Nancy Birdsall urges Senator Leahy to support approval by the United States of the proposed new lending instrument at the World Bank, Program for Results Financing (P4R).
In this working paper, the authors examine four categories of existing resource-mobilization options and recommend which might best be used to finance global public goods.
By 2025, the number of IDA client countries will likely shrink substantially and primarily be smaller in size and overwhelmingly African. This working paper predicts how these changes will impact IDA's operational and financial models and recommends the World Bank begin addressing the implications of these developments sooner rather than later.
This paper offers a proposal to improve performance-based allocation systems of International Development Association (IDA) donors and others to better address the needs of fragile states and better link development allocations with performance.
CGD research fellow Ben Leo estimates that the World Bank could provide an extra $7.5 billion to the poorest countries over the next three years by adjusting the balance sheets of IDA and IBRD, its main lending arms.
In this CGD Essay, Birdsall and Subramianian argue that the World Bank faces twin crises of relevance and legitimacy in a rapidly changing world. The solution, they argue, is for the bank to become a more active catalyst for generating global public goods and knowledge and a more reluctant lender to governments. The World Bank should move, in effect, from being a bank to being a global development cooperative. The essay suggests specific, practical steps for such reforms.
This CGD working group report offers five practical recommendations for strengthening the International Development Association (IDA)--the World Bank's soft-loan facility for the world's poorest countries--as donors begin replenishment talks that will shape IDA's course from mid-2008 through mid-2011. Among the recommendations: affirm IDA's central role in the international aid system; focus on core tasks; don't hold IDA hostage to broader geopolitical issues; get serious about finding ways to help fragile states; and sharpen incentives for performance.Learn more
CGD's online survey of views on selecting the World Bank's next president received nearly 700 responses from people representing 71 nations; all world regions; high-, middle- and low-income countries; a variety of professional affiliations; and all adult age groups. In a new working paper analyzing evidence from the survey, CGD senior fellow David Wheeler finds that despite the participants' diversity, they displayed striking uniformity in their preference for an open, competitive selection process, their weighting of selection criteria, and their assessment of potential candidates for president of the World Bank--including the U.S. nominee, Robert Zoellick.Learn more
In this Essay, CGD president Nancy Birdsall describes the World Bank as a global club with a structure close to that of a credit union in which the members are nations. Its mission, as originally conceived–-to promote broadly shared and sustainable global prosperity--serves the common interests of all its country members. In light of this idea of the Bank as a global credit club, Birdsall addresses the issues that arise with respect to its current governance structure and how these issues affect the Bank's legitimacy, effectiveness and relevance in the global system.
Critics allege that the World Bank is deeply flawed. Yet the world needs a strong World Bank to help manage development and the related global challenges of the 21st century. Do the Bank's shortcomings put its future at risk? If so, can the Bank be rescued? Rescuing the World Bank, a new book that includes a CGD working group report and selected essays edited by CGD president Nancy Birdsall, offers timely perspectives on challenges that are crucial to the Bank’s future success.
Time to put to rest the stale debate over whether the World Bank should disburse grants or loans to the world’s poorest countries. It is critical that the Bank provide more of its funding as grants, but in a more rational manner than has been the case to date. A third Bank window should distribute grants – and grants only – to very poor countries, for example, with incomes below $500 per capita. Shifting to grants-only for the very poorest countries would ensure they never again find themselves with unpayable debt burdens, and would allow them to re-invest resources into their own economies rather than repay the Bank.
This report was prepared by a Working Group convened by the Center for Global Development to identify key priorities the Paul Wolfowitz at the start of his tenure at the World Bank on June 1, 2005. It argues that Wolfowitz's biggest challenge will not be managing the Bank, with its 10,000 staff, but leading its shareholders, the nations of the world. The report offers five bold but practical recommendations for restoring the legitimacy and increasing the effectiveness of the world's largest development institution.
A Better Globalization: Legitimacy, Governance, and Reform by Kemal Dervis is a reformist manifesto that argues that gradual institutional change can produce beneficial results if it is driven by an ambitious long-term vision and by a determination to continually widen the limits of the possible.
In this paper I set out the economic logic for why good global economic governance matters for reducing poverty and inequality and argue that a step towards better global governance would be better representation of developing countries in global and regional financial institutions.