A CGD blog. The dialogue around World Bank reform proposals has been dominated by Northern voices. But in the last week, representatives of World Bank Group client countries both based in the city and visiting for the World Bank-IMF Spring Meetings have helped to rebalance the discussion.

A CGD blog. The world has never been more educated, our populations more connected. Technological advance in areas from solar and fusion power through batteries to satellites and cancer vaccines will help deliver sustained development. Ending extreme ($2.15 a day) poverty, while long overdue, is on a trajectory…

A CGD blog. The World Bank shouldn’t become a dedicated climate bank: that’s not what its client countries want, and the global development agenda (the D in IBRD and IDA) is still urgent. But, with additional finance, the Bank could play an important part in the global response to the climate challenge. That sh…

A CGD blog. I’m very grateful to Olivier de Schutter, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, for his discussion of Zack Gehan and my paper on future growth forecasts and poverty in 2050. There is much to agree with in his analysis, but I’d disagree with his statement “our focus should be…

A CGD blog with Ian Mitchell. In the next few weeks, the OECD will release its estimate of ODA-Official Development Assistance-provided by member countries, and will no doubt claim yet another record high. But this inflated measure has lost its credibility, in large part because its definition is governed solely by ODA-providing…

A CGD blog. In a recent note, Zack Gehan and I used a database of World Bank projects to examine the association between World Bank project types and environmental review procedures and project preparation times. We found that policy lending projects are significantly faster to design, while projects that under…

A CGD blog. I’m not a huge fan of arbitrary lines through country income levels to create income thresholds. That is because there is no obvious clustering of countries within the global (country-level) income distribution, and moving from one income status to another does not correlate with trend breaks or end…

A CGD blog. In a new paper, Zack Gehan and I present scenarios for the global economy in 2050. These scenarios build on a forecast of economic growth built around income, population, education, and temperature. The process suggests a considerable degree of uncertainty about how the world will look in three de…..

A CGD blog. The Sustainable Development Goals commit the world to ending extreme poverty by 2030. More cautiously, the World Bank’s twin goals suggest it can help reduce extreme poverty to 3 percent by 2030. Neither goal can be accomplished unless the extreme poverty line is (finally) fixed rather than constant…

A CGD blog. Forecasts of the future shape of the global economy, if they are at least somewhat accurate, can help planning and policy discussions in areas from global governance through business expansion plans. At the same time, this relies on forecasts in fact being somewhat accurate, and it’s a cliche that p…