Marginal abatement cost curves, which suggest the cheapest approaches to reducing carbon emissions, are out of favor in international climate finance discussions because they are not good tools to use when thinking about systemic and urgent change. On the other hand, international financing studies ...

There is a non-trivial chance that ODA for non-humanitarian and climate finance will fall in absolute terms over the coming years and that aid will become increasingly focused on richer countries. The most promising strategy for bilateral ODA flows may be to increase the generosity of traditional do...

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...

To meet many of today’s most pressing challenges, we need to find new solutions. But the fastest, cheapest, and most effective way to encourage high-impact innovation isn’t always obvious. Governments, philanthropists, and the private sector typically invest in research and development (R&D) by bett...

High-income countries trying to reach net-zero targets are confronting the fact that existing environmental regulations make it harder to build low-carbon infrastructure. Lobbying groups in the US, for example, are using regulatory tools to block geothermal, solar, and wind facilities. Providing sub...

We develop scenarios for the shape of the global economy in 2050 building on a simple regression of the historic relationship between current income and lagged income, demographic features, climate, and education, using the coefficients to develop a “central” forecast and error terms to set high and...

This paper explores how and whether responses to COVID-19, particularly from non-DAC actors, have deepened the transition from an “international” to a “global” development paradigm, and it considers implications for the future of development cooperation.