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Blog Post
December 20, 2021
As the year draws to a close, the temptation to claim wisdom from adversity and experience becomes irresistible. We did it last year, by exploring what we learnt while the world burned around us. 2021 was perhaps a marginal improvement: not quite the best of times, but not quite the worst of times, ...
Blog Post
November 12, 2021
The UK made the largest absolute contribution in the last replenishment of the World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA), the bank’s main instrument for assisting the world’s poorest countries.
As the World Bank mobilizes for the IDA replenishment next month, we take an analytical ...
Blog Post
October 29, 2021
The UK government has announced that it anticipates a return to spending 0.7 percent of gross national income (GNI) on official development assistance (ODA) in three years’ time. It is confident enough in this that the just-published Spending Review, which sets departmental budgets up to the 2024/25...
Blog Post
September 27, 2021
There are a plausible set of circumstances under which the UK’s status as a serious bilateral donor would be under existential threat. They would take the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) from having slightly more than £8 billion in 2019 over which it has full flexibility to spe...
Blog Post
September 21, 2021
The new foreign secretary, Liz Truss, will meet with the chancellor in the coming weeks to determine her department’s budget over the coming three years. If the chancellor maintains his current stance on counting aid spend even where it has no fiscal cost, and also treating the aid target as a ...
Blog Post
August 05, 2021
The case against the cuts to the UK’s aid budget is well-rehearsed. We know they damage the UK’s contribution to its own priorities, that the stated aim to revivify the budget when “fiscal conditions allow” is barely coherent, and that it leaves a laundry list of good causes going wanting.