These remarks were prepared for the Global Development Network (GDN) 2019 Conference, held in Bonn, Germany on October 23-24, 2019. 

Every MDB is now confronted with the question of what to do with middle-income countries, given the need to focus on the Sustainable Development Goals in general, but very concretely on goal #1—poverty eradication—which will be difficult to achieve based on recent trends. MDBs are very i...