Fortnightly links: of cash transfers and sloth, fundraising dilemmas, poor countries rising, and more
By Terence Wood and Camilla Burkot
6 November 2015
Do cash transfer programs in developing countries reduce incentives to work? Abhijit Banerjee, Rema Hanna, Gabriel Kreindler and Benjamin Olken provide good evidence they don’t. (The World Bank also has an interesting discussion of what recent research says about designing effective cash transfers.)
Does NGO fundraising resemble the tragedy of the commons? And if it does, what can be done? Three interesting blog posts discuss.
Is China’s aid program popular in China? Not particularly, according to this Brookings commentary. Also on China, Axel Dreher, Andreas Fuchs, Brad Parks, Austin Strange and Michael Tierney have a fascinating blog on the mischaracterisation of Chinese aid in Africa. Also on China-Africa development cooperation, Deborah Bräutigam (author of The Dragon’s Gift and the China in Africa blog) writes: “Don’t get excited, China is not the new aid superpower“.
The Washington Post has an imperfect, but still useful, summary of the new Aid Data Listening to Leaders research.
Chris Hoy at ODI has a good post on inequality, poverty and development.
And, to end on a happy note, Steven Radelet has a well-argued article in the Journal of Democracy in which he contends that development is occurring, and occurring quite rapidly, even in (most) of the world’s poorest countries. The article is paywalled, but an excellent talk based on the article can be found here.
(Thank you to Ashlee Betteridge and Jonathan Wilson for helping with links for this post.)
About the author/s
Terence Wood
Terence Wood is a Fellow at the Development Policy Centre. His research focuses on political governance in Western Melanesia, and Australian and New Zealand aid.
Camilla Burkot
Camilla Burkot was a Research Officer at the Development Policy Centre, and Editor of the Devpolicy Blog, from 2015 to 2017. She has a background in social anthropology and holds a Master of Public Health from Columbia University, and has field experience in Eastern and Southern Africa, and PNG. She now works for the Burnet Institute.
