IDA, the World Bank’s concessional fund, was set up 1960 to provide affordable finance to countries with the smallest economies, lowest per capita incomes and lowest creditworthiness. The goal was to help those countries to grow faster and more equally and thereby sustainably to reduce poverty. IDA ...

Does governance matter for the long-run financing and effectiveness the multilateral development banks? Does their system of weighted voting matter for their long-run access to financing and their effectiveness as development institutions? Does the voting structure involve some tradeoff between the ...

Globalization is under attack in the West. The debate among pundits is no longer about whether globalization is to blame or not. It is about why globalization is now the bugaboo it has become. A common thread are changes, for the worse, in the economic and social standing of the Western middle class...

In the wake of the global financial crisis, the IMF undertook a series of reforms to its lending facilities to manage volatility and help prevent future crises. The reforms included the adoption of two new lending instruments: the Flexible Credit Line (FCL), introduced in 2009, and the&nbs...

This paper addresses four misconceptions (or ‘myths’) that have likely played a role in the limited utilization of the IMF’s two precautionary credit lines, the Flexible Credit Line (FCL) and the Precautionary and Liquidity Line (PLL). These myths are 1) too stringent qualific...

Recognizing the growing global premium on environmental sustainability in a climate-challenged world, we call on member governments of the World Bank to take the first step in that direction by renaming the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) as the International Bank for Re...

The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) was established to provide large-scale grant funding to poor, well-governed countries to support their efforts to reduce poverty and generate economic growth.  However, the statutory definition of which countries are “poor” for the purposes...