reflects the fact that average incomes have historically varied a great deal, increasing many times over in the span of decades, whereas inequality tends to be more stable."

From: assets.bii.co.uk/wp-content/u...

"Bergstrom (2022) finds that, since 2000, 90 per cent of the historical variation in extreme poverty across 135 countries can be explained by changes in national income per person (average income). The fact that variation in growth explains almost all of the historical variation in poverty ...

“There is a new slogan in China among the private sector firms which is “to go out, if not they are going to die” (...)

“Now there is a new paradigm: “go out together”” (…) Chinese government does not want to see this happening too fast but there is no choice if the tariffs continue to be 50% plus”

“Manufacturing firms are gradually leaving China. It’s hard to leave China because the production networks are so dense and developed in China so leaving" (...)

“very strong urge for Chinese companies to invest abroad”.

Heiwai Tang (Hong Kong University) at ABCDE Conference: (www.youtube.com/live/TyppQJi...)

“We live in a world which I would call the “flying geese” paradigm 2.0” (see here: www.hkubs.hku.hk/research/tho...)

(11/11) “So we move from farmers that were sharecroppers to farmers that are shareholders with ownership in an entity, which is a corporation doing business in agriculture, which enormously increases output and incomes for all of these small farmers without changing property rights.”

(10/11) Mark on an *intermediate solution*: “collective farming”: “ What goes on is that firms come in and contract with a whole set of farmers owning adjacent land to essentially take over the management of farms." Larger entity ->allows for mechanization and solves problem of absent labour markets

(9/11) Mark: As to the “fundamental solution to the problem of [small scale] agriculture”: “What is very important for the productivity of agriculture, the production of food in the world is that there be industrialization in these countries." (so people will leave agriculture for other sectors)

(8/11) "It's clearly true that putting resources into small scale farming will slow down departure of people from small scale farming but I think the benefits of alleviating poverty in the medium term make that a cost worth taking.”

(7/11) "Technological change, market improvement, infrastructure development that will make people better off in the medium run as we move through the process of transformation."

(6/11) Chris Udry: “Here I will disagree some with Mark: Moving to large scale farming and mechanization is what we need in the long-run. In the short run I think there are many inefficiencies in agriculture in Africa that can be alleviated short of this agglomeration. "

(5/11) “A program that is constantly providing resources to small farmers is subsidizing it... it is cementing the world to be small agriculture. It’s a problem that we have literally billions of dollars of money that goes to encourage through subsidization small farming. It’s a policy problem.”

(4/11) all of whom know you will gain in productivity so there is a hold-up problem. (…) So the barriers are natural, it’s a trap to be small size that improving land rights are not going to solve." (...)

(3/11) Mark: “So why don’t farms get bigger? (…) Marginal increase in scale will reduce productivity. It increases scale, so you need more labour, but because transaction costs are high, you can’t do it. To go from 2 acres to over 12 acres you need contractual relationships with 6 farmers

(2/11) Size difference is “fundamental reason for yield gap":
(1) Mechanization – “can’t do it on tiny farms. Economies of scale from mechanization are enormous”.
(2) Slack: Labour & land markets don’t work well. For small farms, cost of hiring labour is high relative to scale of operation -> slack

(1/11) Fascinating discussion on small farms in lower-income countries. voxdev.org/topic/agricu...

Mark Rosenzweig: “Yield differences [between rich and poor countries] are enormous. The “first order salient difference” in agriculture in low-income vs other countries is the size of farms. (…)

"In terms of dynamic consequences, the rise of China actually pulled the majority of countries down, with particularly large losses for a number of African countries who are pushed away from their most-complex sectors, which China exports, and into their least-complex sectors, which China imports"

A recurrent theme of this earlier literature on the dynamic effects of trade … is that there are good sectors, with opportunities for learning, and bad sectors, without them. For countries with a static comparative advantage in the former sectors, free trade therefore slows down productivity growth

“(…) countries sit at different rungs of a ladder, each associated with a different set of economic activities a country can perform. As countries develop, they become more capable, move up the ladder, and start to produce and export more complex goods."

"Globalization and the Ladder of Development:
Pushed to the Top or Held at the Bottom?" (Atken et al. 2024) economics.mit.edu/sites/defaul...

BLUF: rise of China pulled majority of countries down, with particularly large losses for a number of African countries

Eight things policymakers should know about foreign direct investment Policymakers in developing countries often clash over the impact of foreign direct investment, but what does the existing literature tell us?

(iv) Investment promotion works -> important tool for policymakers
voxdev.org/topic/firms/...

(iii) continued: The presence of foreign affiliates boosts the exports of local producers through knowledge spillovers about export markets. (…) Often it is just a handful of firms, most frequently foreign multinationals, that fundamentally restructure sectorial export patterns.

Beata Javorcik (EBRD Chief Economist) on FDI:

(i) Multinational firms are producers of knowledge
(ii) They transfer knowledge to their overseas operations
(iii) FDI inflows facilitate integration into global value chains and improve exports ...

The End of Development Cooperation? Remarks prepared for the opening address of the 2025 Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics, “Development in the Age of Populism.”

"As an aside, I do question whether our current faith in country platforms will turn out to be exaggerated in a world of increased fragmentation."
www.cgdev.org/publication/...

You could also imagine IBRD-type windows taking on a bit more risk by expanding their lending in the less creditworthy...blend countries (...)

If an IDA country cannot sustain a 40-year loan at near-zero interest rates , what does that say about our confidence in underwriting that country’s development strategy? (...)"

"Going forward MDBs will need to think creatively about how to sustain their lending volumes with less budgetary funding" "(...) I do question whether MDBs need to rely as often on making grants rather than concessional loans...

where concessional loans would be just as effective. That should no longer be acceptable." (...)
"I am a committed believer in the genius of the MDB financial model"
(...) MDBs are already - and have the potential to become even more - self financing"

Masood Ahmed (former CGD President) at ABCDE Conference:

"the crunch in development funding is here to stay" (...)
Yet, *we continue to deploy grants in suboptimal ways*. Too many grant-based development programs use a dollar-in-dollar-out model ...

Five Ideas for the Future of Global Health Financing: The Road Not Yet Taken Amidst stagnating levels of development assistance for health, questions about the future of vertical programs such as PEPFAR, lackluster performance on the Sustainable Development Goal for health, an...

"The bells and whistles of disease areas funded by donors can be additional elements hung on this Christmas tree of UHC."
www.cgdev.org/blog/five-id...