Lee Crawfurd

📆Oct. 15: Join CGD & the University of Chicago for a #AnnualMeetings event on lessons from research-policy collaborations that improved millions of lives.

Ft: @rglenner.bsky.social Michael Kremer, Muhamad Chatib Basri, Rema Hanna, Sasha Gallant, & Amanda Glassman.

RSVP:
https://bit.ly/4gUdUzO

There is a more pressing issue. Ministers must ensure that the vast numbers of immigrants who arrived in the so-called Boriswave of 2020-21 are not automatically absorbed into the permanent population. They are about to cross the the five-year threshold into ILR, yet Labour continues to dither. Ms Mahmood must freeze the status of this huge cohort while a new residency regime is finalised. A million or more extra permanent residents in these islands, let in on the nod, is simply unacceptable. Finally, the home secretary must acquaint herself, and the public, with an accurate estimate of the actual number of foreign nationals living here, what taxes they pay and what services they consume. Without hard data, all the political parties are fumbling around in the dark.

The Times finds it "unacceptable" that people who came here legally in 2021 and have been living and working here since should allowed to stay.

The sad decline of a once great newspaper into ignorant xenophobia and casual racism

archive.ph/TFZY9

Documentary: No, I'm Not the Mother Sana travels from Germany to Canada to donate her eggs to a gay couple - an act of solidarity illegal in her home country.

It's crazy that egg donation is illegal in Germany www.kickstarter.com/projects/163...

Open Knowledge Repository Showing items related by metadata.

"75% of children aged 2 to 4 worldwide are regularly subjected to violent discipline across the globe." openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/pub...

Não sou especialista na situação específica do Brasil, mas, em geral, há muitas outras fontes além dessas, como a reciclagem de baterias de chumbo-ácido e esmaltes de chumbo em cerâmica tradicional. www.pureearth.org/our-projects...

New estimates of the global cost of lead exposure due to reduced IQ range from $780 billion to $4.9 trillion

www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Catholic Schools in the Congo Ban Pregnant Girls Almost everywhere, girls who get pregnant in school are allowed to finish their education. Only five countries still have explicit bans or restrictions: Afghanistan, Equatorial Guinea, Iran, Kuwait, a...

Despite evidence that letting pregnant girls stay in school doesn’t raise teen pregnancy rates, Catholic schools in the Congo have imposed a ban.

@daveevansphd.bsky.social & @leecrawfurd.bsky.social warn of the costs: worse employment, wellbeing & more. Read on:
https://bit.ly/3Kq77lm

This is inexcusable incompetence

Shabana Mahmood to demand migrants earn right to settled status New tests will include learning English to a high standard, paying National Insurance and not claiming benefits.

imagine being a consultant doctor here and having to go out litter picking to be given your citizenship lol

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Mahmood demands migrants earn right to settlement in UK New tests will include learning English to a high standard, paying National Insurance and not claiming benefits.

Migrants already "earn the right to settlement" through extortionate visa costs, which can run into tens of thousands of pounds. They prop up key services, including through the Immigration Health Surcharge.

Pushing the hostile environment on steroids helps no-one.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Finance for International Development (FID): A New Measure to Compare Traditional and Emerging Provider Countries’ Official Development Finance Efforts, and Some Provisional Results In this working paper we present a new indicator—Finance for International Development (FID)—that attempts to fill this gap by measuring in a comparable way the flows of official, cross-border concess...

Other approaches include the OECD's "Country Programmable Aid" & @cgdev.org 's "Finance for International Development"

www.cgdev.org/publication/...

Another call for better aid reporting. Axel Dreher says we should distinguish & report separately on:

1. Humanitarian aid
2. Global public goods
3. Development aid

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Promising development | Fabian Society Fabian Society

Great to see that the UK Development Minister is reading @cgdev.org NRF @kopalo.bsky.social & Stefan Dercon fabians.org.uk/publication/...

Lower Than Cowards The surrender of America’s elites

In which @adamserwer.bsky.social makes a useful distinction between "chickenshit" and "cowardice." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Why the Joseph Rowntree Foundation needs to address its historic links to slavery This piece is maybe a little too parochial for the CGD blog where most of my writing goes, and is gated on the Yorkshire Post, so re-posting here for all those of you both interested in historical lin...

The York park my kids play in was built with profits from Rowntree chocolate, that came in part from slave labour. @jrf-uk.bsky.social today works on poverty in the UK. It should do more to address the legacy of slavery in Africa from which it benefitted.

leecrawfurd.substack.com/p/why-the-jo...

Catholic Schools in the Congo Ban Pregnant Girls Almost everywhere, girls who get pregnant in school are allowed to finish their education. Only five countries still have explicit bans or restrictions: Afghanistan, Equatorial Guinea, Iran, Kuwait, a...

Please Pope Leo: speak to this foolish meanness. Sometimes it's embarrassing (and maddening) to be even a "fallen-away" Catholic: www.cgdev.org/blog/catholi...

Catholic schools in the Congo ban pregnant girls despite evidence that pregnancy rates don't rise when those bans are lifted. www.cgdev.org/blog/catholi... by @leecrawfurd.bsky.social and me

"The Big Returns to Early Investments in Foundational Literacy and Numeracy"

Join us in DC (or online) Oct 17 2025 to discuss the latest evidence

with Jishnu Das, Jo Bourne, Jennifer Swift-Morgan, @daveevansphd.bsky.social

www.cgdev.org/event/big-re...

Health Taxes Are a Win-Win Gordon Brown shows how levies on tobacco, alcohol, and sugary beverages could finance health spending and reduce disease.

Gordon Brown is right - health taxes are a great way to finance UHC reforms www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/w...

New US curb on high-skill immigrant workers ignores evidence of its likely harms President Donald Trump on Friday ordered an unprecedented new restriction on lawful immigration to the US by high-skill workers. Starting Sunday, new applications for H-1B visas required payment of an...

Every time I talk with @mclem.org about the economics of immigration, I come away a whole lot smarter.

You can enjoy the same experience: He's written a fantastic primer on what the data reveals about the effect of slashing H-1B visas.

It's a banger. Read it.
www.piie.com/blogs/realti...

For Expertise to Matter, Nonpartisan Institutions Need New Communications Strategies To avoid irrelevance when they are needed most, experts and nonpartisan analysts must rethink not just their channels of communication but also their theory of influence.

There are important changes going on in our media environment that policy wonks need to get to grips with but also OMG

"Senior officials should be trained for “get ready with me” videos"

carnegieendowment.org/research/202... ht: @timhirschelburns.bsky.social

Over the last century, many democracies have started down the road to autocracy.

Some managed to turn around. What did these 'U-turns' have in common?

Political economist @marinanord.bsky.social & colleagues' conclusions are clear and succinct.

Full research summary: www.v-dem.net/media/public...

Striking difference in trust in the World Bank & IMF between Africa & Asia (high trust) and the rest of the world (low trust)

www.rockefellerfoundation.org/reports/dema...

‘Moonshot’ education finance facility aims to turn $1 into $7 in LMICs The International Finance Facility for Education is finally up and running — and it’s “a smart aid approach,” according to its first CEO, Karthik Krishnan.

I'm optimistic about the long-awaited launch of IFFEd. It's hard to beat the returns on investing in children, so cheaper loans for middle-income countries to spend more now is probably a good bet

www.devex.com/news/moonsho...

Foreign Policy has a new issue on "The End of Development."

Lots of pieces worth reading - I'll put my thoughts in this thread as I read through.

(Re the title, worth noting that development has always been about more than ODA + SDGs. That broader development is far from dead)

Seems a sensible compromise to have a stated intention but allow for some switching after a year? I had lots of friends who did a year, changed their mind, and then started again from scratch.

Should undergraduate students pick their specialisation from Y1 (like the UK) or Y3 (like the US)?

South Korea just moved to an earlier specialisation (like the UK), which reduced student wages because they were less able to adjust to a changing job market

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Many interventions “work” in small trials but fail at scale

Also, EdTech often promises much, but delivers little

In a new paper (bit.ly/3JKLgVn)
@karthik-econ.bsky.social
& I show how personalized adaptive learning (PAL) software can sharply improve learning outcomes at scale🧵1/16

It’s official - “Nigel Farage is right, don’t vote for him” is a demonstrably awful strategy for Labour. Boosts salience of immigration, costs votes on the left, doesn’t persuade any voters on right (why would they accept a crap knock-off when they can have the original?)

look, it might not have worked with the public, but at least it was the wrong thing to do morally