Staffing issues are all the talk in Brussels at the moment amid heated discussions over the next EU budget. EU Member States want the European Commission (EC) to reduce its staff by more than 5 % over the next 5 years, more than Council President van Rompuy recently proposed. In particular, Member State officials have made critical observations about the size of the Directorate-General for Development and Cooperation – EuropeAid (DG DEVCO). Counting 6.5% of the EC’s Brussels-based staff, it is the second largest of the EC’s offices in Brussels. However, DEVCO staff manages relatively ...
“Jobs” are the focus of the recently launched World Development Report 2013. This year’s edition of the World Bank’s annual flagship publication raises a host of interesting issues. Key points and take away messages I got from the London launch event earlier this month are: 1) Although labour market functioning is important, labour market policies in developing countries matter much less for employment than other policies because of implementation difficulties and the fact that most employment is informal. 2) Relatedly, although most people in developing countries are informally self-employed on farms and in micro-enterprises, it ...
When I visited Tanzania in early 2009, small street shops were selling fabric with the face of Obama and the famous ‘Yes we Can’ election slogan printed on them. Few months later, I bought a box of Obama gum from a store in Burundi. The box of gum was a special edition produced by a Kenyan candy factory to celebrate the election of Obama into the White House. Africa was clearly proud of its (half) son and expectations that his election would yield a new era in US-Africa relations were very high. But the Obama-fever ...
Florian Kratke co-authored this article. European Heads of State will be taking more than one shirt to the 22-23 November budget summit, anticipating lengthy negotiations for reaching the political agreement on future EU funding needed by the end of the year. EU insiders are expecting a deal to include cuts of up to €200 billion. A key question is how much development cooperation expenditure will be lost in the process. The revised “negotiation box” for the EU’s 2014-2020 Multi-Annual Financial Framework (MFF), presented by the Cyprus EU Presidency at the end of October, will serve ...
With burgeoning regional integration and free-trade arrangements around the world, a key question is whether or not agreed treaties are being implemented and if so, with what impact. This is all the more relevant since a significant number of South-South Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) suffer from a well known lack of implementation, monitoring, and general follow up. A good starting point is to ask what to monitor, why do it, how to do it and who should do it - we may even find that the exercise of monitoring itself helps improve implementation! Sharing monitoring ...
