Harinder S. Kohli

Johannes F. Linn

Leo M. Zucker

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a potential gamechanger for the Central Asia and South Caucasus (CASC) region. CASC countries naturally view this massive development program as a unique opportunity to accelerate their economic development through increased foreign investment, upgraded physical infrastructure, and tighter economic relationships with their neighbors. Yet embracing the BRI is not without risks. Some BRI investments may prove to be fiscally unsustainable, economically and financially unviable, and socially and environmentally harmful. Inadequate cross-border coordination and infrastructure maintenance could render some BRI investments wasteful or redundant. If not proactively addressed, these risks have the potential to leave countries worse off for having participated in the BRI. Policymakers in the CASC region and their development partners, thus, face a daunting question: how to realize the promise of the BRI for their countries while avoiding the pitfalls that lie along the way? This book attempts to answer this question by leveraging the unique insights of development experts in the CASC region. Drawing on the most comprehensive review of BRI investment data conducted to date, this book presents a dynamic policy agenda that is relevant to any country in which China is building the Belt and Road.

Potential Transformation of Central Asia and the South Caucasus

China’s Belt and Road Initiative

Homi J. Kharas

Akio Hosono

Visit any developing country and you will find governments, international donors, NGOs, and corporations involved in a range of innovative activities to address the needs of the poor. Only a fraction of those that show promise at a localized level, however, will ever be replicated, expanded, and sustained to achieve a transformative impact. Learning how to expand the reach of proven interventions so that they help larger numbers of poor people - 'scaling up' - is a fundamental challenge facing the developing world. This book improves our understanding of how scaling up can be achieved and what the international community can do to support the process. Remarkably little is understood of how to design scalable projects, the impediments to reaching scale, or the most appropriate pathways for reaching that goal. To answer these questions, this book features a series of case studies drawn from both the public and private sectors to demonstrate how the scaling up of services for the world's poor can happen. By linking public and private experience, the authors argue that successful scaling up will not be achieved by either public or private sector efforts alone. Rather, it will require both public and private efforts working together. This book demonstrates that the challenges to scaling up are complex and various, but ultimately surmountable. It provides an invaluable resource for development practitioners, analysts, and students on a topic that remains largely unexplored and poorly understood.

How to Bring Development Solutions to Millions of Poor People

Getting to Scale

Scaling Up in Agriculture, Rural Development, and Nutrition

Homi Kharas

Geoffrey Gertz

The achievements and legacy of the Wolfensohn Center for Development at Brookings The Imperative of Development highlights the research and policy analysis produced by the Wolfensohn Center for Development at Brookings. The Center, which operated from 2006 to 2011, was the first home at Brookings for research on international development. It sought to help identify effective solutions to key development challenges in order to create a more prosperous and stable world. Founded by James and Elaine Wolfensohn, the Center’s mission was to “to create knowledge that leads to action with real, scaled-up, and lasting development impact.” This volume reviews the Center’s achievements and lasting legacy, combining highlights of its most important research with new essays that examine the context and impact of that research. Six primary research streams of the Wolfensohn Center’s work are highlighted in The Imperative of Development: the shifting structure of the world economy in the twenty-first century; the challenge of scaling up the impact of development interventions; the effectiveness of development assistance; how to promote economic and social inclusion for Middle Eastern youth; the case for investing in early child development; and the need for global governance reform. In each chapter, a scholar associated with the particular research topic provides an overview of the issue and its broader context, then describes the Center’s work on the topic and the subsequent influence and impact of these efforts. The Imperative of Development chronicles the growth and expansion of the first center for development research in Brookings’s 100-year history and traces how the seeds of this initiative continue to bear fruit.

The Wolfensohn Center at Brookings

The Imperative of Development

Johannes F. Linn

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