The Cotonou Partnership Agreement (CPA), which governs relations between the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group and the European Union (EU), will expire in the year 2020. While the three pillars of this framework addressing political dialogue, development cooperation and trade are...

The distribution of global income is extremely unequal. In 2011, the richest 20 per cent of the world’s population controlled more than 80 per cent of the world’s income, compared to less than 2 per cent for the poorest 20 per cent. In many parts of the developing world, inequality remains...

The need for more coordination in European development cooperation is acknowledged by most academics and practi-tioners. It emerges because there has been a strong increase in the level of fragmentation and proliferation of official development assistance (ODA) in recent years, despite the calls...

Conventional economic wisdom has long maintained that there is a necessary trade-off between pursuit of the efficiency of a system and any attempts to improve equity between participants within that system. Economist Robert Lucas demonstrated the implications of this common economic axiom when...

A country where an individual's chances of success depend little on the socio-economic success of his or her parents is said to be a country with high relative intergenerational mobility. A government's motivation for seeking to improve mobility is arguably two-fold. There is a fairness argument...

With inequality reduction now being officially and broadly recognised as a key development objective with its own Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 10), there is a need for simple, economical and quick methodologies with which to focus on this area and assess progress. This paper presents such a...

On 27 February 2013 the European Commissioners for Development and Environment presented a proposal for a joint European Union (EU) position for a post-2015 framework on global development. This Briefing Paper looks into what the EU can learn from three past international negotiation processes...

Development cooperation encompasses a multitude of accountability relations that do not automatically complement one another. In practice, the strong accountability needs of donor constituencies create perverse incentives to bypass developing-country institutions in an effort to seek “value...

Migration stands among the most politically contentious topics in the United Nations (UN) system. This is shown in the current Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which reflect an approach to human development that does not involve human mobility. Efforts made to promote discussion on the...

United Nations (UN) Member States agreed to start negotiations towards a universal sustainable development agenda. A major challenge is to design goals that guide future action at the national and international levels. These “Goals” usually refer to global development priorities at the...