Aid & Development

The Trump Administration is gearing up to propose ‘dramatic reductions’ in foreign aid expenditure. Alex Thier at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) argues that these proposals would make America weaker.The EU and the UK have begun rolling out an $85 million Euro project of cash transfers

The acid test of Australia’s new foreign policy will be longevity. As a nation, can we set an approach that endures? 'A dynamism about it that can carry forward over about 10 years', is how Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, described the key ingredient for the new foreign policy white paper.  

The Australasian Aid Conference took place in Canberra last week, with more than 350 participants and 100 speakers in attendance. You can watch a livestream of the plenary sessions from the two days, including Julie Bishop’s opening address.Roby Alders has won the inaugural Mitchell Humanitarian

The NY Times has run a profile of Jin Liquin, the inaugural head of the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.A coalition of governments, philanthropists and business have announced $460 million of funding for an initiative that will focus on creating vaccines for infectious diseases that afflict

World Bank member countries have pledged $75 billion in lending to the world’s poorest countries over the next three years. This amount is 50% more than what was committed over the last three years. The increase will be financed through the Bank issuing debt to capital markets, the first time

William Easterly writes for the New York Review of Books about why it is time for the war on poverty to separate itself from the war on terror (ungated version here.) Facebook has released high-resolution population maps for Ghana, Haiti, Malawi, South Africa, and Sri Lanka for their internet

COP 22 is underway in Marrakech. Carbon Brief provides a primer for what the latest UN Climate Change Conference expects to achieve.Despite concerns that it might back out, Australia announced last week at the summit that it will ratify the Paris climate agreement.Smoking cigarettes still causes

The Economist discusses why the world should be both encouraged and embarrassed by the latest global poverty figures. It highlights that, were it somehow possible to transfer the right amount of money into the right hands without cost, just $159 billion a year would be needed to end

The Clinton Foundation has been under the microscope over the last few months. Dylan Matthews takes a look at its record and details how it has undoubtedly had an impact in saving millions of live through playing a critical role in pushing down the cost of HIV/AIDS drugs in developing

The Indian Government is proposing a basic income guarantee in India that it estimates would cost 0.3% of GDP. Maitreesh Ghatak argues that it would cost up to 11% of GDP, which is particularly worrying in a country where 'only 1% of Indians actually pay income tax, while a mere 2.3% file tax

With the first Turnbull Government budget this week, it is important to take stock of the impact the Coalition government has had to date on Australia's aid program.  Perhaps the largest foreign policy legacy of the Abbott Government has been the impact it had upon Australian aid.

Alastair Davis is an intern in the Lowy Institute Melanesia Program. Political tension relating to payments to ex-combatants in the Solomon Islands has continued. PM Sogavare has responded forcefully to critics of his contribution towards peace in the Solomons. Vanuatu Youth Against Corruption

The world’s first dengue fever vaccine, which in clinical trials has prevented up to 93% of severe dengue cases in people aged 6-45, is about to be released in Mexico, the Philippines and Brazil. Dengue fever causes about 25,000 deaths around the world annually. The Economist has a piece

To mark International Migrants’ Day on December 18 the World Bank released its Migration and Remittances Factbook for 2016 (summary available here). It’s packed full of statistics, and includes one of my favourite graphs exhibiting the importance of remittances as a source of development

MIT and Harvard economists have debunked the claim that aid funded welfare programs in developing countries make people lazy. Vox has a good summary. Devpolicy has posted the second in a two part series looking at Australian development NGO expenditure, which I have co-authored. In this post we

Australia is terrible at influencing its aid recipients, according to a massive survey conducted by AidData. Dramatic aid cuts have probably not helped. Aid investments in governance have been a flagship of Australia’s in the 21st century. Sina Odugbemi from the World Bank asks if the

The Vanuatu corruption and pardon scandal continues, with 11 MPs released on bail after being arrested for conspiring to defeat the course of justice. Today, Vanuatu's Supreme Court Justice is set to rule on the constitutionality of Speaker Marcellino Pipite's decision to pardon himself and the 13

The Asia Pacific is the most dynamic digital landscape in the world, home to the fastest adopters of new technologies and the largest concentration of mobile and social media users. An escalation in online activism, changing cyber dynamics, developments in digital diplomacy and the exploitation of

In 2010 former Lowy Institute research fellow Fergus Hanson published a forward-looking policy brief urging Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) to catch up to the rest of the world, join the 21st century and get online. Social media, he argued, is only one aspect of digital

Following a community outcry over the plight of asylum seekers in Europe, the Australian Government has announced that it will resettle 12,000 Syrian and Iraqi refugees. This will be in addition to the annual refugee and humanitarian intake of 13,750. Prime Minister Tony Abbott has described the

By Jenny Hayward-Jones, Director of the Lowy Institute's Melanesia Program, and Jonathan Pryke, Research Fellow. While it's managing its response to serious economic challenges brought about by a budget deficit and drought, Papua New Guinea is preparing to host the Pacific Islands Forum leaders

The establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) reached another milestone on Monday when 50 of the 57 founding members signed the AIIB's Articles of Agreement. Seven countries are still sorting out domestic requirements before signing. China's Finance Minister Jiwei Lou and