The Center for Global Development is a nonprofit think tank and interest group "dedicated to reducing global poverty and inequality and to making globalization work for the poor." It influences "the policies of the United States, other rich countries, and such institutions as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization to improve the economic and social development prospects in poor countries." CGD focuses on the interactions of globalization and heavily indebted developing countries, countries whose situations may be sufficiently desperate that they fail to qualify for some foreign assistance programs.[1]
Foreign Policy ranked CGD among the world’s top think tanks (number 15 out of several thousand such research organizations). It was founded in 2001 by Edward Scott, Jr., C. Fred Bergsten and Nancy Birdsall.
Delivering on Debt Relief: From IMF Gold to a New Aid Architecture, by Birdsall and John Williamson, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, was the Center’s first book.
The Millennium Challenge Act (MCA) became a center of CGD's operations.[2] Yet because the MCA was focused on the “good performers,” weak states and failed states were understandably left out of the conversation—and in this case, their absence underscored the dearth of strategic thinking on the challenges they posed. [3]