The IMF’s Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust (PRGT) faces large financing needs. Unprecedented levels of lending since the start of the pandemic – four to five times higher than before the pandemic – have seriously depleted the PRGT’s subsidy resources. If these are not replenished, the PRGT’s lendi...

The UK government has significantly expanded its development finance beyond ODA. The strategic use of guarantees, export finance, and other instruments is not a substitute for grants to the poorest, but instead offers the prospect of mobilising significant lending to developing countries, which can ...

Higher levels of fiscal redistribution, through income taxes and direct transfers, increase the probability of achieving inclusive growth. To spur inclusive growth in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, countries with limited fiscal space will need to focus on improving efficiency and reallocate ex...

Across several African countries, there has been a troubling trend of infrastructure being stripped to sell as scrap metal. People have been arrested for ripping out and selling rail sleepers in South Africa and Ghana, pylon and copper wires in Uganda, and streetlamp meters in Liberia. That strippin...

Public and policy discourse has been imprecise in its definition of what constitutes a global public good, with implications for our understanding of how MDBs contribute to them. Once this is corrected for, it becomes apparent that, except under restrictive conditions that are unlikely to hold in th...

The principle of a “just transition” is anchored in the 2015 Paris Agreement. But only in recent years has the principle been fully recognized as an enabler and accelerator of power decarbonization efforts by integrating measures that aim to mitigate the direct, indirect, and induced adverse impacts...

While the Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETPs) for South Africa and Indonesia appear to deliver a blueprint for the move away from coal, barriers, risks, and gaps call into question whether their targets can be delivered at the planned pace and scale.