Debora L. Spar

In this book, Spar explores how American women’s lives have—and have not—changed over the past fifty years. Armed with reams of new research, she details how women struggled for power and instead got stuck in an endless quest for perfection. The challenges confronting women are more complex than ever, and they are challenges that come inherently and inevitably from being female. Spar is acutely aware that it is time to change course.

There are many factors that have contributed to this troubling performance: the weight of a colonial past, the vagaries of climate and geography, the torment of war. These are all well-known and exceedingly difficult to address. Equally critical, though, and somewhat more amenable, is the role of governance and the state. Where governments are effective and institutions sound, growth in Africa and elsewhere has generally proceeded apace. Where firms are able to access capital and international markets, development followed suit. Where governments are ineffective, however, and markets weak, growth has faltered, leaving nations to bear the increasing burdens of poverty.

Making Markets Work is an executive education program focused on development and targeted at managers in both the public and private sectors. It starts with the presumption that both government and markets are critical to a nation's social and economic growth and that both public and private sector managers need to understand and play a role in the governance process. Using a combination of cases, videos, texts and online exercises, the course will expose participants to both leading research and local best practice. It will endeavor to engage participants in their own process of discovery, exploring how firms and governments can together affect the pattern of development in Africa, and how individual leaders can contribute to both governance and growth.

This paper probes the problem of accountability in three separate but related ways. First, it describes the wide variation that characterizes NGOs and propose a typology based on these differences. Second, it examines more specifically how performance might be measured across NGO sectors and what kind of information can be derived from these measures. It then concludes with a brief discussion of perhaps the thorniest issue of NGO accountability: whether NGOs contribute to democratization and how society can tell.

For the pharmaceutical industry, the plague of AIDS was compounded by a unique, and baffling set of problems. Nearly all of the medicines were expensive to produce and often difficult to administer. They demanded levels of income and structures of distribution that often were sorely lacking in the developing world. Yet the growing tragedy of the disease had raised a public outcry for a solution. And the pharmaceutical companies were in the center of the storm. Increasingly, activist groups were demanding that the companies respond to the AIDS epidemic with drastic measures, giving their drugs away for free or abandoning the patent rights that had long protected their intellectual property. It had become painfully obvious that the pharmaceutical firms needed to respond to their critics. The question was, how?

The topic of human rights, of course, is both subtle and complex. It encompasses a wide range of alleged 'rights' - the right to life, the right to privacy, the right to equality - and an even wider range of controversy: when does the right to life begin? How is equality defined? What if the right to privacy entails a threat to life? Profitable Souls is not intended as a discourse on these topics. Instead, it starts with a straightforward approach to rights, one that concentrates on the basic qualities of life: if starving people gain access to food, or illiterate children find education, their human rights improve. Undeniably, this definition of rights will raise eyebrows among those who study the topic or protest on its behalf. But it is also most relevant to understanding the direct link between foreign investment and human conditions; the link between multinationals and the populations they affect.

What makes this topic particularly intriguing is the vast range of experience that it encompasses. Foreign investment, after all, takes many forms, and over time, the pendulum of public opinion has swung back and forth, with multinationals painted as either the demons of third world development or the beacons of change.

This project takes a different tack. Rather than arguing that foreign investment is either good or bad, it explores various types of investment across time and space, examining how a specific investment operates and what chain of events it unleashes. Do certain kinds of investment force the foreign firm to embrace local governments? Does the amount of imported capital matter? Or the nationality of the investor? What role is played by the media, or by activists who rail against global capitalism? Using a combination of statistical, historical, and on-site analyses, the project attempts to sort through these questions.