The Center for Global Development (CGD) is a nonprofit

think tank A think tank, or policy institute, is a research institute that performs research and advocacy concerning topics such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, technology, and culture. Most think tanks are non-governmenta ...

based in

Washington, D.C. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...

, and

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

that focuses on international development.

History

It was founded in November 2001 by former senior U.S. official Edward W. Scott, director of the

Peterson Institute for International Economics The Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), known until 2006 as the Institute for International Economics (IIE), is an American think tank based in Washington, D.C. It was founded by C. Fred Bergsten in 1981 and has been led by ...

, C. Fred Bergsten, and

Nancy Birdsall Nancy Birdsall (born 6 February 1946) is an American economist, the founding president of the Center for Global Development (CGD) in Washington, DC, USA, and former executive vice-president of the Inter-American Development Bank. She co-founded ...

. Birdsall, the former vice president of the Inter-American Development Bank and former director of the Policy Research Department at the

World Bank The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and grants to the governments of low- and middle-income countries for the purpose of pursuing capital projects. The World Bank is the collective name for the Inte ...

, became the center's first president.

Lawrence Summers Lawrence Henry Summers (born November 30, 1954) is an American economist who served as the 71st United States secretary of the treasury from 1999 to 2001 and as director of the National Economic Council from 2009 to 2010. He also served as pres ...

was unanimously elected in March 2014 by the CGD Board of Directors to succeed founding Board Chair Edward Scott Jr., on May 1, 2014. CGD was ranked the 13th most prominent think tank in the international development sphere by

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

's "2015 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report". In 2009, ''Foreign Policy'' magazine's Think-Tank Index listed CGD as one of the top 15 overall think-tanks in the US. CGD's stated mission is "to reduce global poverty and inequality by encouraging policy change in the United States and other rich countries through rigorous research and active engagement with the policy community. The center considers itself to be a "think and do" tank, with an emphasis on producing research that is channeled into practical policy proposals.

Major programs

CGD is well known for leading debt-relief programs, specifically in

Nigeria Nigeria ( ), , ig, Naìjíríyà, yo, Nàìjíríà, pcm, Naijá , ff, Naajeeriya, kcg, Naijeriya officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf o ...

and Liberia. CGD vice president Todd Moss first proposed the Nigerian debt buy-back, which resulted in the Paris Club of rich nations forgiving 60% of $31 billion of debt.“Clean Slate”, ''The Economist'', October 2005 Former CGD senior fellow Steve Radelet advised Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and her senior advisors on debt relief and aid coordination. CGD is also known for creating the program called advance market commitments to encourage vaccine development for specific diseases. The G7 endorsed the approach and the

Gates Foundation The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), a merging of the William H. Gates Foundation and the Gates Learning Foundation, is an American private foundation founded by Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates. Based in Seattle, Washington, it was ...

and five countries gave $1.5 billion to create a vaccine against strains of

pneumonia Pneumonia is an inflammatory condition of the lung primarily affecting the small air sacs known as alveoli. Symptoms typically include some combination of productive or dry cough, chest pain, fever, and difficulty breathing. The severi ...

. In cooperation with ''Foreign Policy'', CGD has published the

Commitment to Development Index The Commitment to Development Index (CDI), published annually by the Center for Global Development, ranks the world's richest countries on their dedication to policies that benefit the five billion people living in poorer nations. Rich and poor c ...

since 2003. The annual index ranks countries based on how their foreign aid, trade, migration, investment, environment, security and technology policies encourage global development. The Center for Global Development in Europe was established in October 2011 with the aim of engaging with and learning from policymakers, academics, and researchers in Europe, and bringing the CGD blend of evidence-led, high-quality research and engagement to European policymaking and engagement about development. "CGD in Europe" research initiatives include "Europe Beyond Aid", Development Impact Bonds, and Illicit Financial Flows. In November 2013, CGD purchased a new headquarters that includes a 170-seat state-of-the-art conference center, a 60-seat boardroom/ideas lab, and a multimedia studio.

Research

CGD conducts research within a range of topics that impact

global poverty Poverty is the state of having few material possessions or little

income

and people of the developing world. Topics include

aid effectiveness Aid effectiveness is the degree of success or failure of international aid (development aid or humanitarian aid). Concern with aid effectiveness might be at a high level of generality (whether aid on average fulfils the main functions that aid is ...

, education,

globalization Globalization, or globalisation (English in the Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth English; American and British English spelling differences#-ise, -ize (-isation, -ization), see spelling differences), is the process of foreign relation ...

and

global health Global health is the health of the populations in the worldwide context; it has been defined as "the area of study, research and practice that places a priority on improving health and achieving equity in health for all people worldwide". Problem ...

, as well as the impact of trade and

migration Migration, migratory, or migrate may refer to: Human migration * Human migration, physical movement by humans from one region to another ** International migration, when peoples cross state boundaries and stay in the host state for some minimum le ...

on development. The center is well known for its research on

. CGD president

recently developed Cash on Delivery (COD) Aid, an initiative aimed to improve aid effectiveness by focusing foreign aid on outcomes, not inputs. In 2008, CGD produced a compilation of essays edited by Nancy Birdsall called "The White House and the World: A Global Development Agenda for the Next U.S. President". These essays give policy recommendations to solve international problems, such as global health, foreign aid policy, migration, global warming and foreign direct investment. CGD recently published a report on the dangers of drug resistance in "The Race against Drug Resistance: When Medicines Fail", which the Global Health team launched on June 14, 2010. The center's Migration and Development Initiative aims to study the effects labor movement has not only on the receiving country, but also on the country of origin and the migrants themselves. CGD economists

Michael Clemens Michael Andrew Clemens (born c. 1972) is an American development economist. He is a senior fellow and research manager at the Center for Global Development (CGD), a Washington D.C.-based think tank, where he leads the Migration and Development ...

and

Lant Pritchett Lant Pritchett (born 1959) is an American development economist. He is the RISE Research Director at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. He was born in Utah in 1959 and raised in Boise, Idaho. He graduated from Brigham Yo ...

have repeatedly called for a development agenda that incorporates migration from low and middle-income to high-income countries, where wages for the same task can be up to ten times higher. However, they argue that the misperception that development is about places rather than people often leads policymakers as well as economists to ignore the large benefits to the migrants themselves. Rich countries' immigration policies are also a factor in the

. CGD has advocated for temporary visas for Haitians to seasonally work in US agriculture and participated in an initiative to that end. In 2016, they issued a report on how policymakers can manage migration between the United States and Mexico to the benefit of both countries. CGD Senior Fellow Ranil Dissanayake publishes a weekl
blog
associated with the Center for the Study of African Economies. Other research topics listed on their website include

capital flows In economics, capital goods or capital are "those durable produced goods that are in turn used as productive inputs for further production" of goods and services. At the macroeconomic level, "the nation's capital stock includes buildings, eq ...

financial crises A financial crisis is any of a broad variety of situations in which some financial assets suddenly lose a large part of their nominal value. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many financial crises were associated with banking panics, and man ...

debt relief Debt relief or debt cancellation is the partial or total forgiveness of debt, or the slowing or stopping of debt growth, owed by individuals, corporations, or nations. From antiquity through the 19th century, it refers to domestic debts, in particu ...

environmental issues Environmental issues are effects of human activity on the biophysical environment, most often of which are harmful effects that cause environmental degradation. Environmental protection is the practice of protecting the natural environment on t ...

, economic growth,

governance Governance is the process of interactions through the laws, norms, power or language of an organized society over a social system ( family, tribe, formal or informal organization, a territory or across territories). It is done by the gove ...

/democracy, international financial institutions, finance, food and agriculture,

inequality Inequality may refer to: Economics * Attention inequality, unequal distribution of attention across users, groups of people, issues in etc. in attention economy * Economic inequality, difference in economic well-being between population groups * ...

, population, poverty, private investment, security and development, and data sets and resources.

Funding

CGD receives funding from foundations, governments, individuals, and corporations. The organization publishes information on its website for all grants and donations received that are above $100,000. CGD received the highest rating (five stars) from Transparify for its open disclosure of funding in 2014 and 2015. In 2013, the government of

Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe, the mainland territory of which comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and the ...

gave CGD $5 million to support its work on tropical forests and development. That support was cited in a New York Times article about think tank funding. A report by the Center for International Policy's

Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative The Center for International Policy (CIP) is a non-profit foreign policy research and advocacy think tank with offices in Washington, D.C. and New York City. It was founded in 1975 in response to the Vietnam War. The Center describes its mission ...

of the top 50 think tanks on the

Global Go-To Think Tanks The Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program (TTCSP) was a non-profit program at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that operated from 1989 to 2021. TTCSP was originally established at the Foreign Policy Research Institu ...

rating index found that during the period 2014-2018 the Center for Global Development received the second-highest amount of funding from outside the United States compared to any other think tank, with a total of more than US$37 million, though the center was commended for being "remarkably transparent about its funding sources."

Initiatives

The center considers itself a "think and do" tank, and thus has multiple initiatives to implement their policy suggestions. These, initiatives attempt to give specific policy recommendations to organizations while creating a dialogue. In 2003, David Roodman created the

with ''Foreign Policy'' magazine and Mapping Worlds. The Commitment to Development Index (CDI) ranks and analyzes nations’ financial and political commitments to development every year. The index uses interactive graphs and analyzes how countries contribute to development in seven policy areas: aid (both quantity as a share of income and quality), trade, investment, migration, environment, security, and technology. Other initiatives include Cash on Delivery Aid, Combating Drug Resistance, Development Impact Bonds, Europe Beyond Aid, the Latin America Initiative, Migration as a Tool for Disaster Recovery, Oil-to-Cash: Fighting the Resource Curse through Cash Transfers, Pakistan: US Development Strategy, Preemptive Contract Sanctions, Reforming Trade Preferences, Rethinking US Development Policy, The Future of the World Bank, Tropical Forests for Climate and Development, Understanding India, and Value for Money: An Agenda for Global Health Funding Agencies. From November 2007 to November 2012, CGD published Carbon Monitoring For Action
CARMA
, a searchable

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases s ...

that estimated carbon emissions of power plants and power companies around the world.

Events

CGD hosts about 200 public and private events a year that draw more than 7,000 participants. Events have featured speakers such as U.S. Secretary of State

Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton ( Rodham; born October 26, 1947) is an American politician, diplomat, and former lawyer who served as the 67th United States Secretary of State for President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013, as a United States sen ...

, President of

Goodluck Jonathan Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan (born 20 November 1957)Lawson Heyford, ''The Source'' (Lagos), 11 December 2006. is a Nigerian politician who served as the President of Nigeria from 2010 to 2015. He lost the 2015 presidential election to fo ...

, economist Paul Romer, UK Secretary of State for International Development

Andrew Mitchell Andrew John Bower Mitchell (born 23 March 1956) is a British politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Sutton Coldfield since 2001. A member of the Conservative Party, Mitchell was previously the MP for Gedling from 1987 to 1 ...

, among many others. During Secretary

’s visit to CGD on January 6, 2010, she emphasized the importance of development and said it was "time to elevate development as a central pillar of our foreign policy and to rebuild

USAID The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government that is primarily responsible for administering civilian foreign aid and development assistance. With a budget of over $27 bi ...

into the world's premier development agency". CGD hosts an annual lecture series called the Sabot Lecture series, in honor of the late development economist Richard "Dick" Sabot. Each year, the Sabot Lecture hosts a scholar-practitioner who has made significant contributions to international development, combining academic work with leadership in the policy community. Past Sabot speakers include

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (; born 13 June 1954) is a Nigerian economist, who has been serving as the Director-General of the World Trade Organization since March 2021. Notably, she is the first woman and first African to lead the World Trade Organiza ...

, Lord Nicholas Stern, Kemal Dervis and

Kenneth Rogoff Kenneth Saul Rogoff (born March 22, 1953) is an American economist and chess Grandmaster. He is the Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy and professor of economics at Harvard University. Early life Rogoff grew up in Rochester, New York. ...

Stance on transphobia

In 2019 a tribunal brought by former visiting fellow

Maya Forstater Maya Forstater (born 3 July 1973) is a British business studies and international development researcher who is the claimant in '' Maya Forstater v Centre for Global Development''. The case established that gender critical views are protected as ...

at the Central London Employment Tribunal found in favour of CGD for not renewing her contract due to social media messages describing transgender women as men ( ''Maya Forstater v Centre for Global Development'' (2019)). Employment Judge James Tayler found that Forstater's ' gender critical' views were "incompatible with human dignity and fundamental rights of others" and that they did "not have the protected characteristic of philosophical belief" under the UK

Equality Act 2010 The Equality Act 2010 is an Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom passed during the Brown ministry with the primary purpose of consolidating, updating and supplementing the numerous prior Acts and Regulations, that formed the basis of anti-d ...

.https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5e15e7f8e5274a06b555b8b0/Maya_Forstater__vs_CGD_Europe__Centre_for_Global_Development_and_Masood_Ahmed_-_Judgment.pdf However, in June 2021, an Employment Appeal Tribunal led by Akhlaq Choudhury overturned this judgment, finding that Forstater's beliefs were covered under the protected belief characteristic within the meaning of the Equality Act. The appeal was allowed after the appeal tribunal concluded the belief that "biological sex is real, important and immutable" met the legal test of a "genuine and important philosophical position", and "could not be shown to be a direct attempt to harm others." As such these beliefs were afforded protection under the Equality Act. The original tribunal's ruling that the belief was "not worthy of respect in a democratic society" was overturned. The appeal was supported by interventions by the UK's Equality and Human Rights Commission and the NGO Index on Censorship which both stated that 'gender critical' views should be considered a philosophical belief and thus protected under law. CGD vice president Amanda Glassman, released the following statement in reaction: "The decision is disappointing and surprising because we believe Judge Tayler got it right when he found this type of offensive speech causes harm to trans people, and therefore could not be protected under the Equality Act." On 30 June 2021, 87 staff members wrote a letter to management saying "We were disappointed to learn that the Employment Appeals Tribunal overturned its 2019 ruling ... We believe the original verdict was correct when it found that this type of offensive and exclusionary language and action causes harm to trans people and therefore could not be protected under the Equality Act."

Notable fellows

Resident fellows

* Kalipso Chalkidou *

* Liliana Rojas-Suarez

Visiting fellows

* Joyce Banda *

* Antoinette Sayeh

Non-resident fellows

Abhijit Banerjee Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee (; born 21 February 1961) is an Indian-American economist who is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Banerjee shared the 2019 Nobel Memorial Priz ...

* Chris Blattman *

Francis Fukuyama Francis Yoshihiro Fukuyama (; born October 27, 1952) is an American political scientist, political economist, international relations scholar and writer. Fukuyama is known for his book ''The End of History and the Last Man'' (1992), which argue ...

* Paul Gertler *

Ravi Kanbur Sanjiv M. Ravi Kanbur (born 28 August 1954), is T.H. Lee Professor of World Affairs, International Professor of Applied Economics, and Professor of Economics at Cornell University. He worked for the World Bank for almost two decades and was the d ...

* Dean Karlan *

Michael Kremer Michael Robert Kremer (born November 12, 1964) is an American development economist who is University Professor in Economics And Public Policy at the University of Chicago. He is the founding director of the Development Innovation Lab at the B ...

* Nora Lustig * Branko Milanović *

Sendhil Mullainathan Sendhil Mullainathan () (born c. 1973) is an American professor of Computation and Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the author of '' Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much'' (with Eldar Sha ...

* Martin Ravallion * Paul Romer * Bogolo Kenewendo

References

External links

*
Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Center For Global Development Dupont Circle Foreign policy and strategy think tanks in the United States Non-profit organizations based in Washington, D.C. Nonpartisan organizations in the United States 2001 establishments in the United States Think tanks established in 2001 International development organizations