Recent Posts
A Valentine’s Day Gift for the AfDB’s Campaign for SDR Recycling—But Now We Need More Heart
February 15, 2023Months 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 more heart and put aside the legal blockage to recycling outside the IMF. The African Development Bank (AfDB) took a big step forward in recycling special drawing rights (SDRs) yesterday (February 14), when their staff [...]
A Bigger Mission Must Mean More Financial Ambition at the World Bank
February 6, 2023Building on a roadmap requested by its shareholders, the World Bank’s board and management are discussing updates this week to its mission to respond to the global transboundary challenges threatening human prosperity. It is more evident than ever that climate change, biodiversity loss, pandemic risks, and conflict matter profoundly for development—which would make it devastating if shareholders miss this chance to transform the Bank by thinking too small. The largest Bank shareholders have embraced calls for truly ambitious action to meet this once-in-a-generation opportunity. In October 2022, the G7 with [...]
The World Needs a Green Bank
February 1, 2023Humanity is losing the climate battle, and existing international institutions are not delivering on climate change. Hence, there is a need for a new international institution that would be a repository for global knowledge on climate change, and would advise governments on climate policies, develop green projects across the Global South, mobilize financing for those projects, and support project implementation. The proposed Green Bank would be different from existing multilateral development banks: (1) it would include private shareholders as well as governments; (2) voting rights would be organized so that countries of [...]
The New Model IFC Still Isn’t a Good Deal for IDA Countries
December 7, 2022In September 2019, I wrote a blog asking “Is the New Model IFC a Good Deal for IDA Countries?” It noted that the International Finance Corporation, the private sector investment arm of the World Bank Group, had stopped handing over some of its profits to IDA, the part of the World Bank Group that makes low-interest loans and grants to governments of the world’s poorest countries. Instead, IDA had started providing cash to help finance IFC deals in IDA-eligible countries—through the Private Sector Window (PSW). The net effect: [In 2011,] [...]