Charter Cities are a proposal to build cities from scratch in the world’s poorest nations, outsourcing their design and government to rich countries. Visionary, naïve or plain bonkers? Probably a bit of all three. They are the brainchild of US economist Paul Romer, who explains his idea on this (20 minute) video. He’s serious – last year he gave up

The Human Development Report, published by UNDP, is traditionally the best of the UN annual tomes. This year’s HDR, entitled Overcoming Barriers, discusses migration. It’s a critical issue in development – moving in search of work and a better life has always been a strategy for people living in poverty as most modern-day Americans and Australians can testify (not including indigenous inhabitants,

‘Good and Bad Power: The Ideals and Betrayals of Government’ by Geoff Mulgan combines real insight with a wonderfully eclectic selection of quotes from across the ages. Here’s a small selection: ‘Madness is something rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, peoples, ages, it is the rule.’ Friedrich Nietzsche ‘The highest manifestation of life consists of this: that a being governs its

The Centre for the Study of African Economies in Oxford (home to Paul Collier, among others) is putting out some fascinating two pagers on its work, including two recent papers on ‘dirty elections’. In ‘Cleaning up Dirty Elections’ Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler go to work  on a new data set spanning nearly 30 years and 155 countries (suggesting that

Gave a presentation on this last week. I’ve blogged before on the strengths and weaknesses of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), but if you want more,  ‘Promoting Pro-poor Policy after the MDGs’ a recent conference organized by EADI, ActionAid, IDS and others has dozens of background papers (prize for most world-weary title goes to Pietro Garau for ‘The MDGs are modest,

At what point does an advocacy NGO cease being ‘ahead of the curve’, ‘visionary’ etc (choose your own cliché) and instead become simply bonkers, a prophet ranting in a wilderness uninhabited by anyone with a smidgeon of decision-making power? This subject kept cropping up at an Oxfam internal discussion the other day. Unfortunately, I framed the discussion in terms of

I didn’t attend the G20 summit in Pittsburgh last week, but I’ve been poring over the communiqué. Here are some initial thoughts on what it all means (numbers in square brackets refer to paragraphs in the original), incorporating analysis and intel from the Oxfam team at the event. Headline: Pittsburgh formally enshrined the rise of the BRICs and relative decline

When can a country end poverty by redistributing wealth from its rich people, and when must it instead rely on aid or growth? That’s a question Martin Ravallion, head of the World Bank’s research department seeks to answer in a new paper. Essentially he is trying to put precise numbers on the relatively obvious point that the richer a country

I spent last week racing round Brazil launching the Portuguese-language edition of From Poverty to Power (Da Pobreza ao Poder, the publishers are looking for distributors in Portugal, Angola and Mozambique – any suggestions?). Here are a few impressions: A year after the Lehman’s collapse hit the global panic buttons, there’s a striking level of optimism about Brazil’s handling of

After months of futile and wearying paralysis, marked by interminable meetings full of little more than posturing and the endless repetition of fixed positions, the climate change talks seem to be entering full negotiating mode, and not before time, with the Copenhagen climate summit only 3 months away. For the ‘glass half full’ optimistic version, check out Leo Horn’s summary

These are exciting times for anyone who wants to reform the US aid system, as years of preparation and lobbying start to bear fruit (see my previous blog and click here for an excellent introduction to US aid from Oxfam America). Congress has taken an early lead on reform – with three pieces of legislation currently in the works (bipartisan bills

Foreign Policy magazine has teamed up again with the Washington DC-based ‘Fund for Peace’ thinktank to produce an interactive map of state fragility, to illustrate their Failed States Index 2009, covering 177 countries. Most fragile are Somalia, followed by Zimbabwe, Chad, Sudan and DRC. Most stable are (inevitably) the Scandinavians – Norway, followed by Finland and Sweden. Annoyingly, I can’t