Center for Global Development

The United States has been at the forefront of providing several DR-GPGs, 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.

Many researchers and policymakers have hypothesized that funding models tying grant payments to achieved and verified results - next generation financing models - offer an opportunity for global health funders to push forward their strategic interests and accelerate the impact of their investments. This brief, summarizing the conclusions of a CGD working group on the topic, outlines concrete steps global health funders can take to change the basis of payment of their grants from expenses (inputs) to outputs, outcomes, or impact. While the report focuses primarily on how the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria can make this shift, this brief offers insights for other global health funders looking to address their strategic objectives, increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their investments, and increase their health impact for the populations they serve.

The States of Change: Demographics and Democracy project is a collaboration supported by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation that brings together the Center for American Progress, the American Enterprise Institute, and demographer William H. Frey of the Brookings Institution. The project’s goals are:

- To document and analyze the challenges to democracy posed by the rapid demographic evolution from the 1970s to 2060
- To project the race-ethnic composition of every state to 2060, which has not been done for 20 years
- To promote a wide-ranging and bipartisan discussion of America’s demographic future and what it portends for the nation’s political parties and policy

This report presents the first tranche of findings from this project—including detailed analyses on the nation as a whole and on every state—which we hope will both inform and provoke discussion. We outline 10 broad trends from our findings that together suggest the scale of the transformation our country is living through and the scope of the challenges it will face in the future.

The United States has been the leader of the free world for decades, championing a liberalized open global economy, the modernization of states, and a system of global institutions and rules that has lifted millions out of poverty. However, US development policy has remained narrowly focused on aid as the major tool for building prosperous societies abroad — even as the rise of China and other emerging markets and the dramatic increase in private capital and remittance flows are putting a growing premium on other, underexploited US tools for encouraging growth in the developing world.

In this series, we present more than a dozen concrete and practical policy proposals — ranging across trade, energy, migration, investment, and climate policy, as well as greater effectiveness of US foreign aid programs — that will promote growth and reduce poverty abroad.

Each can make a difference at virtually no incremental cost to US taxpayers. Together they can help secure America’s preeminence as a development and security power and partner.

US leadership in multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and regional development banks is flagging. These institutions, rated as some of the most effective development actors globally, provide clear advantages to the United States in terms of geostrategic interests, cost-effectiveness, and results on the ground. Those are among the reasons the United States played a leading role in creating the institutions and has continued to support them over many decades. Yet the US position in these institutions is less certain today. As a multilateral development bank (MDB) donor, the United States has fallen behind other countries, and it is increasingly seen as an obstacle to expanding MDB capital to address higher demand in the developing world for lending
and investment.

The data available for assessing the current status and trends of global poverty has significantly improved. And yet serious contentions remain. At the same time, a set of recent papers has sought to use these datasets to make poverty projections. Such projections have significant policy implications because they are used to inform debates on the future scale, nature, and objectives of international aid. Unfortunately, those papers have not yielded a consistent picture of future (and even current) global poverty even though their estimates are all derived from the same basic (PPP and distribution) datasets. In this paper we introduce a new model of growth, inequality and poverty. This new model allows for systematic, methodologically transparent, comparative analyses of estimates of poverty in the future based on a range of different methods. We use the model to explore how estimates of the scale and location of future poverty varies by approach.