Democracy is facing deep challenges across Latin America today. On February 16, for instance, municipal elections in the Dominican Republic were suspended due to the failure of electoral ballot machines in more than 80% of polling stations that used them. The failure sparked large protests around the country, where thousands took to the streets to…

On Jan. 14, 2017, the Obama White House hosted 30 incoming staff members of the Trump team for a role-playing scenario. A readout of the event said, “The exercise provided a high-level perspective on a series of challenges that the next administration may face and introduced the key authorities, policies, capabilities, and structures that are…

In Charts of the Week this week, housing affordability and some new COVID-19 related research. How to lower costs of apartment building to make them more affordable to build In the first piece in a series on how improved design and construction decisions can lower the cost of building multifamily housing, Hannah Hoyt and Jenny…

Amid the many plans and projects that have been set awry by the rampage of COVID-19, spare a thought for the world’s census takers. For the small community of demographers and statisticians that staff national statistical offices, 2020—now likely forever associated with coronavirus—was meant to be something else entirely: the peak year of the decennial…

While the country’s attention has been riveted on the COVID-19 pandemic, the general election contest is quietly taking shape, and the news for President Trump is mostly bad. After moving modestly upward in March, approval of his handling of the pandemic has fallen back to where it was when the crisis began, as has his…

For the past three years the Republican Party leadership have stood by the president through thick and thin. Previous harsh critics and opponents in the race for the Republican nomination like Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator Ted Cruz fell in line, declining to say anything negative about the president even while, at times, taking action…

This week in Class Notes: California's shelter-in-place order was effective at mitigating the spread of COVID-19. Asian Americans experience significant discrimination in the Harvard admissions process. The U.S. tax system is biased against labor in favor of capital, which has resulted in inefficiently high levels of automation. Our top chart shows that poor workers are much more likely to keep commuting in…

For Europe, it has been a rough year, or perhaps more accurately a rough decade. However, we must not lose sight of the key structural advantages—and the important policy successes—that have brought Europe where it is today. For example, Europe’s recent progress in energy policy has been significant—good not only for economic and energy resilience, but also for NATO's collective handling of the revanchist Russia threat.

Charles Ebinger writes about India's ongoing efforts to achieve climate targets while balancing other considerations.

Now that there are presumptive nominees for both major political parties, it’s an important moment to outline, in broad strokes, the positions of Secretary Hillary Clinton and businessman Donald Trump on energy and climate.

On June 28, the Hague Institute for Global Justice, in partnership with the Brookings Institution and Municipality of the Hague, will host Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Lloyd Axworthy for the second annual Madeleine K. Albright Global Justice Lecture. Abi Williams, president of the Hague Institute, will give welcoming remarks and Ted Piccone, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, will moderate the discussion.

Roberta Cohen and Francis M. Deng write on sovereignty and responsibility as the building block for R2P in the "The Oxford Handbook of the Responsibility to Protect."

On July 14, the Brookings Project on International Order and Strategy (IOS) hosted an event with Daniel Drezner, Caroline Atkinson, and David Wessel on the future of the global economic order given rising populism and discontent with globalization.

It has been 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The consequences of this event for Germany and for Europe to this day take central stage in discussions about the end of the Cold War. Essays on the repressive nature of the regime in East Germany and the wall’s purposeful construction to keep…

The inaugural Global Refugee Forum (GRF) will take place in Geneva this week to review international commitments to support the ever-growing number of refugees worldwide and the communities that host them. Representatives of states and international agencies, as well as refugees, academics, civil society actors, private sector representatives, and local government officials will all gather.…

Executive Summary The Syrian crisis is approaching its ninth year. The conflict has taken the lives of over 500,000 people and forced over 7 million more to flee the country. Of those displaced abroad, more than 3.6 million have sought refuge in Turkey, which now hosts more refugees than any other country in the world.…

It’s embarrassing to admit, since I work in a Center on Children and Families, but I had never really thought about the word “relative” until I read the new Atlantic essay from David Brooks, “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake.” In everyday language, relatives are just the people you are related to. But what does…

Over the last few decades, family formation patterns have altered significantly in the U.S., with long-run rises in non-marital births, cohabitation, and single parenthood – although in recent years many of these trends have leveled out.   Importantly, there are increasing class gaps here. Marriage rates have diverged by education level (a good proxy for both social class and permanent income). People with at least a BA are now more likely to get married and stay married compared…

President Lyndon B. Johnson introduced his “war on poverty” during his State of the Union speech on Jan. 8, 1964, citing the “national disgrace” that deserved a “national response.” Today, many of the poor children of the Johnson era are poor adults with children and grandchildren of their own. Inequity has widened so that people…

This week in Class Notes: The Texas Top Ten Percent rule increased equity and economic efficiency. There are big gaps in U.S. early-life mortality rates by family structure. Locally-concentrated income shocks can persistently change the distribution of poverty within a city. Our top chart shows how income inequality changed in the United States between 2007 and 2016. Tammy Kim describes the effect of the…

On Feb. 25, 2020, Rashawn Ray, a David M. Rubenstein Fellow at The Brookings Institution, testified before Congress's Joint Economic Committee in a hearing titled “Improving Family Stability for the Wellbeing of American Children.” Ray used his testimony to brief lawmakers on the recent trends in family formation and stability, the best ways to interpret…

While COVID-19 is invisible to the eye, one very visible sign of the epidemic is people wearing face masks in public. After weeks of conflicting government guidelines on wearing masks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended that people wear nonsurgical cloth face coverings when entering public spaces such as supermarkets and public…

Tanzania, Kenya, and UNECA enact environment-positive policies and programs On Saturday, June 1, Tanzania’s ban on plastic bags went into effect. According to The Citizen, the new law targets the “import, export, manufacturing, sale, storage, supply, and use of plastic carrier bags regardless of their thickness” on the Tanzanian mainland. The law also bans the…

South Africa offers bailout for state-owned power utility Eskom On Tuesday, July 23, the South African minister of finance presented a bill to parliament requesting a bailout of more than $4 billion for state-owned power utility Eskom. Eskom supplies about 95 percent of South Africa’s power, but has been unable to generate sufficient revenue to…

On March 15, 2020, the Kenyan government abruptly closed schools and colleges nationwide in response to COVID-19, disrupting nearly 17 million learners countrywide. The social and economic costs will not be borne evenly, however, with devastating consequences for marginalized learners. This is especially the case for girls in rural, marginalized communities like the Maasai, Samburu,…

Today, the Brown Center on Education Policy is releasing a new report on one of the unexplored effects of the opioid crisis: the link between the opioid epidemic and the educational outcomes of children in hard-hit areas. Written by Rajeev Darolia and John Tyler, the report suggests a need to be aware of the potentially…

For perhaps the first time in recent memory, parents and teachers may be actively encouraging their children to spend more time on their electronic devices. Online learning has moved to the front stage as 90 percent of high-income countries are using it as the primary means of educational continuity amid the COVID-19 pandemic. If March will forever…

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Annual economic growth in Israel of 3.5% over the past decade has largely been the result of an increase in employment rates, while the growth rate in productivity has been very low. The rates of employment cannot continue to grow at this rate in the future due to the expected saturation in employment…

The COVID-19 crisis is testing America’s resilience. The rapidly accelerating economic fallout makes concrete the risks for a national economy built on the success of just a few key economic centers. When the nation turns to the work of recovery, our goal must be to expand the number and breadth of healthy communities, jump-starting a…

Prior to COVID-19, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were gaining traction among local governments and city leaders as a framework to focus local policy on ambitious targets around inclusion, equity, and sustainability. Several cities published reports of their local progress on the SDGs in Voluntary Local Reviews (VLR), echoing the official format used by countries…

More than a quarter of the world’s people are in quarantine or lockdown in response to the coronavirus (COVID-19). Tens of millions are required to stay at home, with many of them laid off or on unpaid leave. Given the highly contagious nature of the virus and the absence of a vaccination or cure, the…

To be capable of surveilling, preventing, and managing disease outbreaks, public health systems require trustworthy, community-embedded public health workers who are empowered to undertake their tasks as professionals. The world has not invested in this cadre of health workers, despite the lessons from Ebola. In a new paper, my co-authors and I discuss why, and…

Here’s a striking statistic: Low-income and lower-middle income countries (LICs and LMICs) account for almost half of the global population but they make up only 2 percent of the global death toll attributed to COVID-19. We think this difference is unreal. Views about the severity of the pandemic have evolved a lot since its outbreak…

Amid the many plans and projects that have been set awry by the rampage of COVID-19, spare a thought for the world’s census takers. For the small community of demographers and statisticians that staff national statistical offices, 2020—now likely forever associated with coronavirus—was meant to be something else entirely: the peak year of the decennial…

In the futuristic 2002 film “Minority Report,” law enforcement uses a predictive technology that includes artificial intelligence (AI) for risk assessments to arrest possible murderers before they commit crimes. However, a police officer is now one of the accused future murderers and is on the run from the Department of Justice to prove that the…

Abstract Since 1980, an estimated $1.3 trillion has left sub-Saharan Africa in the form of illicit financial flows (per Global Financial Integrity methodology), posing a central challenge to development financing. In this paper, we provide an up-to-date examination of illicit financial flows from Africa from 1980 to 2018, assess the drivers and destinations of illicit…

The January revelations around illicit financial gains by Isabel dos Santos, Africa’s richest woman and daughter of former Angolan president Edoardo dos Santos, have once again brought the topic of illicit financial flows to the forefront of the conversation on domestic resource mobilization in Africa. Unfortunately, illicit flows are not new to the continent: While…

This month, the Africa Growth Initiative at Brookings published a policy brief examining trends in illicit financial flows (IFFs) from Africa between 1980 and 2018, which are estimated to total approximately $1.3 trillion. A serious detriment to financial and economic development on the continent, illicit financial flows are defined as “the illegal movement of money…

Possibly emerging as a result of wildlife trafficking and the consumption of wild animal meat, COVID-19 is influencing crime and illicit economies around the world. Some of the immediate effects are likely to be ephemeral; others will take longer to emerge but are likely to be lasting. How is the COVID-19 outbreak affecting criminal groups,…

The COVID-19 outbreak worldwide is affecting not just crime as I explained last week, but also law enforcement: How are police responding to COVID-19 and its knock-on effects on crime? What effects does the pandemic have on criminal groups and the policing they do? Where have all the coppers gone? Globally, police forces are predominantly…

Introduction Since 2009, an insurgency calling itself The People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad (Jama’tu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad in Arabic) has caused devastating insecurity, impoverishment, displacement, and other suffering in Nigeria’s poor and arid North- East Zone.1 The group is better known to the world as Boko Haram, and although…

Although the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) developed from efforts to design an international system to protect internally displaced persons (IDPs), it's application may not always work to their benefit. Roberta Cohen points out that to ensure that IDPs gain from this concept, special strategies will be needed to reconcile R2P with IDP protection.

Sudan’s north-south civil war was the longest conflict in African history and claimed more than two million lives, and on January 9, 2011, a referendum will take place, allowing the southern Sudanese to vote on whether to remain part of Sudan or to gain independence. On October 13, Foreign Policy at Brookings hosted a discussion of the prospects for the Sudan referendum featuring Rep. Donald Payne (D-NJ).