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leecrawfurd.bsky.social
Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Global Development https://www.cgdev.org/expert/lee-crawfurd
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Rubio terminated 5800 USAID contracts – more than 90% of its foreign aid programs – in defiance of the courts. Here’s a list of just some of the lifesaving awards that were terminated. Nearly all were Congressionally mandated. They’ve saved millions of lives. 🧵

Dean Karlan's job at USAID was LITERALLY to improve the efficiency of its programs. DOGE is clearly not actually after cutting fraud and waste. And its actions will clearly make the US weaker while also making the world a worse place. www.npr.org/sections/goa...

After cuts announced yesterday, UK bilateral aid program likely to end up about the same size as Switzerland's. Not sure how this fits with manifesto pledge: "Labour will turn the page to rebuild Britain’s reputation on international development" www.cgdev.org/blog/breakin...

I've emailed my MP about the new cuts to UK foreign aid. There's a draft email template if you want to here: forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5oovob...

1/8 This is very much the wrong approach www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

The UK is strapped for cash. But Keir Starmer is going to massively increase military spending to "defend" his country from a phantom menace. How's he going to pay for it? By slashing aid. Is this really a Labour government? www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Just break the fiscal rules! "The international situation has changed because of Trump" is a completely understandable argument!

Shots fired: "the minority of researchers who used the R programming language were more likely to report outlier estimates than researchers who used Stata."

After a long wait, the working paper for the Many-Economists Project: The Sources of Researcher Variation in Economics. We had 146 teams perform the same research three times, each time with less freedom. What source of freedom leads to different choices and results? papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Hard agree: Germany's welcome of a million Syrian refugees "will go down in history as one of the better things Germany has done" marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevo...

There should be money for both development cooperation and defence. They complement each other. Defence is now, development cooperation and relations is future proofing

Of course Britain has to defend itself, but I'm dismayed and ashamed that a Labour government would choose to do so at the expense of the poorest people on the planet

Keir Starmer on 2021 aid cuts:

In a new blog, @leecrawfurd.bsky.social argues that the US should continue to invest aid in global education, citing low costs, high ROI, and lifetime benefits. Read on ⬇

"Fascism always fails. It is destructive and it is awful and not everyone lives to see the other side, but it always, always fails. It takes work. It takes fighting back. ... it feels impossible that we will win. But we will."

PEPFAR saves lives. pepfar.impactcounter.com

I spoke to @kaamilahmed.bsky.social for the Guardian about the impacts of USAID funding freeze - job losses may mean a permanent loss of expertise as experienced professionals are forced to leave the sector www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

Reasons for hope: most autocratization episodes are followed by U-turns with restored or strengthened democracy www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

FT editorial board: 'Given the time it takes to train new construction workers, there’s a risk that... projects fail to take off due to the lack of manpower. That might require the government to make tweaks to the immigration system to make it simpler and cheaper to recruit talent from abroad.'

We've begun a Starter Pack for development and international cooperation! This will be an ongoing project as new people join BlueSky. Who are we missing?

"These gains, small & spread out, aren’t going to make a ton of headlines. But they are still a great use of money, and make plenty of sense on a dollar-for-dollar basis."📝 @leecrawfurd.bsky.social explains why the US should continue to invest in global education ⬇ www.cgdev.org/blog/why-us-...

In some countries, more than one in three mothers have lost a child younger than five

"increased capital spending in schools significantly improves test scores and is efficient on average" academic.oup.com/qje/advance-...

Great interview with @aspaglayan.bsky.social on her book Raised to Obey www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMqb...

🆕 Subsidising secondary education has huge benefits Today on VoxDev, Esther Duflo (MIT), Pascaline Dupas (Princeton University), Michael Kremer (University of Chicago), Elizabeth Spelke (Harvard University) & Mark Walsh (GiveWell) outline their research on Ghana: voxdev.org/topic/educat...

Matt is often right but I think he's wrong to say US aid for girl's education is not valuable, here's why www.cgdev.org/blog/why-us-...

The Cold War and role of external assistance/technology transfer/security from the US in a context of fear of communism is a bit neglected in standard institutional stories (eg the ‘developmental state) of the East Asian miracle

If you've ever used the Polity data, read this from Monty Marshall. tl;dr Polity is coding recent US events as an executive self-coup and an adverse regime change.

Striking set of graphs from @global-developments.org - for years South Korea & Taiwan received more US aid than all of Africa combined www.global-developments.org/p/a-world-wi...

Going to shock you by saying, I agree! It should be easier for think tanks to get research council funding

Britain's "vast demographic experiment" here

Bluesky is catching up with twitter on total referrals to research