At the Annual Meetings of the World Bank and IMF in Marrakech in October, the governors of the World Bank agreed upon next steps in the Bank’s “Evolution Roadmap.” The level of ambition is still high, but big reform is far from a done deal. Looking to the past, there has been no shortage of World Ba...

By the end of primary school, students in Bangladesh are expected to have acquired foundational skills such as basic reading, writing, and numeracy. However, recent assessments conducted by various government institutes reveal that the proportion of Bangladeshi students not meeting grade-level readi...

At the start of the COVID pandemic, we examined how major deteriorations in low-income country (LIC) debt levels could influence the grant funding requirements for IDA, the World Bank’s low-income-country lending arm. IDA provides a mix of concessional credits (which need to be repaid) and grants (w...

Sovereign debt issues for emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs) were a predictable subject of many conversations at the World Bank and IMF Annual Meetings in Marrakech. Here are our main takeaways on the state of play and how to make progress to address urgent needs amidst slow-moving pr...

Recent news that developed countries may finally have delivered on their promise to mobilise $100 billion of climate finance is welcome. But it is nowhere near enough to meet the aims of the Paris Agreement, and climate finance will continue to be an extremely contentious issue at COP28 in Dubai. So...

The central role that private investors must play in financing Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) investments in emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs) is now widely understood and acknowledged. The just-published two-volume report of the Independent Experts Group (here and here) to the ...

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), signed into law last year, will provide the United States with $370 billion in direct investments in clean energy, and possibly spur far more through tax credits. The IRA is expected to stimulate a green transition in the US. And it will turbocharge the US green l...