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...

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the deepest global recession since World War II. Countries across the world implemented substantial mitigation measures in response to the economic shock of the pandemic, with the size of the economic stimulus measures averaging about 5.6 percent of GDP. Social pro...

Dana Hyde showed tremendous leadership and wisdom as the fourth head of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), serving for nearly three years during President Obama’s second term. These brief notes on her leadership are our way of providing a tribute to her major contributions to MCC’s effectiv...

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...

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...

The Sustainable Development Goals commit the world to ending extreme poverty by 2030. More cautiously, the World Bank’s twin goals suggest it can help reduce extreme poverty to 3 percent by 2030. Neither goal can be accomplished unless the extreme poverty line is (finally) fixed rather than constant...

Forecasts of the future shape of the global economy, if they are at least somewhat accurate, can help planning and policy discussions in areas from global governance through business expansion plans. At the same time, this relies on forecasts in fact being somewhat accurate, and it’s a cliché that p...