ZHENGZHOU, China — A vast, boxy customs center acts as a busy island of commerce deep in central China. Government officers, in sharply pressed uniforms, race around a maze of wooden pallets piled high with boxes — counting, weighing, scanning and approving shipments. Unmarked trucks stretch for more than a mile awaiting the next load […]

Can a whole global development community be wrong? Can it be that it’s been wrong since the beginning? That the glittering palaces dedicated to fighting poverty — the World Bank, the United Nations, the Gates and Rockefeller foundations, not to mention the aid agencies, think tanks, and well-meaning initiatives by policy experts and Hollywood stars […]

It sounds kind of crazy to say that foreign aid often hurts, rather than helps, poor people in poor countries. Yet that is what Angus Deaton, the newestwinner of the Nobel Prize in economics, has argued. Deaton, an economist at Princeton University who studied poverty in India and South Africa and spent decades working at […]

Attention to global health by governments, policymakers, media, business leaders, and other institutions has increased markedly in recent decades. Since 2000, donor funding to address health challenges in low- and middle-income countries has grown substantially, new institutions and global goals have been established, and a burgeoning community of stakeholders has emerged around global health. The […]