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The White House and the World: A Global Development Agenda for the Next U.S. President (Paperback)

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Contents

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi

Introduction

Righting the Three-Legged Stool: Why Global
Development Matters for Americans and
What the Next President Should Do about It
Nancy Birdsall 1

Harnessing U.S. Technology and Business

1 Healthy Foreign Policy: Bringing Coherence
to the Global Health Agenda
Ruth Levine 43

2 Global Warming: An Opportunity for Greatness
David Wheeler 63

3 Power and Roads for Africa: What the United
States Can Do
Vijaya Ramachandran 91

4 Foreign Direct Investment and Development
Theodore Moran 121

5 Getting the Focus Right: U.S. Leadership in the Fight against
Global Corruption
Dennis de Tray and Th eodore Moran 141

6 Integration in the Americas: One Idea for Plan B
Nancy Lee 171

Better Trade and Migration Policies

7 U.S. Trade Policy and Global Development
Kimberly Ann Elliott 185

8 Tripping over Health: U.S. Policy on Patents and Drug Access
in Developing Countries
Carsten Fink and Kimberly Ann Elliott 215

9 Don't Close the Golden Door: Making Immigration Policy
Work for Development
Michael Clemens and Sami Bazzi 241

Aid and Security

10 Modernizing U.S. Foreign Assistance for the
Twenty-first Century
Sheila Herrling and Steve Radelet 273

11 Opportunities for Presidential Leadership on AIDS:
From an "Emergency Plan" to a Sustainable Policy
Mead Over 299

12 U.S. Policy toward Fragile States: An Integrated Approach
to Security and Development
Stewart Patrick 327

13 Aid for Education: More Bang for the Buck
Kate Vyborny and Nancy Birdsall 355

Preface

The mission of the Center for Global Development is and has always been to analyze issues and develop policy frameworks that encourage the world's richest countries to act in ways that contribute to the reduction of global poverty and inequality. This is a complex, subtle, and nuanced undertaking. Nonetheless, in the last six years, the Center has made great progress in advancing this core mission. I am extremely proud of the varied and extensive enquiries it has pursued, which aim to improve the lives of the world's poorest citizens. By matching research with action, the Center goes beyond simply adding to the development literature; it conceives of and advocates for policies that directly improve the lives of poor people in developing countries.

In this collection of essays, the Center's fellows offer analyses and recommendations that explain how and why the next U.S. administration should put effective U.S. leadership for global development at the heart of its foreign policy. From global health to foreign aid, from global warming to migration and direct foreign investment, the chapters of The White House and the World lay out concrete and practical solutions to some of the most pressing international problems facing the United States.

The Center for Global Development was founded soon aft er 9/11, at a time when we in this country were anxious and even fearful about the challenges that the new century would bring. Seven years later, Americans have come to understand that the world has changed in ways that link us ever more closely to the lives of people in developing countries. The next U.S. president has not only an opportunity but a responsibility to lead the way in making development a central part of our foreign policy toolkit.

This book is an example of the Center's work at its very best. Given the Center's track record of turning analyses into action, it is my earnest hope that we will look back in a few years and find that many of the cogent and important ideas set forth in this volume have become part of the core reality of the United States in the 21st century. It is with that hope and spirit of optimism that we respectfully commend these views to the attention of the new leadership of the United States.

Edward W. Scott, Jr.
Co-Founder and Chairman
Center for Global Development

Righting the Three-Legged Stool: Why Global Development Matters for Americans and What the Next President Should Do about It
Nancy Birdsall

*****

Nancy Birdsall is the founding president of the Center for Global Development (CGD). She is particularly grateful to several colleagues at CGD for their help on this essay:Lawrence MacDonald for constant encouragement on substance and terrifi c editing; David Roodman for livening up considerably an earlier draft ; Dennis de Tray for thoughtful red-pen work; Nancy Lee, Arvind Subramanian, and the authors of the other chapters for their comments on earlier draft s; and Ruth Coffman for the initial construction of table 1. She is also grateful to CGDboard members and friends who provided extensive comments on an earlier draft , including Thomas Carothers, Jessica Einhorn, CarolLancaster, MarkLowcock, Deepa Narayan, Peter McPherson, Kenneth Prewitt, and Gustav Ranis. She off ers greatest thanks to Karelle Samuda at CGD for her expert help with data, charts, research, and overall management of the intersection of this introduction with the other chapters in this volume.

*****

The next president of the United States will have the responsibility to protect the American people and promote their prosperity. In a hyper-connected twenty-first century, developing countries and development bear fundamentally on that objective more than ever before - and far more than has been recognized in the foreign policy community. Sound global development policy - trade, migration, investment, and climate change as well as foreign aid - is no longer just the right thing to do; it is crucial to the safety and prosperity of the American people.

That developing countries and development matter to Americans is increasingly obvious. The superpower faceoffs that characterized the second half of the twentieth century have given way to terrorist threats in which nonstate actors in remote and sometimes collapsed states threaten U.S. security. Deforestation in Brazil, the Republic of Congo, and Indonesia; weak safety standards in manufacturing in China; nuclear proliferation threats from North Korea and Iran; avian flu incubation in Vietnam; unrest in the oil fields of the Nigerian delta - these and scores of other problems in developing countries directly affect American lives.

Central to addressing these problems are economic growth and improved lives in developing countries. For the last decade or more, however, U.S. foreign policy has failed to address the development dimension - despite the fact that development along with defense and diplomacy are widely accepted across the U.S. political spectrum as the three "D's" of a twenty-first-century foreign policy strategy. The strategy calls for all three to be used together in support of one another. Until now, however, Washington has relied primarily on defense and secondarily on diplomacy to ensure U.S. security and advance U.S. interests. Development - while at the core of U.S. "soft power" - is still too often an afterthought, even when development is a necessary prerequisite for defense and diplomacy to be effective. The result: a lopsided three-legged stool that serves neither U.S. interests nor Americans' long-standing belief that we can help to make the world fairer, safer, and more prosperous.

The Bush administration set forth the logic of a three-legged stool and ramped up foreign aid spending. But aid is only one instrument in the U.S. toolkit; using all the tools that bear on development entails much more. The chapters in this book offer ambitious yet practical suggestions for a new approach to U.S. engagement in the world that puts development at the core. The authors address not only areas that are normally seen as the domain of development, such as aid for health and education, but also such politically contentious issues as trade; migration; investment; climate change; the role of the United States at the United Nations, the World Bank, and other international organizations; and how to deal with weak and fragile states.

This introduction first expands on why helping improve the lives of the four billion poor and near-poor people who live outside the United States must be a priority for the next president. It then outlines key policy recommendations, drawing on the analyses and proposals in this volume.

It closes with a specific proposal for the new president - about organization rather than policies or programs. Organization may seem a secondary issue, but organization drives strategy, and weak organization may well lie at the heart of why development is the weakest leg of the foreign policy stool. To realize are vitalized vision of the role of the United States in the world and to ensure the country's ability to implement that vision - of a better future for all the world's citizens, Americans included - the next president should appoint a cabinet-level development official within the first weeks of taking office. The appointee should have responsibility for development, akin to that of the National Security Adviser for security, to bring a development perspective to the administration's policies on trade, aid, climate change, and other issues outlined in this book. In addition, the appointee should have a mandate to work with Congress and relevant federal agencies to create a cabinet-level Agency for Sustainable Global Development by the end of the president's (first) term.

Why global development matters for the United States

The next president will face a host of domestic and foreign policy challenges: the war in Iraq, domestic health care, energy and the environment, and Medicare and Social Security financing, among many others. Why make global development a priority?

The answer lies in an unusual convergence of values, politics, and national interests. Helping those in need is a moral imperative that Americans have long embraced. In the past decade, it has also become a bipartisan political opportunity, as when Jesse Helms and Jesse Jackson united in support of debt relief for the poorest countries. But development is also a national security necessity. Never before in U.S. history have so many threats to our prosperity risen within countries in which so many people are still so poor, from Afghanistan and Iraq to China, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, and Venezuela. And perhaps except since the days of the Marshall Plan, never before has there been as great an opportunity for the United States to shore up its image and protect its interests abroad by helping build viable states and improving lives overseas.

Americans' sense of moral obligation to people far away has grown as the international movement of goods, information, and people has accelerated.(*1) A surge in manufactured imports; tourism; the threat of terrorism in Bali, AIDS in Africa, child soldiers in Uganda, and the janjaweed in Sudan; a dramatic increase in overseas study among young Americans; even the long military entanglements in Afghanistan and Iraq have all increased Americans' awareness of the harsh realities of life for hundreds of millions of people in developing countries.

This new awareness can be seen in increased private and public support for development efforts. Americans may be weary of the traditional postwar burden of leadership in military security and Middle East problems, but they are increasingly attuned to the plight of the world's poor. Americans' charitable contributions for overseas humanitarian and development work have tripled since 1990.(*2) And President Bush won bipartisan support for several foreign aid initiatives, including 100 percent debt relief for thirty of the world's poorest countries; a dramatic increase in foreign aid, from $12.6 billion in 2001 to $23 billion in 2006, the highest level in real terms since 1980 (even excluding the large amounts for Afghanistan and Iraq); (*3) and two major new aid programs, the Millennium Challenge Account and the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.(*4)

The rise of a multi polar global economy

As attitudes have shifted at home, economic power is spreading more widely abroad. The United States is no longer the world's hyper-power in economic terms. Although still the world's single largest economy, U.S. gross domestic product, currently about $12 trillion, accounts for a shrinking portion of the world economy, down from about 30 percent in 1960 to 20 percent today (using purchasing power parity exchange rates). By this measure, China's economy is second only to the U.S. economy.5 And the combined gross domestic products of Brazil, China, India, and Russia, at about $11 trillion in purchasing power parity terms, will soon exceed that of the United States, given their faster growth rates.6 Include Egypt, (*6) Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa, Vietnam, and other emerging market economies and an entirely new picture of the twenty-first-century global economy emerges; by 2050, today's emerging economies may well be twice as big as the economies of the Group of Seven (G-7; figure 1).(*7)

China and India loom large in the global economy because of their rapid economic growth -  10 percent and 7 percent a year respectively in the past two decades -  and their billion-plus populations. Americans and citizens of the other G-7 countries currently constitute about 12 percent of the world's population; by 2050, that share will have fallen to less than 9 percent (figure 2). Integrating China into the global economy effectively doubled the size of the global labor force.(*8) China will become the largest consumer of energy in the world as early as 2010.(*9) Three of the world's five largest companies by market capitalization are Chinese,10 and India accounted for four of the top ten richest people in the world on Forbes' 2008 list. India's Tata Group and Mittal Steel are now buying European and U.S. firms.

Note: The rest of this chapter is omitted.