Developing Asia as a region has experienced rapid growth over the past three decades. What have these episodes of sustained growth meant for income inequality? Has the region had “inclusive growth,” meaning growth which saw incomes rise without inequality increasing, or has inequality gotten worse? ...

In an earlier paper (and blog) published in March, we assessed the initial five programs supported by the IMF’s the Resilience and Sustainability Trust (RST), a new financing vehicle designed to help countries address climate change and pandemic preparedness. Among our findings, four stood out. Firs...

Everyone agrees that Ghana's school feeding programme is an important and useful social programme…but insufficient and poor quality food is compromising its impacts; government financing remains a challenge; and it lacks lacks broader support and accountability mechanisms. The programme has huge pot...

The future of such spending in countries currently experiencing or at high risk of debt distress is particularly troubling. A country is in debt distress when its ability to service domestic and external debt is impaired. This blog post delves into these issues based on more recent health spending a...

School feeding is one of those social policy interventions that are hard to pigeonhole in traditional sectors. The benefits span various facets of the beneficiaries’ lives and the local economy. So who should bear the responsibility and cost of provision of school meals? Despite strong political and...

In this blog post, we examine the rise of several of today’s big military spenders. These risers were not in the top ten spenders in 1990, but high rates of economic growth allowed them to allocate more dollars to the military, displacing countries higher in the list, including G7 nations.

The IMF should be applauded for implementing the Resilience and Sustainability Facility (RSF). That said, it is highly improbable that extending RSF financing to an additional 44 countries will be feasible in the next one or two years as it would require a major change in the mindset of borrowing co...