The Great Era of Global Development

It is increasingly clear that poor countries have made extraordinary gains economically and politically over the last 20 years. While progress has been uneven and continued progress is far from assured, the sheer magnitude of the improvements in lives and livelihoods is impressive. Average income in low-income countries has tripled since the 1960s, and the number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen by one-third since 1991 alone. What has caused this extraordinary progress and under what conditions can it continue?

Speaker and Presenter Information

Steve Radelet is the chief economist for USAID. During 2010, he served as senior adviser for development for the secretary of state, where he advised leadership on strategies to strengthen and elevate development across the U.S. Government. From 2002 to 2010, he was a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, where his work focused on economic growth, poverty reduction, foreign aid, debt and trade. Radelet served as an economic adviser to the President of Liberia from 2005-2009, and was founding co-chair of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network. From 2000 to 2002, he was deputy assistant secretary of the treasury for Africa, the Middle East and Asia. From 1990 to 2000, Radelet was a fellow at the Harvard Institute for International Development, director of the institute's macroeconomics program, and a lecturer on economics and public policy at Harvard University. Radelet is the author of Emerging Africa: How 17 Countries are Leading the Way (2010) and Challenging Foreign Aid: A Policymaker's Guide to the Millennium Challenge Account (2003), and co-author of Economics of Development (6th edition, 2006), a leading undergraduate textbook. He holds master's and PhD degrees in public policy from Harvard University, and a B.S. in mathematics from Central Michigan University.