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World Bank
CGD maintains an active program of research and analysis of the World Bank, the world’s largest development institution and a leading source of funds, ideas, and expertise for development. The Center’s work in this area offers new ideas and practical suggestions for making the World Bank more effective, accountable, and legitimate in a rapidly changing global economy. Recent work includes the High Level Panel on Future of Multilateral Development Banking: Exploring a New Policy Agenda, building on past work on the future of the World Bank. That work focused on priorities for incoming World Bank presidents, improvements to the leadership selection process, and work on the future of IDA, the Bank’s concessional lending arm.
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With Jim Kim’s abrupt departure from the World Bank, there has been a swirl of commentary on questions of legacy, the best of which aim to answer the question, “how is the bank doing?” For large multilateral institutions like the World Bank, that’s a frustratingly difficult question to answer. Seemingly objective measures like volume of financing or sectoral targets are simplistic and bring their own value judgements about what the institution should be doing. Annual reports give us a narrative about institutional performance, but a heavily biased one.
In 2019/2020 donor governments are anticipated to pledge up to $170 billion to various multilateral organisations as part of their replenishment cycles. This unusual bunching of replenishments of some of the largest organisations in 2019 provides an opportunity to think more coherently about multilateral funding and to address key systemic problems, such as overlapping mandates and under-funding of some parts of the system.

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