Does channeling government-to-person (G2P) payments through bank accounts encourage financial inclusion and use? This paper explores the factors that have driven the adoption of digital payments in India by beneficiaries of PMGKY, the large-scale COVID-19 relief program launched in May 2020.

The stakes are high for the African Development Fund (AfDF) as it kicks off its replenishment fundraising exercise this spring. Countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are still grappling with the health and economic fallout of the COVID-19 crisis, with over 30 million of their citizens pushed into po...

India imposed a lock-down in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 and began a gradual re-opening in June. A telephonic survey in April examined the early effectiveness of information and the massive PMGKY social protection program (Policy Paper 217). This paper analyzes a second-round sur...

As the global financial community considers how to extend debt relief accompanied by IMF adjustment programs to vulnerable low-income countries, the issue of policy conditions for fiscal adjustment will inevitably arise. This paper considers the effectiveness of conditions related to domestic revenu...

Many stress the critical role of the private sector in filling yawning sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) infrastructure finance gaps, only widened by the pandemic. Our paper looks in detail at financially closed (construction-ready) transactions with private participation in SSA from 2007-2020. Despite the “...

This paper discusses three potential requirements for country platforms to facilitate effective delivery of GPGs. We propose that existing country platforms be repurposed to coordinate the contribution of domestic and external stakeholders to GPG delivery efforts at the country level. For this propo...

The pandemic and its economic impact have been a revealing test of the multilateral development bank (MDB) system and of individual MDBs. Although lending by the MDBs as a group rose significantly in 2020 (39 percent), this is much less than the rise in MDB lending in response to the Global Financia...