Given the urgent financial needs of developing country governments, it's time to reimagine the US Sovereign Loan Guarantee (SLG) program as a means to mitigate debt vulnerabilities and support governments in dire fiscal straits.

We examine the World Bank’s climate portfolio at the project level for the period 2000-2022 and find that financing is skewed towards mitigation projects. These projects lack estimates of greenhouse gas emissions reductions, and there is no standardized reporting on GHG estimates across the portfoli...

The ability of the World Bank to strike an appropriate balance between country demands and global goods depends on the institution’s shareholders. Yet, the deterioration in the bilateral relationship between the United States and China now threatens to undermine effective governance at the instituti...

The first section of this note examines the causes and consequences of Afghanistan’s financial crisis and lays out policy options the international community can support to enable urgent financial flows and restore the basic functioning of the Afghan financial system. The next section examines prosp...

Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis continues to worsen, with the World Food Programme (WFP) reporting that 22.8 million people—more than half the country’s population—are projected to be acutely food insecure in 2022, including 8.7 million at risk of famine-like conditions. Even before the Taliban t...

In the face of sudden economic shocks and natural disasters that limit the ability of economies to rapidly raise revenue, MDBs have the potential to play a leading role in crisis response to minimize the damage. One key factor in their success in this role is the speed of their financing instruments...

Sovereign bond guarantees (SBGs) are an effective but underutilized instrument available to the US government in support of developing country partners. By protecting bond purchasers in the event of a foreign issuer country’s default, SBGs substantially reduce borrowing costs for developing country ...