This website is archived and is no longer being updated. Some information may be outdated and links or functions may not work as expected.
Skip to content

Research & Analysis

Explore new ideas, timely commentary, and in-depth proposals from leading experts on the MDB reform agenda.
Read more

How Can the World Bank Better Support the Shared Debt, Climate, and Development Financing Challenges Facing Caribbean SIDS?

Read more

Gender and Climate: Challenges for Multilateral Banking in Latin America and the Caribbean

Read more

Latin America’s positioning for cop 16 of the convention on biological diversity to be held in Colombia

Read more

Investing for resilience: A panel discussion with Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank President Jin Liqun’

ODI
Read more

Domestic Revenue Mobilization for Sustainable Development and the Contribution of IDA-20

Read more

Domestic Revenue Mobilization for Sustainable Development in Sub-Saharan Africa and the contribution of IDA-20

Read more

Domestic Revenue Mobilisation (DRM) for Sustainable Development in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Contribution of IDA-20

Read more

Domestic Revenue Mobilisation for Sustainable Development in the Four East African Countries

Read more

Podcast: How can we make development finance work for everyone?

ODI
Read more

Podcast: Devex @ World Bank-IMF: The skinny on World Bank plans to harness private capital

Read more

Podcast: Think Change episode 44: tackling debt, transforming economies – why is the IDA replenishment so urgent?

ODI
Read more

Leveraging Domestic Revenues for Sustainable Development

Read more

How likely are multilateral development banks to need callable capital? Implications for risk frameworks and lending capacity

Read more

Remarks from a Panel Discussion on Strengthening Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) to Address Shared Challenges of the 21st Century

The distinction between middle-income (MICs) and low-income countries (LICs) is not the most useful when approaching development issues. A number of MICs have very high levels of inequality and large populations, meaning that a significant share of the world’s poor and vulnerable live in MICs.
Read more

Warming or Cooling on World Bank Climate Finance: What Drives Country Demand?

The climate agenda has been a dominant feature of World Bank reform efforts, with President Banga aiming to both mobilize new resources and increase the proportion of total funding for climate-related projects. The stakes are high: greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in many borrowing countries are elevated and rising, dimming prospects for meeting the 2030 Paris...
Read more

Good COP/Bad COP: It’s Not Easy Being Green

The World Bank offered up several new climate commitments at COP, the big UN climate conference, including that 45 percent of its annual financing will be devoted to climate-related projects starting in fiscal year 2025 (which begins next July). The Bank estimates that this will “put to work” more than $40 billion. The target is a...
Read more

Shareholder-led Multilateral Development Bank reforms: Catalyzing private finance towards African climate goals

Read more

Marrakech Meeting on SDRs Rechanneling: Accelerating Development Finance Through Multilateral Development Banks

Read more

Good Practices in the Provision of Global Public Goods: How multilateral development banks build on global public goods in their operations

Read more

More Bang for Its Buck: The World Bank Has to Modernize Its Approach To Enable Private Sector Investment

Read more

The Interlocking Challenges of Climate Change and Poverty | The Development Podcast

Read more

Summary of public comments received by the G20 Expert Group on Strengthening Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs)

Read more

Institutional Drift: Multipolarity, Bretton Woods, and Parallel Multilateral Development Banks

Read more

Declaring a Hollow Victory on SDRs Would Further Undermine G20 Credibility

Read more

The future of the World Bank: In conversation with Vice President for East Asia and Pacific, Manuela V. Ferro

Read more

Evolution of the World Bank Group – A Report to Governors

Read more

What the World Bank’s Country Climate and Development Reports Tell Us About the Debt-Climate Nexus in Low-income Countries

Read more

El mundo no necesita otra institución más contra el cambio climático

Los fondos de mitigación y adaptación al calentamiento global podrían funcionar canalizados por una sola entidad independiente, que controle la asignación de las inversiones y evalúe el impacto.
Read more

Bitesize Business Breakfast: More companies in RAK’s Economic Zone

RAK Economic Zone saw the number of new companies signing up more than double in Q1. Ramy Jallad joined us to explain what's driving up the numbers. Plus, as the UAE Minister of State for Finance Mohamed Al Hussaini heads to Washington for the IMF Spring Meeting, we ask Masood Ahmed about the UAE's role...
Read more

What Does World Bank Success Look Like?

On the face of it, the case for a general capital increase for the World Bank should be obvious and urgent in our age of the polycrisis. It is a very efficient way to support an increase in development and climate lending by an order of magnitude. A $20 billion paid-in capital increase would support...
Read more

The Future of IDA: How Does Gender Equality Factor In?

Among IDA’s key substantive priorities is gender and development—which sits alongside human capital; fragility, conflict, and violence; jobs and economic transformation; and climate change as an overarching special theme. But despite IDA’s inclusion of gender equality as a theme beginning in 2016, it remains at the bottom of IDA-borrowing government officials’ own priorities. What reasons...
Read more

An Innovative IFI Operating Model for the 21st Century

This paper lays out key products and processes that need to be introduced, reformed, and/or scaled to effectively deploy existing and new volumes of climate finance. The paper focuses on the multilateral development banks (MDBs), notwithstanding the critical roles of other institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other public development banks (PDBs)....
Read more

When It Comes to World Bank Reform, April Will Be Disappointing. But that Shouldn’t Be the End of the Story.

Reform of the World Bank is in the eye of the beholder—not just how it’s going, but even what it is. With so many issues still to work out, next week's Spring Meetings are likely to be disappointing for those hoping for swift movement. But there's still room for ambition and optimism in the longer...
Read more

The Road to a Better World Bank Starts with a Commitment to IDA

IDA has emerged as the largest financing arm of the World Bank Group in the last few years, and demand remains high. But IDA has not featured as prominently in the World Bank reform and roadmap conversations as IBRD. The Spring Meetings are an opportunity to change that.
Read more

Do Clients Want the World Bank to Focus on Climate?

Months of innovative work by AfDB staff have resulted in an attractive SDR recycling scheme that overcomes a major hurdle by successfully embodying the reserve asset characteristic. And it will allow leveraging SDRs to multiply their lending power 3-4 times. Now politicians have to step up and commit their SDRs. And Europeans need to show...
Read more

How Emerging Economies Are Reshaping the International Financial System

Whilst the war instigated by Russia, and rising competitions with China, could suggest a return to a cold-war-esque bipolar world, the spread of economic growth and prosperity mean the economic and financial influence is much-wider spread. The “emerging” economies are significantly stepping up their contribution to development and their choices on whether and how...
Read more

What the Biden Administration Should Be Looking for in a World Bank President

With David Malpass’s announcement on Wednesday that he will step down as president of the World Bank, the Biden Administration is faced with the choice of a nominee to run the institution at a particularly challenging time.
Read more

Aftermath of War in Europe The West VS. the Global South?

This publication provides an insight into the lens through which countries of the Global South view the current period of successive crises, brought about by an ongoing global pandemic and a war in Europe.
Read more

The Expansion of the BRICS in a World of Shifting Power Dynamics

Join us on this exploration of the BRICS in a world of shifting power dynamics, and gain a deeper understanding of one of the most important economic and political blocs in the world today.
Read more

A Valentine’s Day Gift for the AfDB’s Campaign for SDR Recycling—But Now We Need More Heart

Months of innovative work by AfDB staff have resulted in an attractive SDR recycling scheme that overcomes a major hurdle by successfully embodying the reserve asset characteristic. And it will allow leveraging SDRs to multiply their lending power 3-4 times. Now politicians have to step up and commit their SDRs. And Europeans need to show...
Read more

Is the European Investment Bank Finally Transforming Itself Into a Development Bank?

Despite increased capital 2022 was a particularly risk-averse year for EIB Global. On paper at least, the bank intends to increase its risk profile and become a development bank. Whether that change materialises remains to be seen.
Read more

The World Bank Should Ramp Up Finance for Climate, But Not at the Cost of Development

The World Bank Group Evolution Roadmap makes three financing asks of donors and shareholders: capital for IBRD, continued support for IDA, and grants to support climate projects. I think donors and shareholders should support a capital increase and strengthen commitments to IDA. But they should not provide more grants to support climate activities at least...
Read more

Energy Trends and Outlook Through 2023: Surviving the Energy Crisis While Building a Greener Future

This Policy Brief explores five recent trends that are likely to shape the transformation of the energy system in 2023 and highlights clean technology challenges to accelerate the transition to a greener future.
Read more

A Bigger Mission Must Mean More Financial Ambition at the World Bank

The longer the World Bank’s biggest shareholders stay mum on the overall package of support, the higher the likelihood that we get more business as usual and more unconvincing fodder for summits and high-level meetings even while the Earth literally burns.
Read more

The World Needs a Green Bank

In this policy brief I propose a new approach to climate financing: the creation of an International Green Bank, which would be a global public-private partnership. This approach would make it easier to raise the $500 billion requested by the Bridgetown Initiative, because in addition to sovereign contributions, the Green Bank’s financing will include contributions to capital by...
Read more

Evolving the World Bank’s Twin Goals

The World Bank management’s Evolution Roadmap suggests the institution is reconsidering its ‘twin goals’ mission statement of eradicating extreme poverty (ending $2.15 poverty by 2030) and boosting shared prosperity (raising the incomes of the bottom 40 percent in each country). It is reassuring that Bank management wants to keep the twin goals focused on consumption...
Read more

The World Bank Group’s Evolution Roadmap: More Work Needed

At the Annual meetings of the World Bank and IMF last year, shareholders asked the World Bank to come up with a set of proposals to evolve a larger role in climate and other global public goods. The Bank’s first response came pretty quick: by mid December, only a couple of months after the request,...
Read more

Transparency and World Bank Evolution

Late last year, the World Bank Group issued a roadmap on its potential evolution in response to shareholder pressure at this year’s Bank-Fund annual meetings. The roadmap document has been widely shared with member governments. As reported by Reuters and Devex on the basis of leaked copies, it proposes reforms to the World Bank Group’s...
Read more

Sailing On a Storming Sea: Policy Challenges For Developing Countries 2022-2025

The current bleak outlook for the world economy, with a likely recession in major economies, high inflation, rising interest rates, and slow productivity growth, will adversely emerging market and developing countries (EMDE) over the next few years.
Read more

The New Model IFC Still Isn’t a Good Deal for IDA Countries

The IFC isn’t finding more private sector projects to support in IDA countries even with the backing of both PSW financing and retained earnings used to hire more staff to look for projects. Absent actual projects to invest in, PSW resources are increasingly committed to regional and global facilities that don’t disburse. That doesn’t help...
Read more

Climate Diplomacy and the Global South

One aim of COP27 was to persuade countries to make commitments to reduce emissions and earmark resources for technologies to be transferred from industrialized states to less developed states. This year’s gathering is the first where “funding arrangements” for “loss and damage” were included on the agenda, to the displeasure of the US and European Union...
Read more

The World Bank Window for Host Communities and Refugees: Opportunities for Learning and Expansion in Africa and Beyond

The US-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington, DC presents an important opportunity to discuss the public good provided by African countries in hosting 7 million refugees. One critical tool that African and US officials should focus on and jointly advocate for is the World Bank’s Window for Host Communities and Refugees (WHR). Designed as an innovative...
Read more

MDBs for a Global Future: Centering Borrowing Country Perspectives

An effective transformation of the MDB system can’t happen from Washington alone—what emerging markets and low-income countries alike want from the MDB system will need to be front and center. To ensure borrower perspectives are a major part of the conversation, two finance ministers have agreed to contribute in-depth discussions of reform.
Read more

Hybrid Capital and SDRs for the Uninitiated

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? 
Read more

Rightsizing the MDB System in the Polycrisis Era

For both rich and poor countries, the climate crisis is no longer looming. It is all around them. Yet, as thousands gather in Sharm el-Sheikh for COP27, scientists have just confirmed that we are nowhere near where we need to be on greenhouse gas emissions reductions.
Read more

Our Wish List for the World Bank’s Evolution Roadmap

The assignment is clear. During this year’s Annual Meetings of the IMF and World Bank, shareholders instructed the World Bank to develop a work program for its own evolution (“to identify gaps in the Bank’s current institutional and operational framework…”) by the end of the year. Secretary Yellen led the evolution charge, noting, “We do...
Read more

COP27: A Brief Account of Contemporary Climate Adaptation and Mitigation Policies, a View from the South

Following the consecutives shocks to the global economy caused by fossil fuels, the timing has never been better to melt the polarization around climate change politics and propose innovative solutions to surf the uncertainty and complexity of this intractable policy problem.
Read more

Bridging Green Infrastructure and Finance

The G20 Infrastructure Investors Dialogue estimated the volume of global infrastructure investment needed by 2040 to be $81 trillion, $53 trillion of which is needed in non- advanced countries (OECD 2020). The Dialogue projected a gap – in other words, a shortfall in relation to the investments foreseen today – of around $15 trillion worldwide,...
Read more

Is World Bank Lending a Hot Ticket in a Global Credit Crunch?

World Bank loan terms are becoming increasingly attractive as global interest rates soar. This is not because the Bank’s International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) loans have gotten cheaper, but because the average emerging market’s (EM) borrowing costs have risen so much more dramatically than IBRD loan prices. Consu, the spread between an IBRD...
Read more

It is Unfair to Push Poor Countries to Reach Zero Carbon Emissions too Early

we must shift the conversation from futuristic net-zero ambitions toward practical and equitable emissions trajectories. The rich and overall high emitters have to reduce emissions aggressively, while the low-emissions poor must lower their growth rate of emissions on a credible path toward zero.
Read more

Reforming the World Bank and MDBs to Meet Shared Global Challenges

Last July, CGD hosted a meeting with other think tanks to exchange perspectives on the multilateral development bank (MDB) system. Participants at our meeting agreed to set out a shared “call to action” where we lay out ideas to evolve the World Bank.
Read more

The Sovereignty of Developing Countries: The Challenge of Foreign Aid

Foreign aid has a well-established and significant role in international relations. The role of foreign aid in the repertoire of international development programs is extensively documented, with its goal being the promotion of human and economic development.
Read more

A Dive into MDB Policy-Based Guarantees: Relevant but in Need of Reform?

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 helping to reduce governments’ external financing costs and mobilize large volumes of...
Read more

Why Should You Care About MDB Capital Efficiency?

At the July G20 meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors, a panel of experts (of which I was one) presented their report on the capital adequacy of the MDBs. Why care? the answer, quite simply, is that hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake. As with any bank, small changes in the...
Read more

Quantitative Tightening and Capital Flows to Emerging Markets

In its May 15th meeting, the Federal Open Market Committee of the U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed) lifted its benchmark policy rate by 0.75% to 1.50%–1.75%, the biggest increase since 1994. In addition to hikes in basic interest rates, liquidity conditions in the US economy will also be affected by the shrinking of the Fed's balance...
Read more

Memo to Administrator Power: Five Recommendations for Better USAID Engagement with the World Bank and other MDBs

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 modest degree of cooperation from Treasury and State.
Read more

A Bank for the World: Better Terms and Conditions for Global Public Goods

As one of the only truly global institutions, the World Bank is uniquely positioned to be the world’s premier source funding for global public goods. But despite its global coverage, the World Bank has never truly been oriented towards global challenges. Its mission has been defined primarily by individual developing country problems and priorities. This...
Read more

Replenishing Africa’s Development Fund: A Time for Ambition

he stakes are high for the African Development Fund (AfDF) as it kicks off its replenishment fundraising exercise this spring. Countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are still grappling with the health and economic fallout of the COVID-19 crisis, with over 30 million of their citizens pushed into poverty since the onset of pandemic.
Read more

How We Can Put SDRs to Work in the Fight Against Climate Change—The Multilateral Development Bank Option

Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) are sitting idle in many countries’ central banks. With a political push and some technical innovation, they can be put to good use at the multilateral development banks (MDBs) to accelerate the fight against climate change.
Read more

How We Can Put SDRs to Work in the Fight Against Climate Change—The Multilateral Development Bank Option

In the midst of a crisis, Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) are sitting idle in many countries’ central banks. With a political push and some technical innovation, they can be put to good use at the multilateral development banks (MDBs) to accelerate the fight against climate change.
Read more

Message to Donors: The African Development Fund Replenishment Needs Ambition

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.
Read more

Paving the Way for Greener Central Banks. Current Trends and Future Developments around the Globe

Climate change has quickly become one of the most pressing challenges of our society. Financial actors could play a key role in supporting and fostering a shift towards a low-carbon economy.
Read more

Country Platforms and Delivery of Global Public Goods

This paper discusses three potential requirements for country platforms to facilitate effective delivery of GPGs. We propose that existing country platforms be repurposed to coordinate the contribution of domestic and external stakeholders to GPG delivery efforts at the country level. For this proposed approach to be successful, an explicit link must be introduced between country-level...
Read more

How Could Country Platforms Facilitate the Delivery of Global Public Goods?

Ongoing and looming global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change have brought renewed attention to the delivery of global public goods (GPGs)—goods that benefit the entire world and can only be provided through cooperation between countries, like public health, climate action, and peace and security. At the same time, it has become...
Read more

A guide to multilateral development banks

The mandates and operations of multilateral development banks (MDBs) have evolved and expanded in recent decades. Many were created in the 1960s, during the period of decolonisation, while others came into being after the end of the Cold War to support reconstruction, development and regional integration.
Read more

Providing global public goods: what role for the multilateral development banks?

More Insights
From the MDBs

The latest reform updates and announcements from the multilateral development banks.

View all
In the News

Weekly news round-up to keep you in the loop on the MDB reform agenda.

View the latest news
Research and Analysis

All viewpoints are welcome.

View all