 Featured News The Center for International Development has been ranked the 2nd best international development think tank in the world, according to the 2013 Global Go To Think Tanks Index released last week. CID moved from the 4th best international development think tank in 2012 to #2 behind Brookings Institution. CID also ranked 14th among university-affiliated think tanks and 25th on the list of all think tanks in the United States. The annual report - generated by the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program at the University of Pennsylvania - is the result of an international survey of more than 2,000 scholars, donors, policy makers, and journalists. Read more >>
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 Featured Publication Income per capita in Uganda has doubled in the last 20 years. This remarkable performance has been buoyed by significant aid flows and large external imbalances. But Uganda's economic growth has been concentrated in non-tradable activities leading to growing external imbalances and a growing gap between rural and urban incomes. Uganda also faces other challenges: low urbanization rate, rapid rural population growth and high dependency ratios. Future growth will depend on achieving sufficient export dynamism. New research by Ricardo Hausmann, Brad Cunningham, John Matovu, Rosie Osire and Kelly Wyett lays out a diversification strategy for sustainable growth in Uganda. They draw on a new line of research that demonstrates how development seldom implies producing more of the same. Instead, as countries grown, they tend to move into new industries, while increasing productivity in existing sectors. Read more >>
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 Featured PublicationPrevious research has identified a negative correlation between religious practices and economic growth, but Filipe Campante and David Yanagizawa-Drott present what may be the first estimate of a causal effect of a religious practice on economic growth and subjective well-being. They discovered longer Ramadan fasting has a negative effect on output growth in Muslim countries, and it increases subjective well-being among Muslims. These results cannot be primarily explained by a direct reduction in labor productivity due to fasting. Instead, the evidence indicates that Ramadan affects Muslims' relative preferences regarding work and religiosity, suggesting that the mechanism operates at least partly by changing beliefs and values that influence labor supply and occupational choices beyond the month of Ramadan itself. Together, the results indicate that religious practices can affect labor supply choices in ways that have negative implications for economic performance, but that nevertheless increase subjective well-being among followers. Read more >>
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 Featured PublicationWhy do development researchers debate claims about 'causality' and 'impact' with energy and precision, yet fail to do the same when examining concerns on how to 'replicate' and 'scale up' interventions? Inferring external validity to empirical results - i.e., generalizing findings from one group, place, or implementation modality to another - is a highly fraught exercise, because a project's impact is a function not only of its design, but its implementation and context. This research paper by Michael Woolcock argues for deploying case studies to better identify the conditions under which diverse outcomes are observed, focusing on the salience of contextual idiosyncrasies, implementation capabilities and trajectories of change. Read more >>
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