Center for Global Development [to 12 December 2015]
http://www.cgdev.org/page/press-center
Selected Press Releases, Blog Posts, Publications

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Focus on FY2016: Which Countries Will MCC Select This Year?
12/8/15
Sarah Rose
The Millennium Challenge Corporation’s (MCC’s) board of directors is scheduled to meet on December 16. When it does, the members will vote on which countries will be eligible for MCC assistance for fiscal year (FY) 2016. As always, the board is faced with some hard decisions.

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Doing Business Differently with Subnationals: Recommendations for Global Health Donors in Highly Decentralized Countries
12/8/15
Amanda Glassman and Anit Mukherjee
In the big decentralized countries where global disease burden is concentrated, such as India and Indonesia, most public money for health isn’t spent by the national ministry of health, the traditional counterpart for global health funders and technical agencies. Instead, most money is programmed and spent subnationally.
Greater subnational public spending reflects growing democratization, power-sharing, and local self-determination. It also responds to the conviction that local decision-makers understand local realities better than a bureaucrat sitting in the capital city. Yet evidence on the effectiveness of subnational spending on health care and outcomes is mixed at best, and incentives for greater spending and better performance can be weak.

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MCC Testimony: Lessons Learned after a Decade and Outlook for the Future
12/8/15
Nancy Birdsall
On December 8, 2015, CGD President Nancy Birdsall testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at a hearing about the Millennium Challenge Corporation: Lessons Learned after a Decade and Outlook for the Future.

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Modernizing US Security and Development Assistance in the Middle East
12/7/15
Nazanin Ash and Allison Grossman
US strategy in the Middle East and North Africa has not changed in the past 40 years, favoring security approaches over political and economic development, narrow partnerships with select regime elements over broader engagement with governments and people, and short-term responses and interventions over long-term vision. Symptomatic of this strategy is the fact that US security assistance vastly outstrips economic assistance.

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Power to the States: Making Fiscal Transfers Work for Better Health
12/7/15
Intergovernmental Fiscal Transfers for Health Working Group
Most money and responsibility for health in large federal countries like India rests with subnational governments — states, provinces, districts, and municipalities. The policies and spending at the subnational level affect the pace, scale, and equity of health improvements in countries that account for much of the world’s disease burden: India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Pakistan.

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Global Public Goods That Matter for Development: A Path for US Leadership
12/6/15
Nancy Birdsall and Anna Diofasi
The United States has been at the forefront of providing several development-related global public goods, including peace and security via its contributions to international peacekeeping, the monitoring of international sea trade routes, its engagement in forums such as the Financial Action Task Force to stem flows of funding to terrorist organizations, and more. Yet it has not fully capitalized on its comparative advantage in research and development at home that matters especially for the world’s poor, or on its opportunities for globally transformative investments abroad in such areas as clean power and disease surveillance. We propose two areas where the United States should lead on providing even more transformative global public goods.