A hobby-horse for aid-watchers has been the sky-high mission and the middling results of the Millennium Challenge Corporation. False-starts with new CEO's, lots of staff turnover, a big, distracting move of headquarters and lots of other excuses have given the MCC its choice of self-inflicted wounds to blame for poor performance. Management continues to be a concern (see the Center for Global Development's MCA Monitor blog for plenty of coverage), but an interesting item about the MCC was picked up by Chris Monasterski at the World Bank's Private Sector Development blog. In a broad stroke, the story is that MCC's pressure to reform, combined with its power to cut off funds, made recipient countries implement major legal changes in Yemen and Lesotho.

In a nutshell (though the ability to reproduce these kinds of results is far from proven), this is probably the kind of thing Americans want to see when they look at money for international development. Right?