The World Bank’s COVID Response

Debt relief for low-income countries is on the table of measures to consider for coronavirus response. The imperative right now is to get cash to LICs as quickly as possible. Suspending some debt service payments may be a good first step in freeing up some budget space for new spending. Beyond that,...

The experience of the 2007 global financial crisis can tell us a few things about how low-income countries could be affected by the coronavirus pandemic in the near term, even as we recognize that the myriad economic problems created by the pandemic are almost certainly greater in number and scale t...

Yesterday the World Bank announced $12 billion in financing available to member countries to respond to the health and economic impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak. There is not much information yet in the public domain on the sources and planned uses for this money, but five questions – each with addi...