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Blog Post
April 28, 2022
In the past two years, we have all learned that the end of a COVID-19 wave is the end of a chapter, not the end of the story. Ongoing COVID transmission means the risk of new variants of pandemic potential is ever present and vaccination remains our best defence. The primary near-term challenges for...
Blog Post
April 25, 2022
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.
Blog Post
April 05, 2022
Ukraine has close to $2.7 billion in principal and interest payments due to the World Bank and IMF in 2022. The government of Ukraine should not be expected to repay its debt to the international financial institutions (IFIs) while it is mobilizing all its resources to fend off the Russian invasion...
Blog Post
March 31, 2022
The effort to recycle unneeded SDRs from wealthy countries to poor countries was dealt a major setback in an omnibus spending deal recently passed by the US Congress. The final measure failed to include language authorizing the US Treasury to recycle 15 billion SDRs, worth about $21 billion, to the ...
Blog Post
March 07, 2022
With Russia’s attack on Ukraine raging and most of the world imposing severe financial sanctions on Russia, attention has turned to whether Russia could use its allocation of special drawing rights to bolster its foreign reserves and finance its war effort. The answer is yes, in principle, but ...
Blog Post
February 23, 2022
On August 23rd, 2021, the IMF allocated $650 billion of Special Drawing Rights to its member countries, in proportion to their quotas. Yet many decried that the distribution of the new allocation was not aimed at those countries that needed it the most. Something had to be done, quickly, t...