News and views from the Blavatnik School of Government community 
Let me begin this blogpost with what I think is a necessary preamble. Having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for the past several years, I’m well aware of the problems posed by profit masquerading as purpose. Tech company after tech company has claimed that their product is going […]
“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”, said Benjamin Franklin. Taxes have always been frowned upon and tax collectors have been vilified and despised, except probably by Christ (and since he came for the scum of the earth, this is the exception that […]
The outrage created by the Panama Papers is understandable. The money laundering that persons at the highest echelons have been engaged in increases the sentiment held by many “ordinary people” that they are living in a society dominated by an elite engaged in pervasive corruption and endemic greed. For many, […]
The economic case for investing now and how to create alternative sources of funding. I attended and presented at the CABRI Conference on Financing Healthcare in Africa: Challenges and Opportunities, in Dar es Salaam last week of November. CABRI brings together senior officials in ministries of finance and budget in Africa, […]
Kenya’s HIV/AIDS 2015 conference, Maisha 2015 (meaning life in Swahili), in which I gave a Keynote Address, highlighted the knowledge and advocacy resources that have been mobilized by the country to fight the HIV pandemic. My speech focused on the mission and messages of RethinkHIV: Death sentence to debt sentence: […]
It was Saturday afternoon, and I had just come to the end of my second week in Nairobi. A friend of mine has her finger on the pulse, and she had heard that an Australian girl was running boozy brunches out of her leafy backyard in Lavington – so along […]
From boosting financial gains to reducing CO2 emissions, there are clear benefits from removing inefficient fossil fuel consumption subsidies. BSG Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Thomas Hale and Peter Ogden, Senior Fellow and Director of International Energy and Climate Policy at the Center for American Progress, explore a new policy tool that […]
At the peak of the Netherlands’ “tulip mania” in 1637, one tulip bulb sold for 5,500 guilders per bulb—roughly the cost of luxurious house in Amsterdam, or $25,000 today. More than three and a half centuries later, economists continue to debate why tulip prices skyrocketed to stratospheric levels in the 1630s, much in the same way that the 2008 Global Financial Crisis remains a source of contention. Why have financial systems been so vulnerable to crises, and what role has regulation played?