- Antonio Manuel de Oliveira Guterres looks to be a lock as the next secretary-general of the UN. He will need to contest with the refugee crisis, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a peacekeeping scandal, climate change, and the ever present question of the UN’s legitimacy, to name a few challenges.
- The Centre for Global Development has released a major eminent persons review, with members including Lawrence Summers, Justin Lin and Dani Rodrik looking at the future of Multilateral Development Banking. Interestingly, Oxfam America’s head Ray Offenhesier provided a note of dissent at the end of the report that is worth reading.
- A new study has found that only six microorganisms cause 78% of diarrhoea cases, an insight which could help tackle the problem by focusing efforts. Diarrhoea is the second most common cause of death in children under five.
- Chris Blattman and Stefan Dercon have produced the results of a large randomised trial looking at the income and health impact of manufacturing creep into Ethiopia. Vox summarises the results here.
- In response to Nancy Birdsall’s piece earlier this year on the importance of the middle class in development, the World Bank’s Sina Odugbemi wonders how much it can really guarantee good governance.
- The World Bank’s latest Trends in Remittances report has been released, showing a plateauing of global remittances after a decade of incredible growth:
- Duncan Green discusses why it is difficult for development academics and NGOs to work together, arguing that they are often too complimentary to each other to effectively team up.
- Ashlee Betteridge and Stephen Howes discuss the trend of fragmentation in the Australian development NGO community, arguing that while mergers between NGOs might be out of the picture, further cooperation should be possible.
- Labor MPs Andrew Leigh and Claire Moore have penned a piece calling for a more robust and agile aid program focusing on fragile states in our region.