As the biological basis of more diseases are fully revealed, and the drugs targeting medical problems become more focused and effective, more patients are finding themselves on costlier specialty medicines. At the same time, consumers find themselves paying a growing portion of their drug bills out of pocket as the structure of insurance changes. These two developments have combined to result in significant consumer hardship.

In response to these trends, there has been political pressure to enact policies giving federal and state governments authority to set drug prices or limit price increases. However, these policies could have the unintended consequence of reducing the incentive to develop more effective drugs.

In Europe, government price-setting authorities systematically overpay for some older, less innovative drugs while reducing the prices of and access to newer, more significant breakthroughs. Many worry that enacting a similar policy in the United States would reduce the profitability of new, innovative research endeavors.

We believe that certain regulatory reforms can address these concerns and encourage more robust competition within the drug market. These policies would allow prices to more easily adjust to reflect how medicines are prescribed and the outcomes they deliver, and thus would help control rising spending and reduce the burden of drug costs for consumers. One way to make drug pricing more competitive is to implement selling models that tie the price of drugs more closely to the usefulness of the clinical setting in which they are being prescribed. However, existing regulations obstruct this type of market-oriented approach.

Pricing Based On Indication And Outcomes

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced that as early as 2017, it plans to pursue changes in the way Medicare pays for injectable drugs under its Part B program to give drug makers more flexibility to price products based on indications and outcomes. Yet the Medicare program left open how the relative value of different indications would be determined. Would drug makers be free to vary prices based on clinical demand and the benefits being offered in different clinical settings? Or as the rule suggests, will CMS try to influence these conclusions with an assessment of clinical value?

CMS’ proposed rule also does not address several challenges associated with a value-based pricing framework. For example, the proposal did not address the small molecule drugs that are the focus of much of the price scrutiny, only injectable drugs paid for as part of the medical benefit. Moreover, enabling such a framework for value-based pricing would require simultaneous regulatory reforms at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as well as the Office of the Inspector General. Because the impediments to this sort of policy effort cut across multiple agencies, it will likely require a legislative remedy to fully enable.

Inside CMS, enabling drug makers to adjust prices based on the purpose for which medicines are being prescribed will require changes to the existing rules that govern drug pricing. For example, federal regulators will need to relax the way that they implement current price-setting constructs like the calculation for Medicaid best price, the ceiling price for the 340B program, and the reporting rules for Medicare’s Part B average sales price. These rules complicate the ability of companies to price the same drug differently, based on how it’s being prescribed, or to enter into “value-based’ contracts that tie drug prices and discounts to measures of how a population of patients benefit from a given treatment.

Take, for example, the Medicaid Best Price rules. Best price is the lowest manufacturer price paid for a drug by any purchaser. It’s defined by the Medicaid statute as “any wholesaler, retailer, provider, health maintenance organization, or nonprofit or government entity” with some exceptions (Note 1). In short, it’s the cheapest price at which a drug is sold. A drug’s reported best price is required to reflect all discounts, rebates, and other pricing adjustments. It’s the benchmark that the government uses to make sure that state Medicaid programs are receiving the lowest price for which a drug is being offered to any purchaser.

Under these rules, if a drug maker enters into a contract with a private health plan to discount a drug based on how it’s being used (or the clinical results that it achieves) then the discount that’s offered when the drug is used in settings that are judged to yield less value would become the new benchmark for calculating the Medicaid best price. The rebates offered to a private insurer under the terms of just one value-based contract would establish the new price offered to all Medicaid programs, regardless of whether or not the Medicaid plans were also entering into similar contracting arrangements. So Medicaid plans that did not contract to pay higher prices when drugs were used in certain higher value settings, and lower prices when they were prescribed for lower value indications, would nonetheless pay a price for all of their prescriptions that reflected the lowest price offered under a value-based arrangement. This new Medicaid price could, in turn, influence other price schedules.

Consider a drug maker that offered a 90 percent discount on a drug when it didn’t produce any of its expected benefit. Under current rules, that deeply discounted price would become the new Medicaid best price, but not necessarily the blended price that reflects the average price being paid under a contract where the price fluctuated based on how a drug was being prescribed. This could create a significant disincentive for manufacturers to offering indication and outcome-based prices. For these reasons, enabling drug makers to adjust prices based on these parameters will require changes to rules on how drug makers must track and report prices to the government under Medicaid and to the 340B drug program.

Similar challenges to value-based pricing are posed by Medicare’s calculation of average sales price (ASP) as part of its framework for reimbursing injectable drugs paid under Part B. The ASP is defined as a manufacturer’s sales of a drug to all U.S. purchasers in a calendar quarter divided by the total number of units of the drug sold by the manufacturer in that same quarter (Note 2). The ASP is net of any price concessions, such as volume discounts, prompt pay discounts, cash discounts, free goods contingent on purchase requirements, chargebacks, and rebates other than those obtained through the Medicaid drug rebate program.

Manufacturers that offer discounts under commercial, value-based contracts would probably face reductions in their calculated ASP as a result of the concessions. In turn, they would see their reimbursement under Medicare Part B also decline, regardless of whether Medicare entered into the same outcome or indication-based contracts. Since the private market pegs its own pricing off of the ASP, a single value-based contract that served to lower the ASP could have the effect of reducing a drug maker’s reimbursement across every other contract. For drug manufacturers, this is another disincentive to entering into these arrangements.

Moreover, without significant regulatory changes, it is unlikely that Medicare would participate in a value-based system due to both legal and practical limitations. In the past, CMS has avoided these contracting arrangements when sponsors have approached the agency with such proposals. Even if CMS asserts the legal authority to enter into such arrangements, it is unclear whether the agency has the informational capacity to implement them. Managing a value-based system would require careful tracking of how and when drugs are prescribed, and collecting information to measure outcomes. Currently, CMS probably lacks the capacity to carry out this level of measurement and analysis. So for now, it will mostly be left to private payers to pursue value-based arrangements.

Reducing Regulatory Barriers

To reduce obstacles to value-based pricing, new regulations would need to be issued to clarify how drug makers, insurance plans, and health systems can rationalize value-based and indication-based contracts with their price reporting calculations. Medicare probably has the requisite authority to do so under constructs created by the Affordable Care Act. Additionally, Congress could provide clear authority and direction through legislation addressing these policy opportunities.

The Medicare and Medicaid programs could exempt value-based contracts that meet certain criteria from the requirement that the resulting prices, and the discounts, be used toward calculating Medicaid best price. CMS recently signaled that it had the existing authority to address some of these issues through a pilot program designed under the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI). Such a program could enable commercial health plans to adapt their reporting obligations to test how value-based and indication-based contracts would impact overall spending and outcomes. While the proposed regulation lays out Medicare’s general intent to pursue these strategies, it does not outline the parameters needed in order to go forward.

Some of the regulatory discretion that is required to change drug-pricing systems may be outside of the Medicare agency’s direct control. For example, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) would have to change its interpretation of anti-kickback rules to enable drug makers to provide discounts based on the clinical indications for which drugs are prescribed, as well as the outcomes they deliver. Otherwise, under the OIG’s existing interpretation of its authority, these arrangements could be perceived as inducements to prescribing.

Fostering outcomes-based and indication-based pricing will also require FDA to adapt some of its existing rules and practices. Currently, drug makers are largely prevented from offering price concessions based on how a drug is used unless all of the prescribing options are listed precisely and completely on the drug’s label. When a drug maker secures approval for a new medicine, what appears on its drug label forms the basis for any outcomes-based contracts with health plans or Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs), even if it would make more sense to contract for drugs based on measuring outcomes for which the drug is not explicitly approved. So far, FDA’s sometimes-purposeful ambiguity over the scope of its authority in these areas of commercial speech creates enough legal risk to discourage these sorts of business interactions.

In order to enable these arrangements, FDA would have to concede that commercial, contract-related communications constitute protected speech under the First Amendment and thus are not subject to the agency’s active regulation. At the least, FDA could stipulate that it does not forfeit its authority to regulate these and similar forms of commercial communication, but as a matter of policy will exercise enforcement discretion when it comes to value-based contracts and their negotiation. Better still, Congress can more firmly establish the same safe harbors in legislation, rather than leaving it up to FDA to stipulate these important legal principles in non-binding guidance or regulation.

Another impediment to contracting based on outcomes measurement is uncertainty over the FDA’s regulation of pre-approval communication. FDA prohibits pre-approval communication, but has not specified whether these restrictions extend to discussions between drug makers and drug purchasers that are conducted as part of contracting discussions prior to a drug’s launch. Pre-market commercial discussions are an important part of the ability to negotiate these complex, value-based contracts, as the contracts would need to be put into place at the time of approval. Because targeted pre-approval conversations between manufacturers and health plans are not inherently promotional, FDA as a matter of policy should not seek to regulate them.

Absent these collective regulatory impediments, drug makers and those who pay for medicines could have more ability and incentive to engage in price negotiations based on the indication for which a medicine is being prescribed by providers and the variable outcomes that it delivers to patients. In the absence of reforms to make drug pricing more competitive, the political alternative may well be regulated pricing. This approach would end up skewing investment because it would inevitably allocate capital based on political priorities rather than scientific priorities and clinical goals.

The discussion over drug prices is driven by a fair degree of politics, but the debate arose because of secular changes in the political economy of health care, and increasing costs to consumers. These challenges need to be addressed with constructive measures that foster access to and competitive pricing of medicines, while preserving market-based rewards for innovation, and the efficient allocation of capital to these efforts.

Note 1: Exceptions to the best price include prices that are charged to certain federal purchasers (sales made through federal supply schedule, single award contract prices of any federal agency, federal depot prices, and prices charged to the Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, Indian Health Service, and the Public Health Service), eligible state pharmaceutical assistance programs, and state-run nursing homes.

Note 2: Section 1847A(c) of the Social Security Act (the Act), as added by the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 (MMA), P.L. No. 108-173, defines an ASP as a manufacturer’s sales of a drug to all purchasers in the United States in a calendar quarter divided by the total number of units of the drug sold by the manufacturer in that same quarter.

Editor's Note: Both authors consult with and invest in life science and healthcare services companies.

Editor's note: This piece originally appeared in Health Affairs Blog.

In late October at the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN ESCAP) headquarters in Bangkok, a multi-stakeholder coalition was launched to promote the role of youth and civil society in advancing post-2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The youth initiatives, fostering regional integration and youth service impact in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and counterpart regions of Northeast and South Asia, will be furthered through a new Asia-Pacific Peace Service Alliance. The alliance is comprised of youth leaders, foundations, civil society entities, multilateral partners and U.N. agencies. Together, their initiatives illustrate the potential of youth and multi-stakeholder coalitions to scale impacts to meet SDG development targets through youth service and social media campaigns, and partnerships with multilateral agencies, nongovernmental organizations, corporations and research institutes.

The “Asia-Pacific Forum on Youth Volunteerism to Promote Participation in Development and Peace” at UN ESCAP featured a new joint partnership of the U.S. Peace Corps and the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) as well as USAID support for the ASEAN Youth Volunteering Program. With key leadership from ASEAN youth entitles, sponsor FK Norway, Youth Corps Singapore and Peace Corps’ innovative program in Thailand, the forum also furthered President Obama’s goal of Americans serving “side by side” with other nations’ volunteers. The multi-stakeholder Asia-Pacific alliance will be powered by creative youth action and a broad array of private and public partners from Thailand, Malaysia, Myanmar, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines, Australia, Korea, China, Mongolia, Japan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, the U.S. and other nations.

During the event, Dr. Shamshad Akhtar, ESCAP executive secretary, pointed out that “tapping youth potential is critical to shape our shared destiny, as they are a source of new ideas, talent and inspiration. For ESCAP and the United Nations, a dynamic youth agenda is vital to ensure the success of post-2015 sustainable development.”

Dr. Surin Pitsuwan, former ASEAN secretary-general, called for a new Asia-wide multilateralism engaging youth and civil society.  In his remarks, he drew from his experience in mobilizing Asian relief and recovery efforts after Cyclone Nargis devastated the delta region of Myanmar in May 2008. Surin, honorary Alliance chairman and this year’s recipient of the Harris Wofford Global Citizenship Award, also noted the necessity of a “spiritual evolution” to a common sense of well-being to redress the “present course of possible extinction” caused by global conflicts and climate challenges. He summoned Asia-Pacific youth, representing 60 percent of the world’s young population, to “be the change you want to see” and to “commit our youth to a useful cause for humanity.”

The potential for similar upscaled service efforts in Africa, weaving regional integration and youth volunteering impact, has been assessed in Brookings research and policy recommendations being implemented in the Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA). Recommendations, many of which COMESA and ASEAN are undertaking, include enabling youth entrepreneurship and service contributions to livelihoods in regional economic integration schemes, and commissioning third-party support for impact evidence research.

A good example of successful voluntary service contributions from which regional economic communities like ASEAN can learn a lot is the current Omnimed pilot research intervention in Uganda. In eastern Ugandan villages, 1,200 village health workers supported by volunteer medical doctors, Uganda’s Health Ministry, Peace Corps volunteers and Global Peace Women are addressing lifesaving maternal and child health outcomes furthering UNICEF’s campaign on “integrated health” addressing malaria, diarrheal disease and indoor cooking pollution. The effort has included construction of 15 secure water sources and 1,200 clean cook stoves along with randomized controlled trials.

Last week, the young leaders from more than 40 nations produced a “Bangkok Statement” outlining their policy guidance and practical steps to guide volunteering work plans for the new Asia-Pacific alliance. Youth service initiatives undertaken in “collective impact” clusters will focus on the environment (including clean water and solar villages), health service, entrepreneurship, youth roles in disaster preparedness and positive peace. The forum was co-convened by ESCAP, UNESCO, the Global Peace Foundation and the Global Young Leaders Academy.

Last week, world leaders agreed on an ambitious set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030. Fully costed, the price tag for achieving these goals over the next 15 years will run into the trillions of dollar, however. The implication is that everyone in the world will have to contribute in one way or another—private businesses as well public sector agencies.

Volunteers seem to be the least recognized group of contributors, despite being the least-expensive component. They often play a crucial role in “the last mile” of program implementation. Volunteer service in support of the SDGs also enriches the lives of volunteers and helps to building the sense of global citizenship that is essential for global peace and well-being.

For the individuals involved, the core benefit of volunteer action comes from working outside of your culture. Making sandwiches for your children is not volunteer action. Making sandwiches at a shelter for the homeless is.

This concept of volunteer action, or service, was probably absent in primitive tribal communities and in early civilizations—such as Egypt—where slavery was embedded in the culture. It was certainly present, however, in the great religions that subsequently emerged and evolved, including Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is implicit in the messages that Pope Francis brought to the United States and the United Nations earlier this month.

Volunteer action took a great leap forward when President John F. Kennedy established the Peace Corps in 1961 for international service and President Lyndon B. Johnson created VISTA in 1965 for domestic service. The evolution since then has been interesting.

The Peace Corps grew quickly to almost 16,000 volunteers in the field in the mid-1960s, dropped to as low as 4,000 in the 1970s, and grew back slowly to around 8,000 in the early 1990s. It has been stuck at this level since then, despite campaign promises by Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama to double the number of serving volunteers.

Meanwhile, a bubbling universe of international volunteer programs emerged in the United States. University-sponsored, corporation-sponsored, NGO-sponsored, and for-profit programs are sending more than 50,000 Americans to foreign countries for short-term and long-term service every year. Inspired by the Peace Corps, other advanced countries also created their own international volunteer programs.

The evolution of government-supported volunteer programs domestically was quite different. In 1993, President Clinton established the Corporation for National and Community Service to manage a new AmeriCorps program along with VISTA and several other small pre-existing programs. AmeriCorps has grown rapidly to the point of having 75,000 volunteers today engaged in full-time, one-year service commitments. Officials from other countries—both advanced and developing—have also been coming here for 20 years to see how AmeriCorps works, before then starting similar domestic service programs in their countries.

Two forces are driving the volunteer movement globally. The first is budget constraints everywhere. In our modern societies, everybody wants to enjoy a good life, but we haven’t figured out how to get enough tax revenue to pay the teachers, health workers, engineers, and community organizers needed to achieve this happy outcome. We have, however, figured out how to mobilize volunteers to provide these services to the neediest.

The second force is an abstract concept combining civic duty and helping the less fortunate. As modern societies have become wealthier, this concept has become more powerful.

Two manifestations of these forces are especially relevant now.

The first is the role of volunteers that has been incorporated in the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. Implementation is receiving more attention in the SDG process than it received in the preceding Millennium Development Goal process. The U.N has recognized that mobilizing volunteers effectively will be necessary to achieve every one of the SDGs. No government has a budget big enough to pay a living wage for all the hours of work that will be required to meet its own SDGs.

The other manifestation is a new debate in the United States about “national service.” Since the military draft was terminated in 1973, concern has slowly grown about having a military force that does not reflect the broad population. It is possible that the sense of national unity felt so strongly after World War II was related to the experience of so many men and women performing national service outside their culture. That kind of service was a social and civic glue that seems in short supply now.

The Aspen Institute’s “Franklin Project” aims to create a one-year national service commitment—either civilian or military—that becomes a valued part of growing up in America. It can help cure the divisiveness by taking us outside our culture and helping us appreciate others. It can be a better kind of glue.

Volunteer action across borders can also be a better kind of glue for the whole world. 

SDGs) for 2030. Fully costed, the price tag for achieving these goals over the next 15 years will run into the trillions of dollar, however. The implication is that everyone in the world will have to contribute in one way or another—private businesses as well public sector agencies.

Volunteers seem to be the least recognized group of contributors, despite being the least-expensive component. They often play a crucial role in “the last mile” of program implementation. Volunteer service in support of the SDGs also enriches the lives of volunteers and helps to building the sense of global citizenship that is essential for global peace and well-being.

For the individuals involved, the core benefit of volunteer action comes from working outside of your culture. Making sandwiches for your children is not volunteer action. Making sandwiches at a shelter for the homeless is.

This concept of volunteer action, or service, was probably absent in primitive tribal communities and in early civilizations—such as Egypt—where slavery was embedded in the culture. It was certainly present, however, in the great religions that subsequently emerged and evolved, including Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is implicit in the messages that Pope Francis brought to the United States and the United Nations earlier this month.

Volunteer action took a great leap forward when President John F. Kennedy established the Peace Corps in 1961 for international service and President Lyndon B. Johnson created VISTA in 1965 for domestic service. The evolution since then has been interesting.

The Peace Corps grew quickly to almost 16,000 volunteers in the field in the mid-1960s, dropped to as low as 4,000 in the 1970s, and grew back slowly to around 8,000 in the early 1990s. It has been stuck at this level since then, despite campaign promises by Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama to double the number of serving volunteers.

Meanwhile, a bubbling universe of international volunteer programs emerged in the United States. University-sponsored, corporation-sponsored, NGO-sponsored, and for-profit programs are sending more than 50,000 Americans to foreign countries for short-term and long-term service every year. Inspired by the Peace Corps, other advanced countries also created their own international volunteer programs.

The evolution of government-supported volunteer programs domestically was quite different. In 1993, President Clinton established the Corporation for National and Community Service to manage a new AmeriCorps program along with VISTA and several other small pre-existing programs. AmeriCorps has grown rapidly to the point of having 75,000 volunteers today engaged in full-time, one-year service commitments. Officials from other countries—both advanced and developing—have also been coming here for 20 years to see how AmeriCorps works, before then starting similar domestic service programs in their countries.

Two forces are driving the volunteer movement globally. The first is budget constraints everywhere. In our modern societies, everybody wants to enjoy a good life, but we haven’t figured out how to get enough tax revenue to pay the teachers, health workers, engineers, and community organizers needed to achieve this happy outcome. We have, however, figured out how to mobilize volunteers to provide these services to the neediest.

The second force is an abstract concept combining civic duty and helping the less fortunate. As modern societies have become wealthier, this concept has become more powerful.

Two manifestations of these forces are especially relevant now.

The first is the role of volunteers that has been incorporated in the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. Implementation is receiving more attention in the SDG process than it received in the preceding Millennium Development Goal process. The U.N has recognized that mobilizing volunteers effectively will be necessary to achieve every one of the SDGs. No government has a budget big enough to pay a living wage for all the hours of work that will be required to meet its own SDGs.

The other manifestation is a new debate in the United States about “national service.” Since the military draft was terminated in 1973, concern has slowly grown about having a military force that does not reflect the broad population. It is possible that the sense of national unity felt so strongly after World War II was related to the experience of so many men and women performing national service outside their culture. That kind of service was a social and civic glue that seems in short supply now.

The Aspen Institute’s “Franklin Project” aims to create a one-year national service commitment—either civilian or military—that becomes a valued part of growing up in America. It can help cure the divisiveness by taking us outside our culture and helping us appreciate others. It can be a better kind of glue.

Volunteer action across borders can also be a better kind of glue for the whole world. 

Suzy Khimm reports on a proposal from the Bipartisan Policy Center that would establish a framework for reaching a grand bargain on deficit reduction in 2013. In short, the BPC proposes that Congress and the president in the lame duck session would agree to a procedural framework for guiding enactment of major spending and tax reforms in 2013. In enacting the framework, Congress and the president would also avert going over the fiscal cliff. In exchange, Congress and the president would make a small down payment on deficit reduction in the lame duck, and would authorize a legislative “backstop” of entitlement cuts and elimination of tax expenditures that would become law if Congress and the president failed in 2013 to enact tax and spending reforms.

The procedural elements of the BPC’s proposal bear some attention. The BPC’s not-quite-yet-a-catchphrase is “accelerated regular order.” Although it sounds like a nasty procedural disease, it’s akin to the fast-track procedures established in the Congressional Budget Act and in several other statutes. In short, the framework proposed by the BPC would instruct the relevant standing committees in 2013 to suggest to the chamber budget committees entitlement and tax reforms that would sum to $4 trillion dollars in spending cuts and new revenues (assuming extension of the Bush tax cuts). The House and Senate budget panels would each report a grand bargain bill for their chamber’s consideration that would be considered (without amendment) by simple majority vote after twenty hours of debate. Failure to meet the framework’s legislated deadlines would empower the executive branch to impose entitlement savings and to eliminate tax expenditures to meet the framework’s target.

Loyal Monkey Cage readers will recognize that the BPC proposal resembles in many ways the procedural solution adopted in the Deficit Control Act in August of 2011. But there are at least two procedural differences from the 2011 deficit deal. First, rather than a super committee, the BPC envisions “regular order,” meaning that the standing committees—not a special panel hand-selected by party-leaders—would devise the legislative package. Like the August deficit deal, the BPC proposal then offers procedural protection for the package by banning the Senate filibuster and preventing changes on the chamber floors (hence, an accelerated regular order). Second, rather than a meat-axe of sequestration that imposes only spending cuts, the BPC offers a “backstop,” giving what I take to be statutory authority to the executive branch to determine which tax expenditures to eliminate and which entitlement programs to cut back.

These differences from 2011 are subtle, but the BPC believes that they would improve the odds of success compared to the failed Super-committee plus sequestration plan. As a BPC staffer noted:

"One of the reasons the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction failed, in our view, was because only 12 lawmakers were setting policy for the entire Congress,” said Steve Bell, Senior Director of BPC’s Economic Policy Project. “The framework we propose today would both ensure an acceleration of regular budget order in the House and Senate, and it would involve all committees of relevant jurisdiction.”

This is an interesting argument worth considering. Still, I’m not so sure that accelerated regular order would improve the prospects for an agreement.

First, it strikes me that the real barrier to a grand bargain hasn’t been the Senate’s filibuster rule. The super committee was guaranteed a fast-track to passage, but that still didn’t motivate the parties to reach an agreement. The more relevant obstacle in 2011 and 2012 has been the bicameral chasm between a Republican House and a Democratic Senate. To be sure, eliminating the need for a sixty-vote cloture margin would smooth the way towards Senate passage. But we could easily imagine that the 60th senator (in 2013, perhaps a GOP senator like Lisa Murkowski) might be willing to sign onto a deal that would still be too moderate to secure the votes of House Republicans (assuming no change in party control of the two chambers). As we saw over the course of the 112th Congress, House passage required more than the consent of the House median (an ideologically moderate Republican) and more than the support of a majority of the GOP conference. The big deals in the 112th Congress only passed if they could attract the votes of roughly 90% of the House GOP conference. Expedited procedures can protect hard-fought compromises from being unraveled on the chamber floors but by themselves don’t seem sufficient to generate compromise in the first place.

Second, and related, I’m somewhat skeptical that the small size of the super committee precluded a viable agreement. By balancing parties and chambers, the group was (in theory) a microcosm of the full Congress. If true, then delegating to the super committee was more akin to delegating to a mini-Congress. Perhaps the BPC’s idea of allowing the standing committees to generate proposals would broaden legislators’ willingness to buy-in to a final agreement. More likely, I suspect that the framework would produce a House bill perched on the right and a Senate bill left of center (since the filibuster ban would reduce Democrats’ incentives to produce a bipartisan bill). That leaves the bicameral chasm still to be bridged, suggesting that accelerated regular order might not bring Congress all that much closer to a bipartisan agreement in 2013. Consent of party leaders remains critical for an agreement.

Third, the BPC proposal is unclear on the precise nature of the legislative backstop. But would either party agree in advance to the framework if they didn’t know whose ox would be gored by the administration when it exercised its power to reform entitlements and eliminate tax expenditures? Perhaps delegating such authority to the executive branch would allow legislators to avoid voters’ blame, making them more likely to vote for the framework. (That said, it’s somewhat ironic that the BPC’s embrace of accelerated regular order flows from its desire to broaden the set of legislators whose fingerprints are visible on the grand bargain.) Regardless, the prospects for cuts in entitlement programs could lead both parties to favor kicking the can down the road again before it actually explodes.

Fast-track procedures have a decent track record in facilitating congressional action. (Steve Smith and I have extolled their virtues elsewhere.) But the most successful of these episodes involve narrow policy areas (such as closing obsolete military bases) on which substantial bipartisan agreement on a preferred policy outcome is already in place. Expecting a procedural device to do the hard work of securing bipartisan agreement may be asking too much of Congress’s procedural tool kit in a period of divided and split party control.

As the clock runs out on the dysfunctional 112th Congress, few have been impressed by its paltry record and balky performance. But pardon my glee: December has been a great month for students of Congress. First, the House leadership was handed a blistering defeat on its “Plan B” to resolve the fiscal cliff. Next, while their leaders were meeting to negotiate an 11th hour of the 12th month fiscal cliff deal, eight senators unveiled a bipartisan proposal to head off a Democratic threat to change the rules by majority vote. When it rains, it pours!

The reform package—addressing “talking filibusters” and filibusters on procedural motions – deserves a bit more attention. And it deserves an appropriate historical illustration: To the right, a 1928 Chicago Tribune cartoon that features not the talking filibuster…but a sleeping one. Seems that talking filibusters might have been few and far between even back then.

Ezra Klein and Jon Bernstein have detailed the proposed changes and weighed in here and here, as has Steve Smith by tweet here and here. Since then, a coalition of nearly fifty liberal groups has rejected the proposal out of hand as watered down reform. To these several perspectives on the McCain-Levin plan, I would add the following thoughts:

First, these are at best incremental reforms. The majority leader would essentially gain the right to set the Senate’s agenda by majority vote, as a four-hour debate limit would be imposed on the motion to proceed. But the majority leader would pay a price for that new power: He would lose his power to block amendments (by “filling the tree”) and the minority bill manager and leader would be newly guaranteed an amendment each upon consideration of a legislative measure. (The majority leader, it seems, might still be able to fill the tree after the guaranteed amendments are dispensed with.) This change leaves untouched the sixty-vote threshold for invoking cloture on the measure or other amendments, similar to the plans of Democratic reformers. In short, the change tries to address the grievances of both the majority (by circumventing filibusters of the motion to proceed) and the minority (by creating and guaranteeing amendment opportunities).

Second, the incremental nature of the reforms is not accidental. Ezra has a point when he argues that this is “filibuster reform for people who don’t want to reform the filibuster.” Still, the incremental nature of the proposal strikes me as the price of negotiating procedural change in a legislative body whose rules already advantage the minority party: The majority gets a little only by giving a little. The barrier to reform is entrenched in the Senate’s cloture rule, given the supermajority required for ending filibusters of proposals that curtail minority rights. A Senate majority could circumvent that barrier by going nuclear with 51 votes, but that strategy is not cost-free. To be sure, reformers claim to have 51 votes for a reform-by-ruling move. But it’s not clear to me yet that the majority would be willing to pay the accompanying costs of weathering the minority’s response to going nuclear.

Third, the rules address leaders’ interests more so than those of the rank and file. Some of the proposed changes are aimed at time management. For example, with the consent of the majority and minority leaders and a bipartisan handful of senators , the cloture process is sped up markedly. Similarly, the three debatable steps required to get to conference are condensed to a single motion (albeit one still subject to sixty votes if the minority objects). Other proposed changes alleviate the minority leader from objecting on his colleagues’ behalf, undermining individual senators’ ability to threaten to filibuster without actually showing up. Then again, there’s no enforcement mechanism in the proposal: Senators would be counting on the minority leader to play by the new rules and to abandon his practice of lodging objections on behalf of his absent colleagues. It’s fair to be skeptical that such informal reforms would ever stick.

Fourth, I think there’s promise in the proposal’s directive to the presiding officer to put questions to a (majority) vote when opponents no longer seek to debate a bill. I share skeptics’ views that majorities might rarely want to hold the minority’s feet to the fire to wear down the opposition and that minorities might at times relish the spotlight while holding the floor. But the proposal strikes me as a potentially valuable chance to see if the change would make a difference. If approved, the McCain-Levin proposal would be adopted as a standing order of the Senate for just the upcoming Congress, providing a testing ground for this version of the talking filibuster. (Standing orders are typically approved opening day by unanimous consent; would there be such consent for McCain-Levin or another negotiated proposal?)

Finally, it may be that incremental procedural change is all that a polarized Senate can agree on—especially if some Democrats are skittish about changing the rules by majority vote. Granted, majority senators won’t agree to the plan if it’s perceived as empowering the minority, not the majority, as Senator Harkin has suggested. Nor should they. In that case, an incremental package may be more than a polarized Senate can agree on—leaving the nuclear option as the only avenue for Democrats seeking to rein in the excesses of the Senate minority’s parliamentary rights.

Baltimore police officer Edward Nero, one of six being tried separately in relation to the arrest and death of Freddie Gray, has been acquitted on all counts. The outcome for officer Nero was widely expected, but officials are nonetheless aware of the level of frustration and anger that remains in the city. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake said: "We once again ask the citizens to be patient and to allow the entire process to come to a conclusion."

Since Baltimore came to national attention, Brookings scholars have probed the city’s challenges and opportunities, as well addressing broader questions of place, race and opportunity.

• In this podcast, Jennifer Vey describes how, for parts of Baltimore, economic growth has been largely a spectator sport: "1/5 people in Baltimore lives in a neighborhood of extreme poverty, and yet these communities are located in a relatively affluent metro area, in a city with many vibrant and growing neighborhoods."
• Vey and her colleague Alan Berube, in this piece on the "Two Baltimores," reinforce the point about the distribution of economic opportunity and resources in the city:
  

  In 2013, 40,000 Baltimore households earned at least $100,000. Compare that to Milwaukee, a similar-sized city where only half as many households have such high incomes. As our analysis uncovered, jobs in Baltimore pay about $7,000 more on average than those nationally. The increasing presence of high-earning households and good jobs in Baltimore City helps explain why, as the piece itself notes, the city’s bond rating has improved and property values are rising at a healthy clip."

• Groundbreaking work by Raj Chetty, which we summarized here, shows that Baltimore City is the worst place for a boy to grow up in the U.S. in terms of their likely adult earnings:

• Here Amy Liu offered some advice to the new mayor of the city: "I commend the much-needed focus on equity but…the mayoral candidates should not lose sight of another critical piece of the equity equation: economic growth."
• Following an event focused on race, place and opportunity, in this piece I drew out "Six policies to improve social mobility," including better targeting of housing vouchers, more incentives to build affordable homes in better-off neighborhoods, and looser zoning restrictions.
• Frederick C. Harris assessed President Obama’s initiative to help young men of color, "My Brother’s Keeper," praising many policy shifts and calling for a renewed focus on social capital and educational access. But Harris also warned that rhetoric counts and that a priority for policymakers is to "challenge some misconceptions about the shortcomings of black men, which have become a part of the negative public discourse."
• Malcolm Sparrow has a Brookings book on policing reform, "Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform" (there is a selection here on Medium). Sparrow writes:
  

  Citizens of any mature democracy can expect and should demand police services that are responsive to their needs, tolerant of diversity, and skillful in unraveling and tackling crime and other community problems. They should expect and demand that police officers are decent, courteous, humane, sparing and skillful in the use of force, respectful of citizens’ rights, disciplined, and professional. These are ordinary, reasonable expectations."

Five more police officers await their verdicts. But the city of Baltimore should not have to wait much longer for stronger governance, and more inclusive growth.

I’ve written here before about my research with Betsey Stevenson showing that economic development is associated with rising life satisfaction. Some people find this result surprising, but it’s the cleanest interpretation of the available data. Yet over the past few days, I’ve received calls from several journalists asking whether Richard Easterlin had somehow debunked these findings. He tried. But he failed.

Rather than challenge our careful statistical tests, he’s simply offered a new mishmash of statistics that appear to make things murkier.

For those of you new to the debate, the story begins with a series of papers that Richard Easterlin wrote between 1973 and 2005, claiming that economic growth is unrelated to life satisfaction. In fact, these papers simply show he failed to definitively establish such a relationship. In our 2008 Brookings Paper, Betsey and I systematically examined all of the available happiness data, finding that the relationship was there all along: rising GDP yields rising life satisfaction. More recent data reinforces our findings. Subsequently, Easterlin responded in of papers circulated in early 2009. That’s the research journalists are now asking me about. But in a paper released several weeks ago, Betsey, Dan Sacks and I assessed Easterlin’s latest claims, and found little evidence for them.

Let’s examine Easterlin’s three main claims.

1. GDP and life satisfaction rise together in the short-run, but not the long-run. False. Here’s an illustrative graph. We take the main international dataset — the World Values Survey — and in order to focus only on the long-run, compare the change in life satisfaction for each country from the first time it was surveyed until the last, the corresponding growth in GDP per capita. Typically, this is a difference taken over 18 years (although it ranges from 8 to 26 years). The graph shows that long-run rises in GDP are positively associated with growth in life satisfaction.

This graph includes the latest data, and Dan generated it just for this blog post. In fact, Easterlin was responding to our earlier work, which showed each of the comparisons one could make between various waves of this survey: Wave 1 was taken in the early ‘80s; Wave 2 in the early ‘90s; Wave 3 in the mid-late ‘90s; Wave 4 mostly in the early 2000s. And in each of these comparisons, you see a positive association — sometimes statistically significant, sometimes not.

What should we conclude from this second graph? Given the typically-significant positive slopes, you might conclude that rising GDP is associated with rising life satisfaction. It’s also reasonable to say that these data are too noisy to be entirely convincing. But the one thing you can’t conclude is that these data yield robust proof that long-run economic growth won’t yield rising life satisfaction. Yet that’s what Easterlin claims.

2. The income-happiness link that we document is no longer apparent when one omits the transition economies. Also false. One simple way to see this is to note that in the first graph the transition countries are shown in gray. Even when you look only at the other countries, it’s hard to be convinced that economic growth and life satisfaction are unrelated. To see the formal regressions showing this, read Table 3 of our response. (Aside: Why eliminate these countries from the sample?)

Or we could just look to another data source which omits the transition economies. For instance, the graph below shows the relationship between life satisfaction and GDP for the big nine European nations that were the members of the EU when the Eurobarometer survey started. Over the period 1973-2007, economic growth yielded higher satisfaction in eight of these nine countries. And while we’re puzzled by the ninth — the increasingly unhappy Belgians — we’re not going to drop them from the data! And if you think Belgium is puzzling, too, then we’ve done our job.

3. Surveys show that financial satisfaction in Latin American countries has declined as their economies have grown. Perhaps true. But how are surveys of financial satisfaction relevant to a debate about life satisfaction? And why focus on Latin America, rather than the whole world? In fact, when you turn to the question we are actually debating — life satisfaction —these same surveys suggest that those Latin American countries which have had the strongest growth have seen the largest rise in life satisfaction. This finding isn’t statistically significant, but that’s simply because there’s not a lot of data on life satisfaction in Latin America! (Given how sparse these data are, we didn’t report them in our paper.)

What’s going on here?

Now it’s reasonable to ask how it is that others arrived at a different conclusion. Easterlin’s Paradox is a non-finding. His paradox simply describes the failure of some researchers (not us!) to isolate a clear relationship between GDP and life satisfaction.

But you should never confuse absence of evidence with evidence of absence. Easterlin’s mistake is to conclude that when a correlation is statistically insignificant, it must be zero. But if you put together a dataset with only a few countries in it — or in Easterlin’s analysis, take a dataset with lots of countries, but throw away a bunch of it, and discard inconvenient observations — then you’ll typically find statistically insignificant results. This is even more problematic when you employ statistical techniques that don’t extract all of the information from your data. Think about it this way: if you flip a coin three times, and it comes up heads all three times, you still don’t have much reason to think that the coin is biased. But it would be silly to say, “there’s no compelling evidence that the coin is biased, so it must be fair.” Yet that’s Easterlin’s logic.

There’s a deeper problem, too. The results I’ve shown you are all based on analyzing data only from comparable surveys. And when you do this, you find rising incomes associated with rising satisfaction. Instead, Easterlin and co-authors lump together data from very different surveys, asking very different questions. It’s not even clear how one should make comparisons between a survey (in the US) asking about happiness, a survey (in Japan) asking about “circumstances at home,” surveys of life satisfaction in Europe based on a four-point scale, and global surveys based on a ten-point scale. Easterlin’s non-result appears only when comparing non-comparable data.

If you want to advocate against economic growth — and to argue that it won’t help even in the world’s poorest nations — then you should surely base such radical conclusions on findings rather than non-findings, and on the basis of robust evidence.

A final thought

Why not look at the levels of economic development and satisfaction? The following graph does this, displaying amazing new data coming from the Gallup World Poll. There’s no longer any doubt that people in richer countries report being more satisfied with their lives.

Is this relevant? Easterlin argues it isn’t — that he’s only concerned with changes in GDP. But the two are inextricably linked. If rich countries are happier countries, this begs the question: How did they get that way? We think it’s because as their economies developed, their people got more satisfied. While we don’t have centuries’ worth of well-being data to test our conjecture, it’s hard to think of a compelling alternative.

Event Information

2015 marked the 40th anniversary of China-European Union (EU) diplomatic ties, highlighting the achievements and continued cooperation in the fields of investment and trade. One of the primary issues in today’s world is green and sustainable development, and the European region has established itself as a central player in the practice of green design. This has become a key factor in coordinating EU relations, and China has been making headway towards the green design movement with energy saving practices, in addition to positive emission reduction commitments made in Paris in 2015.

On March 30, the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy (BTC) hosted a public discussion featuring Jo Leinen, chairman of the European Parliament Delegation for Relations with China, and Qi Ye, director of the BTC. The discussion focused on the topic of the new pattern of the European Union under the green development and sustainable development goals of the United Nations. Leinen has been an elected member of the European Parliament since 1999 and the president of the Union of European Federalists since 1997. Since 2004, he has been a member of the Advisory Council of the Committee for a Democratic U.N. Prior to his time in the European Parliament, he was the minister of the environment in the state of Saarland, Germany and vice president of the European Environment Bureau in Brussels.

Leinen stressed the importance of global governance and international cooperation, which has been emphasized in recent years in order to maintain the stability of the financial system, protect the environment, fight against terrorism, and promote peace throughout the world. He discussed the progress that the China-EU trade relationship has made in the last year, with total trade reaching 400 billion euros, and expressed hope that China-EU relations can achieve new breakthroughs in the future. On the environmental side, Leinen affirmed China’s efforts in the development of a green low-carbon economy and contribution to the world in working to reduce emissions. He highlighted China’s crucial role at the climate change conference in Paris in 2015 and the country’s commitment to allow greenhouse gas emissions to peak by 2030, although he believes that may be a conservative estimate.

The adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris agreement on climate action present a unique opportunity to set the world on a path towards better and more sustainable development outcomes. Delivering sustainable infrastructure at scale lies at the heart of this agenda. Infrastructure is a major driver of growth and inclusive development. Delivered in more sustainable ways, it is also key to tackling climate change, as it currently accounts for around 60 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This means investing more, and better, in renewable energy, cleaner transport, efficient and resilient water systems, and smarter cities. 

The world will need to invest upwards of $6 trillion annually in sustainable infrastructure in the next 15 years, more than double the current level. As much as three-quarters of the incremental investment will need to take place in emerging and developing economies, with the largest part in middle-income countries. This presents a great challenge in mobilizing resources and better integrating climate sustainability in infrastructure. Strong and concerted actions will be needed across public and private sectors, and at national and international levels, including important transformations in the way infrastructure investment is developed, financed, and implemented. More than half of the financing will need to be mobilized from the private sector. 

Public policy has a central role to play in meeting this challenge, both because the public sector itself is a major investor in infrastructure and because public policy provides signals and sets the regulatory and institutional framework that influence the actions of private investors and consumers. Soundness, clarity, and credibility of public policy are especially important for infrastructure investments, given their longevity, public good characteristics, associated externalities, and inevitable and intimate links to government policies. There are four key roles for public policy:

• Articulating national strategies for sustainable infrastructure. Sustainability must be fully integrated in national strategies and plans; addressing one group of projects at a time will not do. The G-20 can provide leadership in setting out clear and coherent national strategies for sustainable infrastructure, linked to intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs) announced ahead of the Paris meeting. National infrastructure strategies should in turn be embedded in overall national investment and growth strategies and macroeconomic frameworks.


• Improving the policy environment. In getting prices right to shift incentive structures towards low-carbon infrastructure, the highest priority attaches to removal of fossil-fuel subsidies and implementation of carbon pricing. To attract more private investment, policy risk and costs of doing business must be reduced. Improvement of policy frameworks and financing mechanisms for public-private partnerships (PPPs) needs particular attention, as this will be an increasingly important investment modality.


• Strengthening public investment management. Public investment has in general been on a declining trend, exacerbating infrastructure gaps. This trend must be reversed. Also, public investment in research and development (R&D) in sustainable infrastructure should be boosted. Public investment management capacities will need substantial enhancement. Strengthening project pipelines is a priority, including incorporating sustainability criteria in project preparation, public procurement, and PPPs.


• Mobilizing financing. Governments must expand their own fiscal space, through tax and expenditure reform and better use of balance sheets, as well as find innovative ways to leverage more private finance and lower its cost. Carbon pricing and improved property taxation in particular have the potential to raise substantial revenue as well as improve the tax structure. With the large role of urban areas in sustainable infrastructure, subnational fiscal reform should empower cities. Through risk mitigation and other instruments, development capital (both traditional development assistance and new climate finance) should be used in ways to achieve more leverage. Multilateral development banks (MDBs) have a key role in this regard and their capacities will need to be boosted. Promoting infrastructure as an asset class will help unlock financing from the large pools of savings held by institutional investors. Middle-income countries in particular should step up efforts to develop domestic capital markets.

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2016: The turning point

Policymakers and development practitioners now face a new set of challenges in the aftermath of the global consensus triumvirate Addis Agenda—2030 Agenda—Paris Agreement: [1] implementation, follow-up, and review. Development policy professionals must tackle these while at the same time including the three pillars of sustainable development—social development, economic growth, and environmental protection—and the above three global consensus’ cross-sectoral natures—all while working in a context where policy planning is still performed in silos. They also must incorporate the universality of these new agreements in the light of different national circumstances—different national realities, capacities, needs, levels of development, and national policies and priorities. And then they have to significantly scale up resource allocation and means of implementation (including financing, capacity building, and technology transfer) to make a difference and enhance novel multi-stakeholder partnerships to contain the surge of global flows of all kinds (such as migration, terrorism, diseases, taxation, extreme weather, and digital revolution) in a resolutely interconnected world. Quite an ambitious task!

Given the above complexities, new national and global arrangements are being made to honor the commitments put forth to answer these unprecedented challenges. Several African governments have already started establishing inter-ministerial committees and task forces to ensure alignment between the global goals and existing national planning processes, aspirations, and priorities.

With the international community, Africa is preparing for the first High-Level Political Forum since the 2030 Agenda adoption in July 2016 on the theme “Ensuring that no one is left behind.” In order to inform the 2030 Agenda’s implementation leadership, guidance, and recommendations, six African countries [2] of 22 U.N. Member States, volunteered to present national reviews on their work to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a unique opportunity to provide an uncompromising reality check and highlight levers to exploit and limits to overcome for impact.

Paralleling Africa’s groundwork, the United Nations’ efforts for coordination have been numerous. They include an inter-agency task force to prepare for the follow-up forum to Financing For Development timed with the Global Infrastructure Forum that will consult on infrastructure investment, a crucial point for the continent; an appointed 10-representative group to support the Technology Facilitation Mechanism that facilitates the development, transfer and dissemination of technologies for the SDGs, another very important item for Africa; and an independent team of advisors to counsel on the longer-term positioning of the U.N. development system in the context of the 2030 Agenda, commonly called “U.N. fit for purpose,” among many other endeavors.

These overwhelming bureaucratic duties alone will put a meaningful burden on Africa’s limited capacity. Thus, it is in the interest of the continent to pool its assets by taking advantage of its robust regional networks in order to mitigate this obstacle in a coherent and coordinated manner, and by building on the convergence between the newly adopted texts and Agenda 2063, the African Union’s 50-year transformation blueprint, with the help of pan-African institutions.

Besides national and global, there is a third level of consideration: the regional one. Indeed, the three major agreements in 2015 emphasized support to projects and cooperation frameworks that foster regional and subregional integration, particularly in Africa. [3] Indeed, common and coherent industrial policies for regional value chains developed by strengthened regional institutions and sustained by a strong-willed transformational leadership are gaining traction towards Africa’s insertion into the global economy.

Africa has long made regional economic integration within its main “building blocs,” the eight Regional Economic Communities (RECs), a core strategy for development. The continent is definitely engaged in this path: Last summer, three RECs, the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), the East African Community (EAC), and the Southern African Development Community (SADC), launched the Tripartite Free Trade Area (TFTA) that covers 26 countries, over 600 million people, and $1 trillion GDP. The tripartite arrangement paves the way towards Africa’s own mega-regional one, the Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA), and the realization of one broad African Economic Community. If regionalization allows free movement of people, capital, goods, and services, the resulting increased intra-African connectivity will boost trade within Africa, promote growth, create jobs, and attract investments. Ultimately, it should ignite industrialization, innovation, and competitiveness. To that end, pan-African institutions, capitalizing on the recent positive continental performances, are redoubling their efforts to build an enabling environment for policy and regulation harmonization and economies of scale.

Importantly, infrastructure, without which no connectivity is possible, is undeniably the enabling bedrock to all future regionalization plans. Together with market integration and industrial development, infrastructure development is one of the three pillars of the TFTA strategy. Similarly, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) Agency, the technical body of the African Union (AU) mandated with planning and coordinating the implementation of continental priorities and regional programs, adopted regional integration as a strategic approach to infrastructure. In fact, in June 2014, the NEPAD Agency organized the Dakar Financing Summit for Infrastructure, culminating with the adoption of the Dakar Agenda for Action that lays down options for investment mobilization towards infrastructure development projects, starting with 16 key bankable projects stemming from the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA). These “NEPAD mega-projects to transform Africa” are, notably, all regional in scope.

See the full map of NEPAD’s 16 mega-projects to transform Africa here »

Supplementing NEPAD and TFTA, the Continental Business Network was formed to promote public-private dialogue with regard to regional infrastructure investment. The Africa50 Infrastructure Fund was constituted as a new delivery platform commercially managed to narrow the massive infrastructure finance gap in Africa evaluated at $50 billion per annum.

The development of homegrown proposals and institutional advances observed lately demonstrate Africa’s assertive engagement towards accelerating infrastructure development, thereby regionalization. At the last AU Summit, the NEPAD Heads of State and Government Orientation Committee approved the institutionalization of an annual PIDA Week hosted at the African Development Bank (AfDB) to follow up on the progresses made.

The energy partnerships listed below illustrate the possible gain from adopting trans-boundary approaches for implementation and follow-up: the Africa Power Vision (APV) undertaken with Power Africa; the ECOWAS Centre for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency (ECREEE) model accompanying the Sustainable Energy for All (SE4ALL) Africa Hub efforts; and the Africa GreenCo solution that is to bank on PIDA.

• Africa Power Vision: African ministers of power and finance gathered at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos in 2014 decided to create the APV. The vision provides a strategic template harnessing resources to fast-track access to modern energy for African households, businesses, and industries. It draws up a shortlist of African-driven regional priority energy projects mostly extracted from the PIDA Priority Action Program, which is the PIDA short-term pipeline to be completed by 2020. The game changer Inga III hydropower project, the iconic DESERTEC Sahara solar project, and the gigantic North-South Interconnection Transmission Line covering almost the entire TFTA are among the 13 selected projects. The APV concept note and implementation plan entitled “From vision to action” developed by the NEPAD Agency, in collaboration with U.S. government-led Power Africa initiative, was endorsed at the January 2015 AU Summit. The package elaborates on responses to counter bottlenecks to achieve quantifiable targets, the “acceleration methodology” based on NEPAD Project Prioritization Considerations Tool (PPCT), risk mitigation, and power projects’ financing. Innovative design was thought to avoid duplication, save resources, improve coordination and foster transformative action with the setting up of dual-hatted Power Africa – APV Transaction Advisors, who supervise investment schemes up to financial closure where and when there is an overlap of energy projects or common interest. Overall, the APV partnership permits a mutualization of expertise while at the same time, since it is based on PIDA, promoting regional economic integration for electrification.

• ECOWAS Centre for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency: U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon launched the Sustainable Energy for All initiative worldwide as early as 2011 with the triple objective of ensuring universal access to modern energy services, doubling the rate of improvement of energy efficiency, and doubling the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix by 2030. Since its inception, SE4ALL prompted a lot of enthusiasm on the continent, and is now counting 44 opt-in African countries. As a result, the SE4ALL Africa Hub was the first regional hub to be launched in 2013. Hosted at the AfDB in partnership with the AU Commission, NEPAD Agency, and the U.N. Development Program (UNDP), its role is to facilitate the implementation of SE4ALL on the continent. The SE4ALL Africa Hub 3rd Annual Workshop held in Abidjan last February showed the potential of this “creative coalition” (Yumkella, 2014) to deliver on areas spanning from national plans of action, regionally concerted approaches in line with the continental vision, to SDG7 on energy, to climate Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) made for the Paris Agreement. Above all, the workshop displayed the hub’s ability to efficiently kick-start the harmonization of processes for impact among countries. Forasmuch as all ECOWAS Member States opted-in to SE4ALL, the West African ministers mandated their regional energy center, ECREEE, to coordinate the implementation of the SE4ALL Action Agendas (AAs), which are documents outlining country actions required to achieve sustainable energy objectives, and from then Investment Prospectuses (IPs), the documents presenting the AAs investment requirements. As a result, the ECOWAS Renewable Energy Policy (EREP) and the Energy Efficiency Policy (EEEP) were formulated and adopted; and a regional monitoring framework to feed into a Global Tracking Framework, the SE4ALL measuring and reporting system, is now being conceived. The successful ECREEE model, bridging national inventory and global players, is about to be duplicated in two other African regions, EAC and SADC, with the support of the U.N. Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO).

• Africa GreenCo: Lastly, initiatives like Africa GreenCo are incubating. This promising vehicle, currently funded by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, envisions itself as an independently managed power trader and broker to move energy where needed. Indeed, Africa GreenCo aims to capitalize on PIDA power projects: In its capacity as intermediary creditworthy off taker, it plans to eventually utilize their regional character as a value addition to risk guarantee. To date, Africa GreenCo is refining the legal, regulatory, technical, and financial aspects of its future structure and forging links with key stakeholders in the sector (member states, multilateral development banks, African regional utilities for generation and interconnection called Power Pools) ahead of the completion of its feasibility study in June 2016.

The above-mentioned partnerships are encouraging trends towards more symbiotic multi-stakeholders cooperation. As they relate to home-crafted initiatives, it is imperative that we do not drift away from a continental vision. Not only do Africa-grown plans have higher chance of success than the one-size-fits-all imported solutions, but consistent and combined efforts in the same direction reinforce confidence, emulation, and attract supportive attention. It implies that the fulfillment of intergovernmental agreements requires first and foremost their adaptation to local realities in a domestication process that is respectful of the policy space. Mainstreaming adjustments can be later conducted according to evidence-based and data-driven experiments. Between these global engagements and national procedures, the regional dimension is the indispensable link: Enabling countries to bypass the artificiality of borders inherited from colonial times and offering concrete options to eradicate poverty in a united-we-stand fashion. Regional integration is therefore a prelude to sustainable development operationalization within Africa and a key step towards its active partaking in the global arena. Regionalization can also trigger international relations shift provided that it encompasses fair multilateralism and sustainable management of global knowledge. Indeed, the resulting openness and the complexity encountered are useful parameters to enrich the conception of relevant local answers.

These success stories show the great potential for new experiments and synergies. To me, they inspire the promise of a better world. The one I like to imagine is characterized by mutually beneficial ecosystems for the people and the planet. It encourages win-win reverse linkages, or in other words, more positive spillovers of developing economies on industrial countries. It is a place where, for example, an African region could draw lessons from the Greek crisis and the other way around: China could learn from Africa’s Maputo Development Corridor for its Silk Road Economic Belt. Twin institutes performing joint research among regional knowledge hubs would flourish. Innovative Fab Labs would be entitled to strive after spatial adventure with e-waste material recycled into 3D printers. In that world, innovative collaborations in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) would be favored and involve not only women but also the diaspora in order to develop environmentally sound technical progress. Commensurate efforts, persistent willingness, indigenous ingenuity, and unbridled creativity place this brighter future within our reach.

Beyond the recognition of the African voice throughout the intergovernmental processes, Africa should now consolidate its gains by firmly maintaining its position and safeguarding its winnings throughout the preliminary phase. The continent should urgently set singular tactics with the greatest potential in terms of inclusiveness and creation of productive capacity. While doing so, African development actors should initiate a “learning by doing” virtuous cycle to create an endogenous development narrative cognizant of adaptable best practices as well as failures. Yet the only approach capable of generating both structural transformation and informative change that are in line with continentally own and led long-term strategies is … regional integration.

Event Information

China’s meteoric rise lifted its economy but damaged its environment, and it has new aspirations to leadership on the global stage. Africa has enormous natural capital and is hungry for development. How can they collaborate? Their interests may intersect within a model of development that invests in natural capital instead of prizing only extraction.

On July 11th, the Brookings Tsinghua-Center, in collaboration with GreenPoint Group and School of Public Policy and Management at Tsinghua University, hosted the panel Sustainability within the China-Africa Relationship: Governance, Investment, and Natural Capital. The panel was moderated by SMPP Associate Professor and IMPA director Zheng Zhenqing, and featured Mr. Peter Seligmann, chairman and CEO of Conservation International; Professor Qi Ye, director of the Brookings Tsinghua-Center; Honorable Minister Anyaa Vohiri of the Environmental Protection Agency of Liberia; Professor Pang Xun, expert on official direct assistance and the politics of aid; and Mr. Rule Jimmy Opelo, Permanent Deputy Secretary of the Ministry of Environment, Wildlife and Tourism of Botswana.

Professor and Dean of School of Public Policy and Management Xue Lan gave the opening remarks, highlighting that both China and Africa face the challenge of balancing development and sustainability. Minister Vohiri then presented on the challenges and great potential of Africa's vast, untapped renewable energy resources before Professor Zheng opened the panel. Framing China and Africa as global partners with the common aspiration of growing sustainable, the panelists discussed the need for developing economies to recognize that the health of their environment is inseparable from the health of their economies.

Questions concerning the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and Millennium Development goals presented conservation as a global issue requiring global governance. Mr. Seligmann forwarded the idea that sustainable development as enlightened self-interest has entered mainstream thought, asserting that the challenge now lies in crafting region-specific policies and plans of implementation. The importance of cooperation surfaced as a common theme. Mr. Opelo examined the possibilities of South-South cooperation, and Professor Qi provided a history for the emergence of natural capital as a concept before underlining the need for government to collaborate with civil society and the private sector.

The highlighted benefits of Sino-African cooperation ranged from the greater political freedom afforded to aid recipient countries when there is donor competition to Africa's potential "leapfrog" development to a green economy if it obtains sufficient investment. Professor Qi spoke of the lessons provided by China’s evolution from a parochial developing country into the world’s leader in sustainable development. Professor Pang emphasized the benefits both to China and to African countries when the influence of conditional aid from the United States is diluted by Chinese competition. Minister Vohiri and Mr. Opelo discussed the challenges of balancing conservation enforcement with the provision of basic needs, concluding that China's capital and knowledge could help Africa develop its economy in a sustainable direction. The panelists closed by addressing questions from the audience that problematical transparency problems with China's current model of development in Africa, the sustainability of green energy subsidies, the threats of mining and poaching, and Africa's role in addressing a global environmental crisis to which it largely did not contribute.

Xue Lan gave the opening remarks

Minister Vohiri delivered keynote remarks

Transcript

• Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• Sustainability within the ChinaAfrica relationship governance investment and natural capital

The votes have been counted in the presidential and legislative elections that Taiwan held earlier today. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won a sweeping victory in both contests, displacing the Kuomintang (KMT).

There will no doubt be extensive and useful analysis on what the election means, particularly on the underlying preferences of the Taiwan public. But attention is already shifting to the policies that the new administration will pursue, and whether they will complicate relations on the three sides of the Taiwan-China-United States triangle.

By the numbers

On the election itself, Tsai Ing-wen, the DPP’s chairperson and presidential candidate, won with 56.1 percent of the vote, with virtually all polling places reporting. Eric Chu, the leader and candidate of the more conservative KMT, received 30.1 percent. James Soong, chairman of the People First Party (PFP), a small spinoff from the KMT, got 12.8 percent. This is the second time that the DPP candidate won in an open contest; Chen Shui-bian was the first to do so, in 2000, but only with 40 percent of the vote in a previous three-person race. 

For the elections for the Legislative Yuan (LY), voters cast two ballots. One is for a candidate to represent their geographic election district, of which there are 78. The other is for the voter’s preferred political party—that outcome produces 35 legislators, drawn from party lists. Final results are not yet available for all of the 78 geographic seats, but the Central News Agency reports that the DPP will have at least 60 seats, enough for an absolute majority. We do know the final result in the party vote: DPP with 44.1 percent; KMT with 26.9 percent; PFP with 6.5 percent; New Power Party with 6.1 percent; the pro-unification New Party with 4.2 percent; and the pro-independence Taiwan Solidarity Union with 2.5 percent.

Not a fluke

Several tentative implications flow from these results.

The DPP victory is similar to the KMT’s in 2008, when voters rejected the eight-year presidency of DPP leader Chen Shui-bian. Tsai’s percentage this time is slightly less than the 58 percent that Ma Ying-jeou won in his first election in eight years ago (in 2008, the KMT won 81 legislative seats). Both elections have a “throw the bums out” flavor.

Although Tsai will not have a totally free hand, she has gained significant political capital and freedom of action. The question now is how she will use them. She has the scope to address a number of domestic problems that were on voters’ minds when they went to the polls. I suspect that she will want to conduct her presidency in a way that helps ensure that the DPP will be Taiwan’s majority party for a long time to come. Whether succeeds will depend a lot on the response of the Legislative Yuan, including the DPP caucus, to her agenda and whether the legislature is willing to undertake reforms that would make it a more effective institution.

Although Tsai will not have a totally free hand, she has gained significant political capital and freedom of action. The question now is how she will use them.

The size of the DPP victory should induce Beijing to reconsider the hardline stance that it has taken during the run-up to the election. It said, in effect, that Dr. Tsai would have to accept its own parameters preserving the status quo if she is to secure mutually beneficial cross-Strait relations. But today’s result was no fluke. It occurred not because of Tsai’s “cool” charisma or the DPP’s skill at mobilizing its supporters, although those were not trivial. It was the result of the public growing more skeptical about Ma Ying-jeou’s policy of engaging China, at least economically—a skepticism grew that throughout Ma’s second term. If Beijing can adjust its strategy and Tsai is willing to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping half way, a mutual accommodation between them is not impossible. But it will not be easy.

Cross-Strait shifts?

The open question, which only future developments can answer, is whether today’s result reflects a more fundamental shift in political attitudes than simply dissatisfaction with Ma Ying-jeou’s policies and their consequences. Such a more fundamental shift would not only change the balance of power within Taiwan but also the continued feasibility of China’s approach to reaching its goal of unification. If so, should Beijing offer more and different carrots to better “win the hearts and minds” of Taiwan people? Or would it consider greater reliance on sticks?

The open question...is whether today’s result reflects a more fundamental shift in political attitudes than simply dissatisfaction with Ma Ying-jeou’s policies and their consequences.

The implication that the U.S. government drew from the election results is captured in the statement the State Department released today: 

“We share with the Taiwan people a profound interest in the continuation of cross-Strait peace and stability. We look forward to working with Dr. Tsai and Taiwan’s leaders of all parties to advance our many common interests and further strengthen the unofficial relationship between the United States and the people on Taiwan.”

It is worth noting that Taiwan is the only ethnic Chinese society in the world in which genuinely competitive elections pick senior political leaders. The powers that be in China, Hong Kong, and Singapore all seek to preserve control over the outcomes of their leadership selection processes. Taiwan is the one system where the outcome reflects the preferences of over 12 million voters. Moreover, this is Taiwan’s third peaceful transfer of power through direct elections, and it should further consolidate Taiwan’s democracy. Finally, that Taiwan has elected its first female president signals the removal of one more significant social barrier to talented people holding the island’s highest political office.

Event Information

Thailand has been under military rule since May 2014, when General Prayuth Chan-Ocha and the Royal Thai Army seized power after deposing democratically elected Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra. Current Prime Minister Prayuth has systematically postponed elections on the grounds of prioritizing order and drafting a new constitution to restore democracy. Since the coup, Thai authorities have used the murky lèse-majesté law to curtail opposition to the monarchy, while the country’s economy has languished.

On February 24, the Center for East Asia Policy Studies at Brookings hosted an event to explore the root causes of Thailand’s political crisis, the implications of an upcoming royal succession, and the possibilities for the road ahead. The event was moderated by Senior Fellow Richard Bush.  Panelists included Duncan McCargo, professor of political science at the University of Leeds, Joshua Kurlantzick, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Don Pathan, an independent security analyst based in Thailand.

 Please follow the conversation on Twitter at #ThaiPolitics

Audio

• Kingdom at a crossroads: Thailand’s uncertain political trajectory

Transcript

• Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20160224_thailand_political_crisis_transcript

A months-long political crisis in Kiev came to an end on April 14, when Ukraine’s Rada (parliament) approved a new prime minister. Expectations that the government will move on needed reforms and anti-corruption measures, however, are low.

Kamikaze prime minister?

The previous prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, had served since the Maidan Revolution in February 2014. Early on, Yatsenyuk equated his tenure to a kamikaze mission, noting that the reforms the government would adopt would carry heavy political costs. He proved right. By early 2016, his National Front party, which won over 22 percent in the October 2014 party-list vote in the Rada elections, polled in the low single digits. 

Reports of a widening rift between Yatsenyuk and President Petro Poroshenko grew last autumn, though they still had reason to stay together. The National Front party and Poroshenko Bloc formed the core of the majority coalition in the Rada, and neither party could expect to fare well in early parliamentary elections.

Early on, Yatsenyuk equated his tenure to a kamikaze mission, noting that the reforms the government would adopt would carry heavy political costs.

The crisis took a twist in mid-February, when the Rada passed a resolution expressing disapproval of the work of Yatsenyuk and his cabinet…but then failed to pass a vote of no-confidence that would have led to Yatsenyuk’s dismissal.

Speculation nevertheless intensified over his looming replacement, with American-born Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko mooted as a possibility. Volodymyr Hroysman’s name also came into play. Hroysman, a member of the Poroshenko Bloc, is closely connected to the president. He had a reputation as a reformer and effective mayor of the city of Vinnytsia, though his performance as Rada speaker was mixed. For example, he opposed the finance ministry’s proposed tax reform, even though it was a requirement of Ukraine’s program with the International Monetary Fund. 

When Yatsenyuk announced his resignation on April 10, Hroysman appeared the front-runner to succeed him. His appointment took longer than expected, however, as he reportedly rejected some suggestions from the president’s camp for ministers, seeking to put in place his own people instead. Backroom negotiations and a fair amount of horse-trading as parties jockeyed for ministerial positions took place April 11 to 13. Finally, the Rada approved Hroysman on April 14.

Low reform expectations

At first glance, the composition of the new cabinet is a far more political group than its predecessor, which comprised many technocrats. It is devoid of names with established reputations for pressing reform or fighting corruption. My conversations on the margins of the Kiev Security Forum on April 14 to 15 turned up few expectations that the new cabinet will proceed with the kinds of reform actions and, in particular, measures to combat corruption that the country needs.

The International Monetary Fund will watch the cabinet’s actions before it considers releasing an additional tranche of funding for Ukraine. One unsettling sign: The incoming finance minister suggested that some adjustments might be sought in the IMF’s criteria. Historically, when Ukrainian finance ministers seek adjustments to IMF criteria and programs, they do not aim for changes that will accelerate reform.

At first glance, the composition of the new cabinet is a far more political group than its predecessor.

Some in Kiev worry about the close relationship between Hroysman and Poroshenko. But that relationship may have one upside: it ties Poroshenko more closely to the prime minister and his success or failure. Too often in the past, Ukrainian presidents have stood some distance from the prime minister, positioning themselves to escape responsibility for difficult government policies rather than throwing their full political weight behind the prime minister’s efforts.

Poroshenko did not fully back Yatsenyuk. As one Ukrainian observer put it, the president often seemed more interested in explaining or rationalizing the status quo rather than trying to change it. Now, if Hroysman and the new cabinet fail to deliver, it will reflect more directly on Poroshenko.

A friendly push

If my Ukrainian interlocutors are correct, the new government will pursue the needed reforms at best only half-heartedly. Among other things, that could leave in place the current system in which oligarchs exercise outsized and unhealthy political influence. That will impede Ukraine’s prospects of getting on the path to becoming a modern European state. 

The International Monetary Fund, United States, and European Union should help the Ukrainian president and prime minister make the right decisions: to press forward a program of genuine reform and, at long last, a real anti-corruption campaign. The West should make clear that further assistance will depend on such actions. 

An American drone strike that killed leader of the Afghan Taliban Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Mansour may seem like a fillip for the United States’ ally, the embattled government of Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani. But as Vanda Felbab-Brown writes in a new op-ed for The New York Times, it is unlikely to improve Kabul’s immediate national security problems—and may create more difficulties than it solves.

The White House has argued that because Mansour became opposed to peace talks with the Afghan government, removing him became necessary to facilitate new talks. Yet, as Vanda writes in the op-ed, “the notion that the United States can drone-strike its way through the leadership of the Afghan Taliban until it finds an acceptable interlocutor seems optimistic, at best.”

[T]he notion that the United States can drone-strike its way through the leadership of the Afghan Taliban until it finds an acceptable interlocutor seems optimistic, at best.

Mullah Mansour's death does not inevitably translate into substantial weakening of the Taliban's operational capacity or a reprieve from what is shaping up to be a bloody summer in Afghanistan. Any fragmentation of the Taliban to come does not ipso facto imply stronger Afghan security forces or a reduction of violent conflict. Even if Mansour's demise eventually turns out to be an inflection point in the conflict and the Taliban does seriously fragment, such an outcome may only add complexity to the conflict. A lot of other factors, including crucially Afghan politics, influence the capacity of the Afghan security forces and their battlefield performance.

Nor will Mansour’s death motivate the Taliban to start negotiating. That did not happen when it was revealed last July’s the group’s previous leader and founder, Mullah Mohammad Omar, had died in 2013. To the contrary, the Taliban’s subsequent military push has been its strongest in a decade—with its most violent faction, the Haqqani network, striking the heart of Kabul. Mansour had empowered the violent Haqqanis following Omar’s death as a means to reconsolidate the Taliban, and their continued presence portends future violence. Mansour's successor, Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban’s former minister of justice who loved to issue execution orders, is unlikely to be in a position to negotiate (if he even wants to) for a considerable time as he seeks to gain control and create legitimacy within the movement.

The United States has sent a strong signal to Pakistan, which continues to deny the presence of the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network within its borders. Motivated by a fear of provoking the groups against itself, Pakistan continues to show no willingness to take them on, despite the conditions on U.S. aid.

Disrupting the group’s leadership by drone-strike decapitation is tempting militarily. But it can be too blunt an instrument, since negotiations and reconciliation ultimately depend on political processes. In decapitation targeting, the U.S. leadership must think critically about whether the likely successor will be better or worse for the counterinsurgency endgame.

Next week, Americans will be looking westward to the Tuesday Democratic primary in California. Meanwhile, in Washington, President Obama and then the U.S. Congress will host someone very familiar with electoral politics: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

This will be the third Modi-Obama summit since the Indian prime minister took office two years ago. Since their first phone call on May 16, 2014, the two leaders have also met multiple times at regional and global gatherings or on the sidelines of those summits. This frequency has been a departure from the past and has even led some—particularly in the Indian media—to ask: why is Modi visiting the United States again? A simple answer would be “because he was invited,” and there are a few reasons why the White House extended that invitation and why Modi accepted.

At a time when [Obama] is being criticized for not having done enough or for doing the wrong thing on foreign policy, he can point to the U.S.-India relationship as a success.

Achievements logged

For President Obama, there’s the legacy issue. At a time when he is being criticized for not having done enough or for doing the wrong thing on foreign policy, he can point to the U.S.-India relationship as a success, particularly in the context of the rebalance to the Asia-Pacific. U.S. popularity is up in India according to polls and three-quarters of those surveyed in India last year expressed confidence in Obama on world affairs. 

President George W. Bush left office after having signed the historic civil nuclear deal with India. Obama can claim to have put quite a few more runs on the board. At a recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Nisha Biswal indeed laid out some key developments in the relationship in the Obama era: 

Strengthening friendships

For Prime Minister Modi and the Indian government, the visit represents another chance to strengthen India’s partnership with a country that Modi has called “a principal partner in the realization of India’s rise as a responsible, influential world power.” The United States is India’s largest trading partner and a crucial source of capital, technology, knowledge, resources, remittances, and military equipment. It can also help ensure multi-polarity in Asia, which is a crucial goal for Indian policymakers. 

The visit is also an opportunity for Modi to engage with legislators and the American private sector—two key constituencies that can help determine the pace of progress in the relationship. House Speaker Paul Ryan has invited the Indian leaders to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress, and Modi will be the fifth Indian prime minister to do so (India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru gave back-to-back speeches to the House and Senate separately in 1949). But it’ll likely hold special significance for the prime minister and his supporters, given that from 2005 to 2014, then Gujarat Chief Minister Modi was denied entry into the United States. 

A busy calendar

Modi’s has a packed schedule in Washington. On June 6, he’ll visit Arlington National Cemetery, meet with the heads of think tanks, and participate in an event involving the recovery and return of stolen Indian antiquities. On June 7, he’ll meet with President Obama, who will also host a lunch for him, and then Defense Secretary Ashton Carter. That will be followed by meetings with business leaders and an address to the U.S.-India Business Council. Expect to see Modi highlight and defend his government’s two-year record on the economy and make a pitch for U.S. businesses to increase their involvement in India—and particularly some of Modi’s flagship initiatives such as Make in India and Digital India.

Expect to see Modi highlight and defend his government’s two-year record on the economy and make a pitch for U.S. businesses to increase their involvement in India.

June 8 will be devoted to Congressional engagement, including the joint address, a lunch hosted by Speaker Ryan, and a reception hosted by the House and Senate Foreign Relations Committees, as well as the India Caucus. Modi will acknowledge the legislature’s role and significance in developing the U.S.-India relationship, and will likely highlight the democratic values the two countries share, as well as how India and Indians have contributed to the United States, global growth, and the international order. Importantly, in an election year, Modi will likely note the bipartisan nature of the relationship—there’s no indication yet that he will or wants to meet any of the presidential candidates on this visit, though the sessions potentially offer opportunities for him to do so. Republican members of Congress will also seek to highlight their role in the development of the partnership. The interactions on Capitol Hill will also be a chance for Modi to address some Congressional concerns—such as human rights, Iran, non-proliferation, the investment climate—and for Modi to call for the two countries to “accommodat[e] each other’s concerns.”

Do not, however, expect to hear the word “Pakistan”—the Indian government wants to avoid hyphenation and get Americans to think of India beyond India-Pakistan terms. Nor should you expect to hear the word “China,” though there might be subtle attempts to note the contrast with that other Asian giant and make the case for the United States to support the rise of a large Asian democracy that can demonstrate that democracy and development aren’t mutually exclusive.

Parting glance between Modi and Obama

And what’s on the agenda for the Modi-Obama meeting? In one sense, the last few years have signaled a regularization of U.S.-India leader-level summits (with bilateral meetings in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016). Over the last two years, high-level meetings have been effective as action-forcing events. This time, officials have been managing expectations, broadly describing the visit as “part of consolidating and celebrating the relationship.” So this is a chance to recognize the steps that the other side has taken to increase the run-rate of the relationship—particularly on defense and security fronts—and tie up some loose ends with an eye towards sustaining momentum into the next administration (without necessarily tying its hands). 

In terms of focus areas, the governments have emphasized (to varying degrees) economic ties, energy and climate change, as well as defense and security cooperation. The Obama administration would like to India ratify the Paris agreement, for instance—unlike in the United States, India doesn’t require legislative approval. Indian officials recognize the importance of this issue to Obama, but are also concerned about U.S. policy continuity given the presumptive Republican nominee’s stand on the issue. Delhi, in turn, is partly using the shared desire for India to meet its clean energy commitments to make the case for an American full-court press to facilitate Indian membership in the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG)—similar to the Bush administration’s efforts to help India get an NSG waiver in 2008. The U.S. position has been that India is ready for NSG membership and meets requirements for membership of the Missile Technology Control Regime, and it has supported Indian application and eventual membership of both, as well as two other nonproliferation and export control regimes. Asked if Modi would ask Obama to “go to bat for India” with others on this, the Indian foreign secretary didn’t answer directly but noted: “countries that feel we’re doing the right thing...if they take it upon themselves to…articulate their positions and talk to others, this is what friends do for each other.” Modi himself will visit two other NSG members (Switzerland and Mexico) just before and after the U.S. visit partly to make the case for India’s membership.

The visit will also be a chance to cement and highlight cooperation in and on the Indo-Asia-Pacific region. In addition, observers will be watching to see whether the two countries will sign the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA)—the logistics support agreement that the Indian defense minister said in April that Secretary Carter and he had “agreed in principle to conclude”—or whether there’ll be further announcements with regard to the Defense Technology and Trade Initiative. There’ll also be interest in whether the countries get serious talks restarted on a Bilateral Investment Treaty, and whether Westinghouse and the Nuclear Power Corporation of India can finalize an agreement to set up reactors in India. Overall, there is a desire to take the relationship to the “next level” but not necessarily in terms of a big deal; rather there’s a search for ways to deepen, operationalize, and institutionalize cooperation—such as through arrangements to share information in the counterterrorism space—and facilitate interaction between an increasing number of stakeholders.

While highlighting areas of convergence, both sides will likely also discuss the divergences that remain—perhaps including the east-west divergence related to Pakistan, the north-south divergence related to Russia, the security-economic divergence with more progress in the partnership on the former than the latter, and the potential expectations-reality divergence. And while the direction of the U.S.-India relationship is likely to remain the same in the near future, how the two countries deal with these divergences will determine the trajectory and the pace of the relationship.

Editors’ Note: International relations almost never progress in a linear fashion. In this excerpt from a new Brookings India briefing book titled “India-U.S. Relations in Transition,” Tanvi Madan examines some of the high-impact but low-probability events that may affect the relationship in the future: so-called “black swans.”

U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter recently said that the U.S.-India defense partnership would become “an anchor of global security.” But in an increasingly uncertain world, the partnership between these two large and relatively stable democracies can also potentially be a critical anchor of stability more broadly. Here are some black swans—low-probability, high-impact and, in hindsight, predictable events—that could exacerbate regional and global uncertainty and instability, and affect both countries’ interests and, potentially, their relationship. 

• Regional Assertiveness: What might be the impact of greater Chinese or Russian assertiveness—even aggression? How might Russian actions against Ukraine, Georgia, or even a NATO member change not just U.S. calculations, but India’s as well? How will it affect their bilateral relationship? What about a China-U.S. confrontation over Taiwan or in the South China Sea? Or Chinese action against a country like Vietnam, with which India has close ties and which the United States is increasingly engaging? What if there is a sudden or serious deterioration of the situation in Tibet, perhaps in the context of a leadership transition? 
• Chaos in India’s West: What happens if there is political uncertainty in Saudi Arabia, a country with which the United States has close—albeit tense—ties, and which is India’s largest oil supplier and home to millions of Indian citizens? How will the United States and India react if Iran, after all, decides to acquire nuclear weapons? What about the chain reaction either of these scenarios would set off in the Middle East? Closer to India, what if Afghanistan relapses into a total civil war? Or if there is a sharp downturn in stability within Pakistan, with the establishment challenged, the threat of disintegration, and challenges posed by the presence of nuclear weapons? 
• Shocks to the Global Economy: What if a confluence of circumstance leads to a major spike in oil prices? What will the impact be of a major economic crisis in China, not just on the global economy or Chinese domestic stability, but also in terms of how Beijing might react externally? How will the United States and India deal with this scenario? And what if the eurozone collapses under the weight of refugee flows, Britain’s threatened exit, or national financial crises? 
• The Epoch-Defining Security Shock: Both the United States and India have suffered major attacks relatively recently—the United States on September 11, 2001 and India on November 26, 2008. But what if there is another major terrorist attack in either country or on the two countries’ interests or citizens elsewhere? Or a major cyber incident that takes down critical infrastructure? 
• Environmental Challenges: What if rising sea levels cause a catastrophe in Bangladesh resulting in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, crossing over into India? And then there are the various climate change-related challenges that can perhaps be considered “white swans”—more-certain events, whose effects can be more easily estimated. 

In addition, one could think of domestic black swans in each country and some in the bilateral context. These might include dramatic domestic political developments, or a spark causing a major backlash against immigrants in the United States or American citizens in India. 

As the U.S.-India partnership has developed, and India’s regional and global involvements have increased, the U.S.-India conversation—and not just the official one—has assumed greater complexity. This will help the two countries tackle black swans in the future. So will the further institutionalization of discussions on global and regional issues of the sort already underway. Amid the day-to-day priorities, there should be room for discussing contingencies for black swans in dialogues between the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State and the Indian Foreign Secretary, in the two countries’ dialogue on East Asia, and in discussions between the two policy planning units.

A recent article in The Guardian caught my eye: “Report accuses government of increasing inequalities in developing countries by financing academies at the expense of state schools.” The report, conducted by the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, was an attack on U.K. aid money being linked to private education providers since the rapid increase in such schools may be contributing to sub-standard education. In particular, they cited the U.K. government’s investments in the Nairobi-based and for-profit Bridge International Academies.

I’ve worked on private education extensively throughout my career and do not believe there is anything wrong with private schools, but in this particular case I couldn’t agree more. But to be clear, it’s the funding strategy that’s the problem.

Private schooling is on the rise in a number of poor countries, and Pakistan—where my education research is focused—is no exception. The majority of these schools are no longer the elite institutions of yore, but low-cost alternatives fighting for survival in a highly competitive environment. These schools have mushroomed in response to increased parental demand and poor public alternatives, but also to the greater availability of teachers in the local labor market.

More importantly, research increasingly demonstrates that there is absolutely nothing wrong with private schools. There's a summary of this research available here; specific examples on India (more here) and Pakistan are also available.

Some key are takeaways from this research are:

• Private schools charge low fees (about $1 to$2 a month in Pakistan).
• The quality is almost certainly higher compared to government schools in the vicinity.
• At least in Pakistan, there is no significant segregation between public and private schools in terms of parental wealth, education, or caste.
• The most significant barrier to attendance in low-cost private schools is not cost—it’s distance. Put simply, there just aren’t enough of them around.

If there is a cheaper and better alternative to public schooling, shouldn’t we encourage children to shift and thus improve the quality of education for all?

Perhaps. But when the rubber from these well-intentioned aid policies hits the road of rural Pakistan, Kenya, or Ethiopia, a very different sort of model emerges. Instead of supporting private schooling, donors end up supporting private schools (or at best private school chains), which is an entirely different action with little theoretical backing. In fact, economic theory screams that governments and donors should almost never do that.

Donors say the problem is that the low-cost private school market is fragmented with no central authority that can be “contracted with.” No one has a good model on how to work with a competitive schooling sector with multiple small players—ironically, the precise market structure that, according to economics, leads to efficiency.

In reality, I suspect the problem goes deeper. Most low-cost private school owners don’t do well at donor conferences. They don’t know how to tell compelling human-interest stories about the good they do. But what they are excellent at is using local resources to ensure that their schools meet the expectations of demanding parents.

The first is a problem of accountability. Public schools are accountable, through a democratic system, to citizens of the country. Private schools are accountable to the parents. And donor-funded private school chains are account to the donors. While both citizen-led accountability and direct accountability to parents have problems, they are grounded in centuries of experience. It’s unlikely that donors in a foreign land, some of whom can’t visit the schools they fund for security reasons, can do better than either citizens or parents.

The second is a problem of market structure. When one private school or private school chain receives preferential treatment and funding, without allowing other private schools to apply for the same funds, the donor is picking winners (remember Solyndra?). The need for private schools as an alternative to government schools is insufficient justification for donors to put their thumbs on the scale and tilt the balance of power towards a pre-identified entity.

In a recent experiment, my colleagues and I gathered direct proof for this assertion. We gave untied grants to low-cost private schools with a twist. In certain villages, we randomly selected a single private school for the grant. In others, we gave the grant to every private school in the village. Our preliminary results show that in villages where we gave the grant to a single school, the school benefitted enormously from an increase in enrollment. Where we gave the grant to multiple private schools, the enrollment increase was split among schools. But only in the villages where we gave the grant to every school did test-scores for children increase.

What happened? When a single private school receives the grant, knowing that the other schools cannot react due to a lack of funds, they engage in “customer poaching” to increase their profits at the expense of others. Some have argued that Uber’s recent fundraising is precisely such an effort to starve competitors of funding.

When you equally support all private schools, customer poaching does not work, and the only way to increase profits and generate returns is to increase the size of the market, either through higher overall enrollments or through new quality offerings.

The first strategy supports pre-identified private schools and concentrates market power. The second, by providing opportunities for all private schools, improves education for children.

Sure, some private school chains and schools are making positive impact and deserve the support they can get. But funding such schools creates the wrong institutional structures and are more likely to lead to disasters than successes (Greg Mortensen and 3 cups of tea, anyone?).

In general, the Government’s responsibility towards the education of children is two-fold:

• Alleviate the market constraints that hold back private schooling without favoring one school over the other—letting parents decide who succeeds and who does not.
• Support and improve public schools to provide an alternative because there will always be children who cannot enroll in private schools, either because they are too expensive or because they are too far away, or because they don’t offer the instruction “basket” that some parents want.

In short, foreign aid should play no part in supporting private schools rather than private schooling.

The development community issued a collective sigh of relief last week when the U.S. Senate, after a seven-month delay, finally confirmed a new Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). In addition to dealing with the many global development issues, Gayle Smith also has the task of making good on the Obama administration’s commitment to make USAID a preeminent 21st century development agency.

While a year might seem a short time for anyone to make a difference in a new government position, Gayle Smith assuming the lead in USAID should be seen more as the capstone of a seven-year tenure guiding U.S. global development policy.  She led the interagency process that produced the 2010 Presidential Policy Determination on Development (PDD), and has been involved in every administration development policy initiative since, including major reforms inside USAID.

The five items below are suggestions on how Smith can institutionalize and take to the next level reforms and initiatives that have been part of the development agenda of which she has been a principal architect.

The PPD lays out key elements for making our assistance programs more accountable, including “greater transparency” and “more substantial investment of resources in monitoring and evaluation.”

USAID staff have designed a well thought out Cost Program Management Plan to advance the public availability of its data and to fulfill the U.S. commitment to the International Assistance Transparency Initiative (IATI). What this plan needs is a little boost from the new administrator, her explicit endorsement and energy, and maybe the freeing-up of more resources so phases two and three to get more and better USAID data into the IATI registry can be completed by the end of 2016 rather than slipping over into the next administration. In addition, the fourth and final phase of the plan needs to be approved so data transparency is integrated into the planned Development Information Solution (DIS), which will provide a comprehensive integration of program and financial information. 

Meanwhile, in January 2011 USAID adopted an evaluation policy that was praised by the American Evaluation Association as a model for other government agencies. In FY 2014, the agency completed 224 evaluations. The new administrator could provide leadership in several areas that would raise the quality and use of USAID’s evaluations. She should weigh in on the sometimes theological debate over what type of evaluation works best by being clear that there is no single, all-purpose type of evaluation. Evaluations need to fit the context and question to be addressed, from most significant change (focusing solely on the most significant change generated by a project), to performance evaluation, to impact evaluation.   

Second, evaluation is an expertise that is not quickly acquired. Some 2,000 USAID staff have been trained, but mainly through short-term courses. The training needs to be broadened to all staff and deepened in content. This will contribute to a cultural change whereby USAID staff learn not just how to conduct evaluations, but how to value and use the findings.

Third, evaluations need to be translated into learning. The E3 Bureau (Bureau for Economic Growth, Education and Environment) has set the model of analyzing and incorporating evaluation findings into its policies and programs, and a few missions have bought evaluations into their program cycle. This needs to be done throughout the agency. Further, USAID should use its convening power to share its findings with other U.S. government agencies, other donors, and the broader development community.

Current USAID processes are considered rigid and time-consuming. This is not uncommon to large institutions, but in recent years the agency has been seeking more innovative, flexible instruments. The USAID Global Development Lab is experimenting with what is alternatively referred to as the Development Innovation Accelerator (DIA) or Broad Agency Announcement (BAA), whereby it invites ideas on a specific development problem and then selects the authors of the best, most relevant, to join USAID staff in co-creating solutions—something the corporate sector has been calling for—to be involved at the beginning of problem-solving. Similarly, the Policy, Planning, and Learning Bureau is in the midst of redesigning the program cycle to introduce adaptive management, allowing for greater collaboration and real-time response to new information and evolving local circumstances. Adaptive management would allow for more customized approaches and learning based on local context.

Again, the PPD calls for “innovation.” As with accountability, an expression of interest and support from the new administrator, and an articulation of the need to inculcate innovation into the USAID culture, could move these endeavors from tentative experiment to practice.

Gayle Smith has been immersed in guiding U.S. policy in unstable, fragile states. She knows the territory well and cares. The U.S. has been an active participant and leader in the New Deal for Fragile States. The New Deal framework is a thoughtful, comprehensive structure for moving fragile states to stability, but recent analyses indicate that neither members of the G7+ countries nor donors are following the explicit steps. They are not dealing with national and local politics, which are the essential levers through which to bring stability to a country, and are not adequately including civil society. Maybe the New Deal structures are too complicated for a country that has minimal governance. Certainly, there has been insufficient senior-level leadership from donors and buy-in from G7+ leaders and stakeholders. With her deep knowledge of the dynamics in fragile states, Smith could bring sorely needed U.S. leadership to this arena.

The PPD calls for “robust policy, budget, planning, and evaluation capabilities.” USAID moved quickly on these objectives, not just in restoring USAID former capabilities in evaluation, but also in policy and budget through the resurrection of the planning and policy function (Policy, Planning, and Learning Bureau, or PPL) and the budget function (Office of Bureau and Resource Management, or BRM). PPL has reestablished USAID’s former policy function, but USAID’s budget authority has only been partially restored.

Gayle Smith needs to take the next obvious step. Budget is policy. The integration of policy and budget is an essential foundation of evidence-based policymaking. The two need to be joined so these functions can support each other rather than operating in isolated cones. Budget deliberations are not just about numbers; policies get set by budget decisions, so policy and budget need to be integrated so budget decisions are informed by strategy and policy knowledge.

I go back to the model of the late 1970s when Alex Shakow was head of the Policy, Planning, and Coordination Bureau (PPC), which encompassed both policy and budget. Here you had in one senior official someone who was knowledgeable about policy and budget and understood how the two interact. He was the go-to-person the agency sent to Capitol Hill. He could deal with the range of issues that always unexpectedly arise during congressional committee hearings and markups. He could effectively deal with the State Department and interagency meetings on a broad sweep of policy and program matters. He could represent the U.S. globally, such as at the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) and other international development meetings.

With the expansion of the development agenda and frequency of interagency and international meetings, such a person is in even greater need today. USAID needs three or four senior officials—administrator, deputy administrator, associate administrator, and the head of a joined-up policy/budget function —to cover the demand domestically and internationally for senior USAID leadership with a deep knowledge of the broad scope of USAID programs.    

The arguments for the need to reform U.S. food assistance programs are incontrovertible and have been hashed hundreds of times, so no need to repeat them here. But it is clearly in the interests of the tens of millions of people globally who each year face hunger and starvation for the U.S. to maximize the use of its resources by moving its food aid from an antiquated 1950s model to current market realities. There is leadership for this on the Hill in the Food for Peace Reform Act of 2015, introduced by Senators Bob Corker and Chris Coons. Gayle Smith could help build the momentum for this bill and contribute to an important Obama legacy, whether enactment happens in 2016 or under a new administration and Congress in 2017.

Gayle knows better than anyone the Obama development agenda. These ideas are humbly presented as an outside observer’s suggestions of how to solidify key administration aid effectiveness initiatives. 

This week, the richest business leaders and investors from around the world will gather in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. In keeping with tradition, a small portion of the agenda will be devoted to global development and the plight of people living at the other end of the global income distribution.

Philanthropy is one way of linking the fortunes of these disparate communities. What if some of the mega-rich could be persuaded to redistribute their wealth to the extreme poor?

This question may feel hackneyed, but it deserves a fresh hearing in light of a dramatic reduction in the global poverty gap over the past several years (Figure 1). The theoretical cost of transfers required to lift all poor people’s income up to the global poverty line of $1.90 a day stood at approximately $80 billion [1] in 2015, down from over $300 billion in 1980. (Values expressed here are in 2015 market dollars.)

Source: Authors’ calculations based on OECD, World Bank

This reduction can be unpacked into two parts. The first is a steep decline in the number of people living below the global poverty line. This is increasingly recognized as one of the defining features of the era. A U.N. goal to halve the poverty rate in the developing world between 1990 and 2015 was nearly achieved twice over. The second and lesser-known factor is the shrinking average distance of the world’s poor from the poverty line. In 1980, the mean daily income of those living below $1.90 was $1.09. In 2012 it was 25 cents higher at $1.34. (Values expressed here in 2011 purchasing power parity dollars.)   

Despite this good news, global poverty still demands attention. Hundreds of millions of people continue to suffer this most acute form of deprivation. In several countries, the prospects for ending poverty over the next generation, in line with a recently endorsed successor U.N. goal, appear challenging at best.

Figure 1 illustrates that in 2006, global aid flows exceeded the cost of the global poverty gap for the first time. This suggests that the elimination of extreme poverty should be possible simply through a more efficient allocation of aid. However, this confuses foreign aid’s goals and functions. The bulk of official foreign aid is used in the provision of public goods, such as physical infrastructure and strengthening institutions. Only 2 percent is directed to social payments and their administration. If the elimination of extreme poverty is to be achieved through targeted transfers, it depends on sources other than foreign aid.

The main source of transfers to the poor is welfare programs run and financed by developing countries themselves. These social safety nets have emerged as an increasingly prominent instrument in the toolkit of developing economy governments. Eighty-three percent of developing economies employ unconditional cash transfer programs, although many are small in scale. Several countries are in the process of building the apparatus for more accurate targeting and authentication through the assembly of beneficiary registries and the rolling out of identity programs. In at least 10 developing countries, social safety nets have succeeded in establishing a social floor by lifting all those people under the poverty line up above the threshold. In the vast majority, however, safety nets are insufficiently targeted or generous for that purpose, reflecting not only resource constraints, but also political choices that can be resistant to change.

A complementary approach is to consider the role of private mechanisms and wealth. NGOs were among the original pioneers of cash transfers in the developing world. More recently, the NGO GiveDirectly has designed a compelling new method of charitable giving that sends money directly to the poor using digital monitoring and payment technology. Its approach has received strong endorsements from independent charity assessors and has been validated by impact evaluations. Yet the scale of its existing donations remains tiny relative to the global poverty gap.

This is where Davos’s global elite could come into play: What difference could a philanthropic donation from the world’s richest people make?

To explore this question, we begin by identifying those developing countries that are home to a least one billionaire. (Our analysis is restricted to billionaires by data, not by the potential largesse of the world’s multi-millionaires. We focus our attention on billionaires in the developing world given the traditional focus of philanthropy on domestic causes.) Let’s assume that the richest billionaire in each country agrees to give away half of his or her current wealth among his or her fellow citizens, disbursed evenly over the next 15 years, roughly in accordance with the Giving Pledge promoted by Bill Gates. That money would be used exclusively to finance transfers to poor people based on their current distance from the poverty line. Transfers would be sustained at the same level for the full 15-year period with the aim of providing a modicum of income security that might allow beneficiaries to sustainably escape from poverty by 2030.

Table 1 summarizes the key results. In each of three countries—Colombia, Georgia, and Swaziland—a single individual's act of philanthropy could be sufficient to end extreme poverty with immediate effect. Swaziland is an especially striking case as it is among the world’s poorest countries with 41 percent of its population living under the poverty line. In Brazil, Peru, and the Philippines, poverty could be more than halved, or eliminated altogether if the billionaires could be convinced to match Mark Zuckerberg’s example and increase their donation to 99 percent of their wealth.

Source: Authors’ calculations based on Forbes, International Monetary Fund, PovcalNet, and the World Bank. Poverty rates post-transfer calculated based on average distance of the poor from the poverty line.  

In other countries—Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and Angola—the potential impact on poverty is only modest. A number of factors account for differences between countries, but two factors that penalize African countries are especially noteworthy. First, the depth of poverty in Africa remains high, with 15 percent of the population living on less than $1.00 a day; and second, Africa has relatively high prices compared to other poor regions, which means more dollars are required to deliver the same amount of welfare.  

For those nations that have more than one billionaire, an alternative scenario is that the country’s club of billionaires makes the pledge together and combines resources to tackle domestic poverty. This would end poverty in China, India, and Indonesia—countries that rank first, second, and fifth globally in terms of the absolute size of their poor populations. The last two columns of Table 2 describe the results.

Table 2. The potential impact on poverty of collective billionaire giving pledges

Source: Authors’ calculations based on Forbes, IMF, PovcalNet, and the World Bank. Poverty rates post-transfer calculated based on average distance of the poor from the poverty line.

This exercise is of course laden with simplifying assumptions. [2] It is intended to provoke discussion, not to provide definitive figures. Moreover, it is open to debate whether transfers represent the most cost-effective way of sustainably ending poverty, the extent to which transfers ought to be targeted, the efficacy of building private transfer programs alongside public safety nets, and whether cash transfers represent the most appropriate use of billionaires’ philanthropy.  

What is less contestable is that a falling global poverty gap presents an opportunity for more systematic efforts for poverty reduction. This raises the question: How low does the poverty gap have to fall before we explicitly design programs to bring the remaining poor above the poverty line? We would argue that we are already beyond this point, not least in countries that remain a long way from ending poverty. Were a billionaire at Davos to commit to using his or her wealth in this fashion, it could trigger a powerful demonstration effect of innovative solutions—not just for other billionaires, but for countries that are currently at risk of being left behind.

[1] The cost of the global poverty gap in 2015 is an overestimate compared with the World Bank’s tentative poverty estimate for the same year. This is due to a different treatment of Nigeria. For this exercise, we rely on data from the 2009/10 Harmonized Nigeria Living Standards Survey reported in PovcalNet, despite its well-documented problems, whereas the Bank draws on the 2010/11 General Household Survey.

[2] Simplifying assumptions include: zero administrative costs in identifying the poor, assessing their income, and administering payments with no leakages, or no portion of those costs being borne by billionaires; the efficacy of administering miniscule transfers to those who stand on the margin of the poverty line; and no change in the cost of closing the poverty gap in a country over time, whether due to population growth, an increase or decrease in poverty, or a change in prices relative to the dollar.   

On February 9, President Obama submitted his FY 2017 budget request to Congress. The proposed international affairs budget is down 1 percent from current funding levels and 12 percent (in constant dollars) since 2010, better than many domestic accounts. In addition, outside the regular budget, the administration is proposing $1.8 billion ($376 million from the international affairs budget account) to meet the latest pandemic—the Zika virus. Given the budget environment, the proposed amounts for the international affairs budget seem reasonable.

But from a long-term perspective, the budget is alarming. It seems unable to take account of global trends, it relies on fractured and ad hoc processes, and it is excessively siloed into pre-determined sectors.

Being satisfied with relatively small budget cuts does not face the reality of far greater and more pressing challenges today than in 2010. Today, Iraq and Afghanistan are still demanding sizable budget resources. We need to respond to Russia’s muscle-flexing by demonstrating our commitment to its independent neighbors. The effort to move HIV/AIDS to a more sustainable model is commendable but showing minimal success, so U.S. funding cannot slip. The Ebola crisis has been succeeded by the Zika virus. The Middle East is unstable and violent, with half the population of Syria killed or displaced. Sixty million displaced persons is the highest level ever reached. The world is addressing four Level 3 humanitarian crises, an unprecedented number. The fear of terrorism is spreading and disrupting rational political dialogue. Domestic violence and civil strife is increasing in Central America. Free expression is under siege in many countries and civil societies are in need of reinforcement.

Many of these challenges reflect an underinvestment in development in the past. We are using a Rube Goldberg budget system that cobbles together funding from multiple sources for a single objective and locks in funding several years before a penny flows, making it difficult to adjust to changing circumstances.

The budgeting system problem

The 2017 budget uses a gimmick that may not be sustainable. To fund the Iraq war, the Bush administration invented an off-budget account (Overseas Contingent Operations, or OCO, a successor to earlier emergency funding) that does not count against the annual budget caps. The State Department and USAID got part of their budgets starting in 2012 from this account. OCO for FY 2017 is proposed at one-quarter of the international affairs budget. The problem is that OCO cannot be counted on in the long-term, and the sustainable base budget for FY 2017 is down 30 percent from FY 2010 in constant dollars.

The budget process is also absurdly long. The Obama administration began planning the FY 2016 budget in the spring of 2014, roughly 18 months before Congressional appropriations. Typically, it could take another six months for agency officials and appropriation committees to agree on country and program allocations. Only then, 30 months later, can U.S. development professionals working overseas get on with the business of putting those resources to work.  

This budget process, with its long timeframes and pre-determined earmarks and presidential initiatives, means that despite best efforts by USAID, it is difficult to respect “local ownership” of development—something that development experience demonstrates is fundamental to successful and sustainable development.

Presidential initiatives have their place as a way to bring along political allies and the American populace. It is also appropriate and constructive for Congress to weigh in on funding priorities. But it can be counterproductive to effective development when presidential initiatives and congressional earmarks dictate at the micro level and restrict flexibility in implementation, especially in a rapidly changing world with frequent crises. 

Another problem with the current budget system is that most but not all sectors are protected by budget accounts or earmarks. Health is protected and the funding divided into various sub-accounts. Education and agriculture get earmarks. New in the FY 2016 appropriations bill is a separate line item for democracy.

Another structural issue is the crisis-reactive nature of our assistance programs. Health, which garners the lion’s share of U.S. economic assistance, has been dominated for nearly two decades by responses to global crises — first massive funding for combatting HIV/AIDS, followed by significant funding to tackle malaria, Ebola, and now the Zika virus. It is funding by individual disease. Crisis galvanizes political and popular support for the here and now. But what if we had focused on building up national health systems for the last 20 years rather than fighting one-off diseases? If we moved to more preventive approaches now, maybe in 10 or 20 years the pandemic of the day could be met less by the U.S. ramping up in a crisis mode and more by the health systems in those countries affected, with the U.S. playing a supportive and technical role rather than the core funding role. 

These issues are examples of why it is imperative for the next administration and congress to engage in a strategic dialogue on the objectives and priorities of foreign assistance programs, both in funding levels and how the funds are used. It is time to move away from the current structure that resembles building a Cadillac from parts of models stretching from 1949 to 1973, as in the Johnny Cash song "One Piece at A Time.”

Figure 1: How we build our budget

Source: Abernathyautoparts, CC BY-SA 2.5

It is not unrealistic to envisage a more strategic approach. One option is to return to the approach in the 1970s, when all development funding was put into one of just five or six functional accounts, and provide some flexibility in moving funds between accounts.

Policymakers who believe that America is an exceptional or indispensable nation and that world problems do not get solved without American involvement need to take a hard look at whether they are providing the U.S. government with the required diplomatic and development tools. It is high time for U.S. policymakers to take a more strategic approach to the level of funding of international affairs and how the U.S. uses its foreign assistance. The inauguration of a new president and Congress in 2017 offers the opportunity to seize this challenge.

In the past decade, a remarkable shift has occurred in the development landscape. Specifically, acknowledgment of the central role of the private sector in contributing to, even driving, economic growth and global development has grown rapidly. The data on financial flows are dramatic, indicating reversal of the relative roles of official development assistance and private financial flows. This shift is also reflected in the way development is framed and discussed, never more starkly than in the Addis Abba Action Agenda and the new set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which the SDGs follow, focused on official development assistance. In contrast, while the new set of global goals does not ignore the role of official development assistance, they reorient attention to the role of the business sector (and mobilizing host country resources).

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has been in the vanguard of donors in recognizing the important role of the private sector to development, most notably via the agency’s launch in 2001 of a program targeted on public-private partnerships (PPPs) and the estimated 1,600 USAID PPPs initiated since then. This paper provides a quantitative and qualitative presentation of USAID’s public-private partnerships and business sector participation in those PPPs. The analysis offered here is based on USAID’s PPP data set covering 2001-2014 and interviews with executives of 17 U.S. corporations that have engaged in PPPs with USAID.

The genesis of this paper is the considerable discussion by USAID and the international development community about USAID’s PPPs, but the dearth of information on what these partnerships entail. USAID’s 2014 release (updated in 2015) of a data set describing nearly 1,500 USAID PPPs since 2001 offers an opportunity to analyze the nature of those PPPs.

On a conceptual level, public-private partnerships are a win-win, even a win-win-win, as they often involve three types of organizations: a public agency, a for-profit business, and a nonprofit entity. PPPs use public resources to leverage private resources and expertise to advance a public purpose. In turn, non-public sectors—both businesses and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—use their funds and expertise to leverage government resources, clout, and experience to advance their own objectives, consistent with a PPP’s overall public purpose. The data from the USAID data set confirm this conceptual mutual reinforcement of public and private goals.

The goal is to utilize USAID’s recently released data set to draw conclusions on the nature of PPPs, the level of business sector engagement, and, utilizing interviews, to describe corporate perspectives on partnership with USAID.

The arguments regarding “why” PPPs are an important instrument of development are well established. This paper presents data on the “what”: what kinds of PPPs have been implemented and in what countries, sectors, and income contexts. There are other research and publications on the “how” of partnership construction and implementation. What remains missing are hard data and analysis, beyond the anecdotal, as to whether PPPs make a difference—in short, is the trouble of forming these sometimes complex alliances worth the impact that results from them?

The goal of this paper is not to provide commentary on impact since those data are not currently available on a broad scale. Similarly, this paper does not recommend replicable models or case studies (which can be found elsewhere), though these are important and can help new entrants to join and grow the field. Rather, the goal is to utilize USAID’s recently released data set to draw conclusions on the nature of PPPs, the level of business sector engagement, and, utilizing interviews, to describe corporate perspectives on partnership with USAID.

The decision to target this research on business sector partners’ engagement in PPPs—rather than on the civil society, foundation, or public partners—is based on several factors. First, USAID’s references to its PPPs tend to focus on the business sector partners, sometimes to the exclusion of other types of partners; we want to understand the role of the partners that USAID identifies as so important to PPP composition. Second, in recent years much has been written and discussed about corporate shared value, and we want to assess the extent to which shared value plays a role in USAID’s PPPs in practice.

The paper is divided into five sections. Section I is a consolidation of the principal data and findings of the research. Section II provides an in-depth “data picture” of USAID PPPs drawn from quantitative analysis of the USAID PPP data set and is primarily descriptive of PPPs to date. Section III moves beyond description and provides analysis of PPPs and business sector alignment. It contains the results of coding certain relevant fields in the data set to mine for information on the presence of business partners, commercial interests (i.e., shared value), and business sector partner expertise in PPPs. Section IV summarizes findings from a series of interviews of corporate executives on partnering with USAID. Section V presents recommendations for USAID’s partnership-making.

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• WP94PPPReport2016Web

Brookings today releases a report USAID’s Public-Private Partnerships: A Data Picture and Review of Business Engagement, which will be the subject of a public discussion on March 8 featuring a panel of Jane Nelson (Harvard University), Ann Mei Chang (U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)), Johanna Nesseth Tuttle (Chevron Corp.), and Sarah Thorn (Wal-Mart Stores Inc.).

The report is based on USAID’s database of 1,481 public-private partnerships (PPPs) from 2001 to 2014 and a series of corporate interviews.

The value of those partnerships totals $16.5 billion, two-thirds from non-U.S. government sources – private companies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), foundations, and non-U.S. public institutions. Over 4000 organizations have served as resource partners in these PPPs.  Fifty-three percent are business entities, 32 percent are from the non-profit world, and 25 percent are public institutions. Eighty-five organizations have participated in five or more PPPs, led by Microsoft (62), Coca Cola (36), and Chevron (33).

The partnerships are relatively evenly distributed among three major regions—Africa, Latin American/Caribbean, and Asia—but 36 percent of the value of all PPPs is from partnerships that are global in reach.

In analyzing the data, the researchers found that 77 percent of PPPs included one or more business partner, and that 83 percent of these partnerships are connected to a business partner’s commercial interest (either shared value or more indirect strategic interest). In almost 80 percent of those PPPs, the business partner contributes some form of corporate expertise to the partnership.

The purpose of the March 8 panel discussion is to examine the report but also to go beyond by addressing outstanding questions like: how should the impact of public-private partnerships be identified, measured, and evaluated? Is shared value the Holy Grail linking corporate interest to public goods and achieving sustainable results? Where do public-private partnerships fit in USAID’s strategy for engaging the private sector in development, particularly in light of the emphasis on the role of business in advancing the new set of Sustainable Development Goals?

We hope you can join us for what should prove to be an engaging discussion.

Thursday, South Africa’s highest court found President Zuma guilty of violating the constitution as he refused to reimburse the large sum of money spent on improvements to his personal home. Between 2010 and 2014, the home located in the president’s rural hometown of Nkandla received improvement which cost an estimated $23 million. The improvements include a chicken coop, an amphitheater, a swimming pool, and a helipad. President Zuma has stated that the improvements were necessary to ensure his security and should consequently be paid for with taxpayers’ money. In 2014, public prosecutor Thuli Madonsela ruled that the president should repay part of the taxpayers’ money spent on the improvements of his personal home. In refusing to do so, he violated the country’s constitution “by not complying with a decision by the public protector, the national watchdog.” The court has given the National Treasury 60 days to determine the sum the president must repay. The opposition has stated that they will seek Zuma’s impeachment.

In other South African news, this week, the rand strengthen against the U.S. dollar and reached its highest value since December 8, 2015, the day before President Zuma fired former Finance Minister Nhlanla Nene. The strengthening of the rand was coupled with the strengthening of other Emerging Markets currencies. This hike follows the statement from Federal Reserve Chair Janey Yellen, reiterating the importance to raise U.S. interest rates cautiously, amid risks in the global economy. Investors—weighting prospects of higher U.S. borrowing costs—were holding off in acquiring emerging-market assets.

This week, 17 Angolan activists were sentenced to jail time for rebellion against the government of Jose Eduardo dos Santos. The sentences ranged from two years to eight and a half years. Last June, the activists were arrested during a book club meeting focusing on Gene Sharp’s book titled From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation—a book on nonviolence and resistance to repressive regimes. Monday, the activists were charged and sentenced with acts of rebellion, planning mass action of civil disobedience, and producing fake passports, among other charges. Amnesty International has accused the Angolan court of wrongfully convicting the activists and using the judicial system to “silence dissenting views.”

Later in the week, in response to the jailing of the young activists, the Portuguese branch of hacking group Anonymous claimed the shutdown of 20 government websites, including that of the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, among others. In a Facebook post claiming the attack, the group states, “The real criminals are outside, defended by the capitalist system that increasingly spreads in the minds of the weak.” The functionality of the websites has been restored.  

On Monday, March 28, the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) withdrew $472 million in aid from the government of Tanzania after the result of the last weekend’s disputed presidential election rerun in the semi-autonomous archipelago of Zanzibar was announced. Incumbent President Ali Mohamed Shein of the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi party was declared the winner with 91.4 percent of the vote. However, the rerun was boycotted by the opposition Civic United Front party over the cancellation of last October’s election by the Zanzibar Electoral Commission. The commission claimed the October poll was fraudulent, while the opposition says the allegations of fraud were fabricated to thwart a victory by their candidate.

The MCC was planning a number of power and infrastructure projects in Tanzania, but its development assistance programming is conditional upon beneficiaries meeting certain standards of good governance. The MCC’s board of directors held a vote on Monday, in which they determined that Tanzania was no longer eligible to partner with the MCC given the election outcome. Although the loss of the MCC partnership is a sizable blow to the Tanzanian government, the Tanzanian finance minister appeared optimistic that the power projects would continue despite the MCC’s decision, as he stated: “We weren’t surprised at all because we were prepared for whatever the outcome. We will implement those projects using local sources of fund and the support of from other development partners.” Meanwhile, 10 out of the country’s 14 key western donors withdrew general budget support to Tanzania over the contested election.

Spring has sprung and once again Publish What You Fund has issued its Aid Transparency Index (ATI). Once again most of the multilateral development banks (MDBs) receive high grades rated as very good. And once again I ask whether those grades are well deserved? At the heart of my question is whether aid agencies are disclosing sufficient information during the critical implementation stage of a project.

Last year we reviewed the practices of 8 aid agencies, 7 of which consistently receive the highest accolades in the ATI. What was evident from our review was the serious asymmetry of the type of aid data released to the public. A major target at Busan in 2011 when donors made commitments to aid transparency and in the establishment of the ATI has been the reporting of aid flows and the projects approved by each agency. There has been growing emphasis since then on reporting information on the results of those projects. But there has been very limited progress in the release of information during project implementation.

The importance of such information should be obvious. It is during project implementation that the various stakeholders need to monitor project progress, report on issues requiring attention, and make changes to ensure achievement of the desired results. It is insufficient to only disclose who wins a contract; consideration should be given to publishing the contracts, reporting on its execution, and disclosing amendments to the contracts. And it is not enough to simply publish the resettlement action plan for a project; how that plan is being implemented must be reported. Real time reporting is the key to being able to adapt and make changes as projects evolve.

It is very evident that the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) and the ATI have had a major positive impact on raising the level of transparency of aid agencies. Discussions with various agencies illustrate how they are keen to getting higher scores each year, carefully analyzing the indicators to guide their actions. However, with only a limited focus and weighting of reporting on project implementation in the ATI, there is no incentive to fill this important gap. 

In its 2016 report, Publish What You Fund has indicated that it will be reviewing its indicators later this year and intends to raise the bar. It would be timely to include information on project implementation in those revisions. One challenge is how to develop indicators that are similarly relevant across a wide variety of aid agencies. Implementation information is most critical for agencies that finance longer-term projects, especially infrastructure, such as the MDBs.  One option is to consider a set of indicators to better “incentivize” the relevant agencies and refer to these as ATI+.

The MDB’s, in their major disclosure reforms since 2010, adopted a principle that “deliberative” information would not be disclosed in order to foster candid and open dialogue within the organization and between the organization and the client country. As per the World Bank’s policy, “The Bank, like any institution or group, needs space to consider and debate, away from public scrutiny.” This excludes emails, notes, and other exchanges either internally or with member countries.

As a result, the project supervision reports, which managements use to monitor projects under execution and are generally published twice a year, were divided between disclosed versus undisclosed sections. The undisclosed sections would offer space for reporting on confidential project concerns including potential corruption. Our review of the disclosed reports suggests that most aid agencies’ task managers tend to take a cautious approach, placing most information in the undisclosed sections. Stakeholders outside the MDB, such as local civil society groups, then, often only see truncated information.

While the adoption of the “deliberative” principle is understandable, its application places a serious responsibility on management to ensure that this is applied with considerable restraint. The MDBs should review the application of this principle and assess the type of information released during implementation.

It is indeed time to raise the bar on transparency and to focus on the most critical information required to ensure results. This is not the moment for complacency with high grades.

A recent article in The Guardian caught my eye: “Report accuses government of increasing inequalities in developing countries by financing academies at the expense of state schools.” The report, conducted by the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, was an attack on U.K. aid money being linked to private education providers since the rapid increase in such schools may be contributing to sub-standard education. In particular, they cited the U.K. government’s investments in the Nairobi-based and for-profit Bridge International Academies.

I’ve worked on private education extensively throughout my career and do not believe there is anything wrong with private schools, but in this particular case I couldn’t agree more. But to be clear, it’s the funding strategy that’s the problem.

Private schooling is on the rise in a number of poor countries, and Pakistan—where my education research is focused—is no exception. The majority of these schools are no longer the elite institutions of yore, but low-cost alternatives fighting for survival in a highly competitive environment. These schools have mushroomed in response to increased parental demand and poor public alternatives, but also to the greater availability of teachers in the local labor market.

More importantly, research increasingly demonstrates that there is absolutely nothing wrong with private schools. There's a summary of this research available here; specific examples on India (more here) and Pakistan are also available.

Some key are takeaways from this research are:

• Private schools charge low fees (about $1 to$2 a month in Pakistan).
• The quality is almost certainly higher compared to government schools in the vicinity.
• At least in Pakistan, there is no significant segregation between public and private schools in terms of parental wealth, education, or caste.
• The most significant barrier to attendance in low-cost private schools is not cost—it’s distance. Put simply, there just aren’t enough of them around.

If there is a cheaper and better alternative to public schooling, shouldn’t we encourage children to shift and thus improve the quality of education for all?

Perhaps. But when the rubber from these well-intentioned aid policies hits the road of rural Pakistan, Kenya, or Ethiopia, a very different sort of model emerges. Instead of supporting private schooling, donors end up supporting private schools (or at best private school chains), which is an entirely different action with little theoretical backing. In fact, economic theory screams that governments and donors should almost never do that.

Donors say the problem is that the low-cost private school market is fragmented with no central authority that can be “contracted with.” No one has a good model on how to work with a competitive schooling sector with multiple small players—ironically, the precise market structure that, according to economics, leads to efficiency.

In reality, I suspect the problem goes deeper. Most low-cost private school owners don’t do well at donor conferences. They don’t know how to tell compelling human-interest stories about the good they do. But what they are excellent at is using local resources to ensure that their schools meet the expectations of demanding parents.

The first is a problem of accountability. Public schools are accountable, through a democratic system, to citizens of the country. Private schools are accountable to the parents. And donor-funded private school chains are account to the donors. While both citizen-led accountability and direct accountability to parents have problems, they are grounded in centuries of experience. It’s unlikely that donors in a foreign land, some of whom can’t visit the schools they fund for security reasons, can do better than either citizens or parents.

The second is a problem of market structure. When one private school or private school chain receives preferential treatment and funding, without allowing other private schools to apply for the same funds, the donor is picking winners (remember Solyndra?). The need for private schools as an alternative to government schools is insufficient justification for donors to put their thumbs on the scale and tilt the balance of power towards a pre-identified entity.

In a recent experiment, my colleagues and I gathered direct proof for this assertion. We gave untied grants to low-cost private schools with a twist. In certain villages, we randomly selected a single private school for the grant. In others, we gave the grant to every private school in the village. Our preliminary results show that in villages where we gave the grant to a single school, the school benefitted enormously from an increase in enrollment. Where we gave the grant to multiple private schools, the enrollment increase was split among schools. But only in the villages where we gave the grant to every school did test-scores for children increase.

What happened? When a single private school receives the grant, knowing that the other schools cannot react due to a lack of funds, they engage in “customer poaching” to increase their profits at the expense of others. Some have argued that Uber’s recent fundraising is precisely such an effort to starve competitors of funding.

When you equally support all private schools, customer poaching does not work, and the only way to increase profits and generate returns is to increase the size of the market, either through higher overall enrollments or through new quality offerings.

The first strategy supports pre-identified private schools and concentrates market power. The second, by providing opportunities for all private schools, improves education for children.

Sure, some private school chains and schools are making positive impact and deserve the support they can get. But funding such schools creates the wrong institutional structures and are more likely to lead to disasters than successes (Greg Mortensen and 3 cups of tea, anyone?).

In general, the Government’s responsibility towards the education of children is two-fold:

• Alleviate the market constraints that hold back private schooling without favoring one school over the other—letting parents decide who succeeds and who does not.
• Support and improve public schools to provide an alternative because there will always be children who cannot enroll in private schools, either because they are too expensive or because they are too far away, or because they don’t offer the instruction “basket” that some parents want.

In short, foreign aid should play no part in supporting private schools rather than private schooling.

In the course of two days last week, the U.S. Congress passed two foreign aid bills.

What’s more, in the course of five months, Congress has passed three foreign aid bills!

All three bills passed with strong bipartisan leadership and support.

Equally important, all three bills reflect a new era of a more modernized approach to assistance.

The bills avoid many of the problems of past aid legislation, including micromanagement, earmarks, and requirement of frequent reports that are seldom read by members of Congress or their staffs. Each bill was developed in cooperation with the Obama administration and reflects its policies and civil society priorities. And they emphasize strategic approaches, results, use of data, monitoring and evaluation, and learning.

The Foreign Assistance Accountability and Transparency Act of 2016, sponsored by Republicans Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Ted Poe and Democrats Sen. Ben Cardin and Rep. Gerry Connolly, is grounded in important principles of foreign aid reform. It enacts into law key policies advocated by the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network and supported by the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition and many other international development and foreign policy organizations. Robust evaluation and aid transparency, first elevated as elements of the Millennium Challenge Corporation by the Bush administration and later adopted by the Obama administration across all foreign affairs agencies, are institutionalized by the bill. The bill calls for two reports 18 months after enactment, not annual, year-after-year reports, which had been the normal practice and usually resulted in shelves of unread reports. One report will be from the president outlining the monitoring and evaluation guidelines called for in the report, and the other report will be from the Government Accountability Office assessing those guidelines.

This type of independent, objective evaluation is essential to improving assistance; it assesses what we have tried and improves our understanding of what does and does not work. When aggregated across multiple evaluations of similar programs, it produces new knowledge and learning.

Transparency, another important element of aid reform, brings multiple benefits. It provides all stakeholders, including Congress, U.S. taxpayers, intended beneficiaries, government officials, and civil societies in recipient countries, with data and information that allows them to understand where and how assistance is used. It provides data that is critical to making informed decisions. And it keeps agencies and programs focused on their mission and objectives by permitting public scrutiny and accountability.

The Global Food Security Act of 2016, sponsored by Republicans Sen. Johnny Isakson and Rep. Chris Smith and Democrats Sen. Bob Casey and Rep. Betty McCollum, writes into law the administration’s initiative Feed the Future. The core of the bill is a mandate of the president to coordinate a comprehensive U.S. global food security strategy—such a forward-looking strategy will help gain stakeholder buy-in and ultimately provide more consistent, rationale policies and programs. Also included are guidelines that we know from experience produce good development—measurable goals and performance metrics, solid monitoring and evaluation, clear criteria for selecting targets, alignment with local policies and priorities, multi-sectoral approaches, building local capacity and resilience, and partnership with the private sector. The bill authorizes funding for food security but does not earmark it—meaning the funds are authorized but are not required to be expended. And the bill calls for only a single report to Congress a year after the issuance of the strategy.

The third bill, the Electrify Africa Act of 2015, sponsored by Republicans Sen. Bob Corker and Rep. Ed Royce and Democrats Sen. Ben Cardin and Rep. Elliot Engel, is centered on a comprehensive energy strategy for Africa. Similarly, the legislation calls for a strategy that is flexible and responsive to local communities and for policies that promote transparent and accountable governance, local consultation, and monitoring and evaluation. The bill requires two reports, the first within six months of enactment to transmit the strategy and the second three years after enactment to report on implementation. The bill directs U.S. government agencies to use accountable and metric-based targets to measure effectiveness of assistance and to leverage private and multilateral finance.

For those who say that Congress does not support foreign assistance, let’s hope this legislative triple-hat puts that to rest. Similarly, for those who say the Congress does not understand a more effective approach to development, maybe it’s time to become a believer.