More than a year after the IMF general allocation of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) and the G20 promise to recycle $100 billion of SDRs, how much has been achieved? And how will the recycled SDRs be used? 

This blog post argues that higher health spending is unlikely to be sustained because of the pandemic’s adverse impact on revenues, other spending pressures, and the resulting deteriorating fiscal position of LLMICs. This suggests that countries will need to undertake policy actions to create additi...

The “billions to trillions” vision advanced the notion that some significant part of official development assistance (ODA) should be used to catalyze additional finance from other public and private sources. Seven years later, the expectations that blended finance would expand sharply to help narrow...

For those who care about the mobilization of private finance for development, channeling a much larger volume and share of the trillions of dollars of global institutional investment, including from pension funds, into SDG-related investment in emerging markets might be described as the holy grail. ...

Following on from the “Financing Low-Income Countries: Towards Realistic Aspirations and Concrete Actions in a Post-COVID World" conference in October, Mark Plant and Sudhir Shetty outline some of the key themes discussed at the conference. 

We need to move forward—or backward—in what we expect development finance institutions (DFIs) to do in terms of financing private sector development in the world’s poorest countries.

We’re a third of the way through the lifetime of the Sustainable Development Goals, which were set to transform the world by 2030. But when it comes to SDG 5 on gender equality, global progress towards targets remains either unmeasured or too slow.

Last month, Abhijit Banerjee won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, together with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer. Here’s a quick introduction to almost all of Banerjee’s publications. The range of topics is breathtaking, from land reform to corruption to microcredit to inter...