For In Development with Erin Collinson. The U.S. is now operating an aid program without an aid agency. It isn’t going so well.

A blog for CGD. Hopefully there’s about to be a lot more effective-altruist-adjacent philanthropic money around. My pitch on spending it: vaccinate everyone against everything all the time.

A note for CGD. The early period of China’s Belt and Road initiative involved significant sovereign lending, much of it directed to poorer developing countries, with considerable support for major infrastructure projects. A number of those projects generated healthy economic returns, but the lending was comparatively expensive and non-transparent, and so increasingly financially unsustainable. The…

An article for the German journal Welternährung. More on emigration as a growth strategy, with some German examples. Also available in German.

A CGD note and blog with (mostly by) Euan Ritchie. If you are going to change ODA income eligibility lower the threshold and make it PPP (we live in hope).

A CGD blog. The private sector should be engaged with the World Bank Group. But this necessary and important relationship needs guardrails and these are being tested by a closer relationship between firms and World Bank leadership, as well as reforms to bring the Bank Group’s private and public sector arms closer together.

An article for In Development. Lower income countries need a new path to rapid growth. Higher income countries need workers. It’s a match made in heaven. Part- subject of an Effective Altruism Forum discussion.

A CGD Policy Paper. The IFC has the potential to be a macroeconomically significant player in the world’s poorest countries that most need a more vibrant private sector. Sadly, however, it provides very little finance to firms in those countries. The IDA Private Sector Window was designed to help that problem by subsidizing both IFC…

A CGD blog. We need an honest reckoning: about what is affordable, about where it makes more sense for the public sector to directly invest, about more realistic ways to spark structural transformation in the poorest countries-and about the role of development finance institutions.