Year Published
- 2008 (0)
- 2009 (7) Apply 2009 filter
- 2010 (2) Apply 2010 filter
- 2011 (0)
- 2012 (0)
- 2013 (0)
- 2014 (0)
- 2015 (2) Apply 2015 filter
- (-) Remove 2016 filter 2016
- (-) Remove 2017 filter 2017
- 2018 (1) Apply 2018 filter
- 2019 (1) Apply 2019 filter
- 2020 (0)
- 2021 (0)
Research Topics
Populations
- Countries/Governments (2) Apply Countries/Governments filter
- Rural Populations (0)
- Smallholder Farmers (0)
- Women (0)
Types of Research
- Data Analysis (1) Apply Data Analysis filter
- (-) Remove Literature Review filter Literature Review
- Portfolio Review (0)
- Research Brief (0)
Geography
- East Africa Region and Selected Countries (1) Apply East Africa Region and Selected Countries filter
- Global (2) Apply Global filter
- South Asia Region and Selected Countries (1) Apply South Asia Region and Selected Countries filter
- Southern Africa Region and Selected Countries (1) Apply Southern Africa Region and Selected Countries filter
- Sub-Saharan Africa (0)
- West Africa Region and Selected Countries (2) Apply West Africa Region and Selected Countries filter
Dataset
- ASTI (1) Apply ASTI filter
- FAOSTAT (1) Apply FAOSTAT filter
- Farmer First (0)
- LSMS & LSMS-ISA (0)
- Other Datasets (0)
Current search
- (-) Remove 2016 filter 2016
- (-) Remove Literature Review filter Literature Review
- (-) Remove Political Economy & Governance filter Political Economy & Governance
- (-) Remove 2017 filter 2017
- (-) Remove Research & Development filter Research & Development
The share of private sector funding, relative to public sector funding, for drug, vaccine, and diagnostic research & development (R&D) differs considerably across diseases. Private sector investment in overall health R&D exceeds $150 billion annually, but is largely concentrated on non-communicable chronic diseases with only an estimated $5.9 billion focused on "global health", targeting diseases that primarily affect low and middle-income countries (LMICs). We examine the evidence for five specific disincentives to private sector global health R&D investment: scientific uncertainty, weak policy environments, limited revenues and market uncertainty, high fixed and sunk costs, and downstream rents from imperfect markets. Though all five may affect estimates of net returns from an investment decision, they are worth examining separately as each calls for a different intervention or remediation to change behavior.
Donor countries and multilateral organizations may pursue multiple goals with foreign aid, including supporting low-income country development for strategic/security purposes (national security, regional political stability) and for short-and long-term economic interests (market development and access, local and regional market stability). While the literature on the effectiveness of aid in supporting progress on different indicators of country development is inconclusive, donors are interested in evidence that aid funding is not permanent but rather contributes to a process by which recipient countries develop to a point that they are economically self-sufficient. In this report, we review the literature on measures of country self-sufficiency and descriptive evidence from illustrative case studies to explore conditions associated with transitions toward self-sufficiency in certain contexts.
This research considers how public good characteristics of different types of research and development (R&D) and the motivations of different providers of R&D funding affect the relative advantages of alternative funding sources. We summarize the public good characteristics of R&D for agriculture in general and for commodity and subsistence crops in particular, as well as R&D for health in general and for neglected diseases in particular, with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Finally, we present rationales for which funders are predicted to fund which R&D types based on these funder and R&D characteristics. We then compile available statistics on funding for agricultural and health R&D from private, public and philanthropic sources, and compare trends in funding from these sources against expectations. We find private agricultural R&D spending focuses on commodity crops (as expected). However contrary to expectations we find public and philanthropic spending also goes largely towards these same crops rather than staples not targeted by private funds. For health R&D private funders similarly concentrate on diseases with higher potential financial returns. However unlike in agricultural R&D, in health R&D we observe some specialization across funders – especially for neglected diseases R&D - consistent with funders’ expected relative advantages.
Common aid allocation formulas incorporate measures of income per capita but not measures of poverty, likely based on the assumption that rising average incomes are associated with reduced poverty. If declining poverty is the outcome of interest, however, the case of Nigeria illustrates that such aid allocation formulas could lead to poorly targeted or inefficient aid disbursements. Using data from the World Bank and the Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics, we find that while the relationship between economic growth and poverty in Nigeria varies depending on the time period studied, overall from 1992-2009 Nigeria’s poverty rate has only declined by 6% despite a 70% increase in per capita gross domestic product (GDP). A review of the literature indicates that income inequality, the prominence of the oil sector, unemployment, corruption, and poor education and health in Nigeria may help to explain the pattern of high ongoing poverty rates in the country even in the presence of economic growth. Our analysis is limited by substantial gaps in the availability of quality data on measures of poverty and economic growth in Nigeria, an issue also raised in the literature we reviewed, but our findings support arguments that economic growth should not be assumed to lead to poverty reduction and that the relationship between these outcomes likely depends on contextual factors.