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Most recent by Brookings Institute

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Leveraging the Biden-Harris climate agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals

In November, at the COP26 U.N. Climate Change Conference, the U.S. will join the community of nations keeping alive the promise to meet the agreed target to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to preindustrial levels. The Biden administration will continue to work to reestablish U.S. leadership and increase global commitments for tackling climate change amid...
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Moving beyond GDP: Sustainability, resilience, and inclusiveness for economic development

What is the best way to assess a nation’s prosperity, not just today but into the future? Growing concerns about climate change, rising inequality, unsustainable resource use, and destruction of nature highlight the need for new economic tools to ensure development is sustainable, resilient, and inclusive. Gross domestic product (GDP), the conventional measure of economic progress, overlooks many vital...
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Stability and inclusivity of stablecoins: A conversation with Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire

While cryptocurrency has been around for over a decade, it has only gained mainstream popularity recently. Crypto backers see the technology as the way of the future, but its instability leaves others skeptical. As a less volatile alternative to traditional cryptocurrencies, asset-backed stablecoins have joined the market. But as with all new technology, important questions must be resolved before...
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The US needs urgently to raise its macropru game

Donald Kohn Robert V. Roosa Chair in International Economics Senior Fellow - Economic Studies Implementing robust macroprudential policy—addressing threats to financial stability beyond those that were the focus of safety and soundness on an institution-by-institution basis or of investor protection market-by-market—was a constructive outcome of the legislative and policy response to the global financial crisis of 2008-09. In the U.S., the Dodd-Frank Act...
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Cautious optimism on the road to Glasgow

At the beginning of the summer, I noted how the climate-change narrative had changed in recent years, thanks to tremendous technological progress that has made green energy more competitive and often less costly than older carbon-based technologies. This is certainly true for new power investments, although for a while it will still be cheaper to produce electricity from older assets...
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20211015 Thomson Reuters Foundation Aloysius Uche Ordu

Africa is the world's breadbasket—or should be. It has vast arable land, grows a wide variety of crops and has vast irrigation potential with seven major rivers. Yet, Africa imported $43 billion worth of food items in 2019. Digital technologies ... are eliminating the traditional inefficiencies of smallholder food production and helping to close the yield gap....
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Improving learning and life skills for marginalized children

Even before COVID-19 shuttered schools around the world, rapidly expanding access to high-quality learning opportunities for all children was critically needed. The pandemic has only exacerbated the magnitude, inequity, and urgency of this need. While many innovations exist—often emerging outside the formal education system—the question has increasingly become how to scale and sustain those that are most effective at...
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Enhancing climate change resilience through self-protection, public investment, and market insurance

Between 1980 and 1999, natural disasters caused 1.2 million deaths worldwide. Since 2000, 520,000 have been caused by natural disasters. An optimist sees evidence of climate change adaptation. A realist would say that the death toll is huge and we have been lucky in recent years to avoid even greater losses. Rising global greenhouse gas emissions mean that Mother...
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The promise of services-led development

Manufacturing-led growth has been the central development paradigm for centuries, but it is time to shift the spotlight. The share of industry in total employment across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) has, strikingly, remained almost unchanged in recent decades (Figure 1).  Rather, the share of the services sector increased from 40 percent to 50 percent between 1991 and 2018,...
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How should we assess children’s learning in the COVID era?

With widening education inequality due to lost instructional time and other COVID-19 impacts, what should education system leaders do about assessment? Are we interested in what is being learned or in identifying what young people are ready to learn? Even before the pandemic struck, many students were learning little from the intended curricula, with half of 10-year-olds in low-...
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COVID-19’s impact on overall health care services in Africa

In addition to directly causing the deaths of at least 200,000 people in Africa, the COVID-19 pandemic is also disrupting critical health services and undermining years of progress fighting other deadly diseases, such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), tuberculosis (TB), and malaria, which continue to be the leading causes of death in the region. In order to better understand...
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Regulating stablecoins isn’t just about avoiding systemic risk

It’s good news that financial regulators are focused on figuring out what to do about stablecoins because their growth is creating significant risks. But there’s a bigger picture here than how to bring these new instruments within the regulatory perimeter, or how to regulate crypto generally, even though these are important. The bigger issue is how do we modernize...
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Property tax compliance in Tanzania: Can nudges help?

Abstract Low- and middle-income countries around the world struggle with low tax compliance together with limited capacity to enforce compliance. This paper reports the results of a randomly rolled out text-message campaign aimed at promoting compliance among landowners in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Landowners were effectively randomly assigned to one of four groups designed to test different aspects of tax...
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Industries without smokestacks in Tunisia: Creating jobs in tourism and ICT

Tunisia, like many African countries, is facing an influx of young people into its workforce, but the country doesn’t have enough jobs to absorb them. Recent research, though, reveals that there might actually be great potential and even a comparative advantage for job creation in Tunisia in “industries without smokestacks” (IWOSS). IWOSS are sectors that share much in common...
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USAID’s local staff are an overlooked resource to advance locally led development

Last week’s House Foreign Affairs Committee Hearing on locally led development highlighted the bipartisan consensus about its numerous benefits. Subcommittee chairman Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) noted that each of the last four administrations has advanced this vital foreign aid reform because “evidence indicates that working with local partners improves the effectiveness and sustainability of our foreign assistance programs.” Ranking...
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The risks of US-EU divergence on corporate sustainability disclosure

Sustainability disclosure is in vogue, with more than 80 percent of major global companies reporting on some aspects of their social and environmental impacts. This is partly driven by growing calls for transparency by civil society organizations and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investors, who are demanding detailed and verified corporate sustainability information. ESG investments—assets that fulfill certain minimum...
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The risks of US-EU divergence on corporate sustainability disclosure

Sustainability disclosure is in vogue, with more than 80 percent of major global companies reporting on some aspects of their social and environmental impacts. This is partly driven by growing calls for transparency by civil society organizations and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investors, who are demanding detailed and verified corporate sustainability information. ESG investments—assets that fulfill certain minimum...
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G-20 support for improved infrastructure project cycles in Africa

Priyadarshi DashResearch and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS)Paulo EstevesBRICS Policy Center Rob Floyd African Center for Economic Transformation (ACET) Arthur MinsatDevelopment Center, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Aloysius Uche Ordu SAfrica Growth Initiative, Brookings Institution Cobus van Staden South Africa Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA)...
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US economic statecraft adrift as China seeks to join mega Asian trade deal

China’s decision to formally seek to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-pacific Partnership (CPTPP), the world’s most important Asian trade deal, presents the U.S. with an enormous set of economic and diplomatic challenges. China joining CPTPP would deal a significant blow to U.S. economic statecraft and further strengthen Chinese leadership in the Indo-Pacific. Taiwan’s recent announcement that it also...