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Blog Post
April 03, 2023
The World Bank shouldn’t become a dedicated climate bank: that’s not what its client countries want, and the global development agenda (the D in IBRD and IDA) is still urgent. But, with additional finance, the Bank could play an important part in the global response to the climate challenge. That sh...
Blog Post
March 20, 2023
I’m very grateful to Olivier de Schutter, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, for his discussion of Zack Gehan and my paper on future growth forecasts and poverty in 2050. There is much to agree with in his analysis, but I’d disagree with his statement “our focus should be on...
Blog Post
March 20, 2023
In the next few weeks, the OECD will release its estimate of ODA—Official Development Assistance—provided by member countries, and will no doubt claim yet another record high. But this inflated measure has lost its credibility, in large part because its definition is governed solely by ODA-providing...
Blog Post
March 15, 2023
In a recent note, Zack Gehan and I used a database of World Bank projects to examine the association between World Bank project types and environmental review procedures and project preparation times. We found that policy lending projects are significantly faster to design, while projects that under...
Blog Post
March 14, 2023
The World Bank’s Evolution Roadmap suggests the institution could provide more grants and subsidies to activities that support the provision of global public goods (GPGs), particularly in richer developing countries. Provision of those public goods is surely a priority: avoiding future pandemics and...
Blog Post
March 06, 2023
I'm not a huge fan of arbitrary lines through country income levels to create income thresholds. That is because there is no obvious clustering of countries within the global (country-level) income distribution, and moving from one income status to another does not correlate with trend breaks or end...
Blog Post
March 06, 2023
In a new paper, Zack Gehan and I present scenarios for the global economy in 2050. These scenarios build on a forecast of economic growth built around income, population, education, and temperature. The process suggests a considerable degree of uncertainty about how the world will look in three de...