the results seem broadly in the same range [as the World Bank's]. So it seems that we can assume rough and ready estimates through a much less laborious process.

Mobile money is a disruptive technology which sits somewhere in between telecommunications and the banking sector. In weak regulatory environments, deployments are able to take advantage of this ambiguity by avoiding the kind of oversight they would normally be subject to.