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International Institutions
CGD research explores how international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, multilateral development banks, and other international development agencies can become more responsive to the needs of developing countries. The Center’s work concerns itself with the future of these institutions, all of which are facing shifts in demand for their traditional services, the emergence of new institutions, and reform of their leadership selection processes.
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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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