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One of the things that makes development assistance less effective than it might be is fragmentation: many donors providing small amount of assistance to a country, each mission head demanding their photo with a minister, many demanding different reports and procedures and providing overlapping or c...

ODA has increased more quickly but six providers are spending at least a third of their ODA domestically. Refugee hosting costs are the main driver. We argue that ODA has become polluted with items of limited relevance to developing countries welfare; and urge the parties to consider proposals that ...

Every year I do this teaching, I am given cause to reflect on Richard Feynman’s advice: to really understand something, teach it. Though some questions come up time and again, every year there are a few I’d never heard before, every year an argument or an example that is new to me. Teaching older st...

Without a workforce that can meet the demand of the green transition, countries will struggle to meet their ambitious climate goals.

It almost didn’t happen, but at the eleventh hour, negotiators at COP29 in Baku were able to finalise an agreement that wealthy countries would provide at least $300 billion annually to developing countries by 2035. On the face of it, a tripling of the previous $100 billion goal sounds impressive. A...

2024 has been a great year so far for getting lead (pb) on the international agenda, with the launch by USAID and UNICEF of the Partnership for a Lead-Free Future. But only a brief passing mention to 7 percent of global GDP in a set of UN documents on chemical regulation suggests that we still have ...

This week, President-elect Trump said he would impose a 25 percent tariff on all goods coming from Mexico and Canada, effectively disregarding the North American free trade agreement (USMCA) that he made a priority to renegotiate in his first term. The USMCA has a review clause where the three count...

My colleagues and I are preparing a series of blogs on the Biden administration’s global development agenda over the past 3 ½ years, with analysis on how the next Trump administration could affect its legacy. For the second piece in this series, we look at the outgoing administration’s record on hea...

There is a broad consensus that achieving the SDGs and addressing the costs of climate change in developing countries will require substantial financial resources. In this blog post, we argue that while mobilizing additional financing is challenging, effectively absorbing and utilizing these additio...

For too long disasters have been considered unexpected and unforeseeable. A force majeure on a country’s development and fiscal planning. This has led to governments largely taking a reactive approach to financing the response, recovery, and reconstruction from disasters. However, the data and scien...