I’ve taken pride over the years in CGD’s success as a think-and-do tank in coming up with new “products” (outcomes of think/research) and working with officials around the world to see them adopted and implemented (outcomes of do/outreach and advocacy)). New products that change people’s lives in go...

Policy-based guarantees (PBGs) have long been a multilateral development bank (MDB) instrument in search of a purpose. PBGs—a credit enhancement for sovereign market borrowing—have been around for decades but their uptake has been limited. In most instances, they have proven remarkably effective in ...

DFC has been the subject of a growing list of proposals from lawmakers that envision the agency tackling a wider range of challenges than initially envisioned. The agency may find ways to leverage this heightened interest. However, delivering on the bipartisan, foundational vision for DFC amid evolv...

The World Bank and other multilateral development banks are historically underutilized assets when it comes to USAID’s development objectives across a wide range of sectors and initiatives. We offer instead a set of recommendations that USAID could implement largely within its own purview, or with a...

At a time when governments seem able to agree on very little, the consensus around the Bank’s need to scale up its engagement on climate and other global public goods is striking. But “scaling up ambition” is vague, and there remains a great deal of work to do to pin down what it means in practice f...

On the heels of last year’s landmark $93 billion replenishment of the World Bank’s IDA—and with the international community preoccupied with responding to Ukraine—the replenishment of the African Development Fund cannot be an afterthought.

This blog post is based in part on a presentation delivered by Nancy Birdsall on March 19th, 2022 as part of the MIT Seminar XXI program, hosted by Kenneth Oye.