While all corners of the world have been touched by COVID-19, countries’ experiences with the virus have certainly not been universal. Staggering divergences in outcomes between countries—in terms of lives lost, economic carnage, secondary health losses, learning loss, and social trust and cohesion,...

In the fall of 1968, when I was 22 and starting the second year of a two-year master’s program at the Johns Hopkins School of International Studies in Washington, DC, the man who would become my first husband told me about a college friend in New York needing $200 to help pay for an illegal but reas...

At some point in the next couple of years, the UK is going to have an election. Before then, political parties are going to be working up their election manifestos. In an attempt to save them time, here's a draft section on international cooperation for them to cut-and-paste.

Can governments contract out school management at scale? In 2016 the Government of Punjab transferred management of over 4,000 failing primary schools to private operators. Schools remained free to students. Private operators received a government subsidy per enrolled student of less than half per-s...

When the G20 pledges of $100 billion of SDR recycling materialize, there will no doubt be much self-congratulatory celebration. But the celebrations will be meaningless if the SDRs do not make their way to the low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) that need them. Will we be able to tell if the SD...

Development agencies in high-income countries spend a large amount of both official development assistance (ODA) and other forms of financing on migration programming. While most of this spending is aimed at deterring migration, increasingly more is being focused on facilitating migration; to the hi...

Low tax compliance in low- and middle-income countries around the world limits the ability of governments to offer effective public services. This paper reports the results of a randomly rolled out text message campaign aimed at promoting tax compliance among landowners in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. L...