Talks at GoogleRachel Glennerster | Innovation and the Center for Global Development | Talks at Google
Talks at Google
A new era for development 0:06
Rachel Glennerster explains that although talk of a new era for development usually means aid cuts, the bigger story is that development has been a huge success over the past twenty to twenty five years. Poverty and child mortality have fallen dramatically, and the number of low income countries has dropped from sixty four to twenty five since 2000. Middle income countries now have their own money to fight poverty, spending far more on it than any aid program, but they also produce most of the world's carbon emissions, sixty nine percent today and thirty eight percent cumulatively since the Industrial Revolution. She notes that just 0.3 percent of world GDP could lift everyone above the poverty line if perfectly targeted, and that India needs less than one percent of its GDP to do this while Nigeria still needs eight percent.
Simple technologies driving big gains 5:04
Glennerster shows that technology, not just rising income, explains many health gains. Vietnam's life expectancy today matches Italy's in 1985, even though Vietnam's income is only sixty five percent of Italy's back then, thanks to cheap tools like vaccines, vitamins, and insecticide treated bed nets. She points out that most research and development is funded by rich countries for rich country markets, leaving a gap for poorer places, especially since even trained doctors in these countries often know the right treatment but fail to deliver it. Randomized trials have also reshaped education spending: textbooks, more teachers, computers, extra equipment, and even cash had no effect on learning in a Kenyan classroom, but training teachers in structured pedagogy did. In agriculture, the Green Revolution's new seeds raised yields and cut poverty, and a ten year delay in rolling them out would have cut 2010 GDP by seventeen percent.
Fixing innovation incentives 12:31
Glennerster is cautiously hopeful about AI lowering the cost of innovation, for example through tools like AlphaFold, but warns that giving away patents removes the incentive to run trials, get regulatory approval, and build distribution and marketing, especially for seeds that need country by country approval. She explains how patents let innovators charge high prices that cover research costs but shut out poorer buyers, and proposes an alternative called an advance market commitment, where a donor pays a top up so innovators can charge low prices and still profit from high sales. She illustrates this with a sixty million dollar pooled mechanism for a fast neonatal sepsis diagnostic, which could avert twelve percent of sepsis deaths and cut unnecessary antibiotics by fifty four percent, with a benefit cost ratio of seventy eight to one. She closes by noting that sixty three percent of R&D happens in rich countries and twenty seven percent in China, leaving almost none elsewhere, so philanthropy must fund R&D paired with the right incentives for the poorest countries left behind.
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