December, 2007

greenhouse.gif

The latest installment of the

In the spirit of the holiday season, here is a resource that can help you decide to which organizations you should donate: it’s called GiveWell, an

While talk of energy these days often focuses on the surging demand for oil in places like China and India, an

Beginning this week and over the next few months, many airline carriers in the U.S.

Amidst the current climate change negotiat

This morning, the CSIS Hills Program on Governance hosted an event titled “The Impact of U.S. Foreign Assistance on Democracy Building, 1990-2004.” By way of background, USAID commissioned a team of researchers (from the University of Pittsburgh and Vanderbilt University) to evaluate the impact of USAID’s democracy and governance (DG) assistance programs in countries across the world. In the first phase of the project, the research team found, to the surprise of many, that USAID democracy assistance had a positive effect on countries’ democratic trajectories over time ($10 million of DG assistance translated into a 0.25-point increase in a country’s Freedom House score). In the second phase, which was the focus of this morning’s event, the team sought to confirm the findings of the first phase as well as explore related questions about the effectiveness of aid. Once again, the researchers found a positive correlation between DG assistance and democracy building (this time, $10 million of DG assistance translated into a 0.29-point increase in Freedom House score). In addition, they found that DG aid had the greatest impact in countries with low levels of human development, more ethnic fractionalization, and weak states.