Currency risk is stifling climate finance for developing countries. It should – and can – be mitigated
By Ruurd Brouwer, CEO, TCX, and Barry Eichengreen, Professor of Economics and Political Science, University of California, Berkeley
Private-sector funding will be essential for raising the trillions of dollars needed to finance climate-change abatement and adaption projects in emerging and developing countries. The question is: will that finance be forthcoming?
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Cascading climate risks are a threat Latin America must take seriously
By Will Nichols, Head of Climate and Resilience Risk, Verisk Maplecroft
Record temperatures, wildfires, storms and floods have all made headlines in 2023 as the world braces for a new climate reality. But the secondary impacts of these climate shocks cannot be ignored.
Governments and business organisations in Latin America must ask difficult questions about the relationships between climate impacts and secondary risks, including:
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Opinion: The World Bank’s Evolution Is a Chance to Accelerate the End of Extreme Poverty
By Shameran Abed, Executive Director, BRAC International and Joanne Carter, Executive Director, RESULTS/RESULTS Educational Fund
The World Bank is evolving, but can it widen its mandate without losing focus on ending extreme poverty?
Cascading crises that include COVID-19, the Ukraine war, rising inflation, and climate extremes are making the fight against poverty ever more complex. Presented with this shifting landscape, we must support the World Bank’s efforts to evolve to better support governments in driving sustainable development.
However, in a world where lack of prioritisation over recent years has already led to a slowing of poverty reduction, the Bank must ensure its evolutions do not result in losing further momentum towards this goal.
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Une ambition renouvelée pour la coopération pour le développement à l’OCDE
Par María del Pilar Garrido Gonzalo, Directrice de la coopération pour le développement à l’OCDE
Le récent sommet de Paris pour un Nouveau Pacte Financier Mondial a tourné une page de la coopération pour le développement écrite en 1944 à Bretton Woods. Créés alors, la Banque internationale pour la reconstruction et le développement (BIRD) et le Fonds monétaire international (FMI) avaient un champ d’action limité pour un monde qui comptait moins d’une centaine de pays indépendants. Les priorités étaient la reconstruction de l’Europe et l’équilibre des balances de paiements, comme en témoigne le prêt pionnier de la BIRD à la France. Depuis, le monde a considérablement évolué, avec plus de 150 pays aspirant au statut de pays à revenu élevé, plus de 650 millions de personnes en situation d’extrême pauvreté, et des défis urgents liés au changement climatique et à la perte de biodiversité.
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A renewed ambition for development co-operation at the OECD
By María del Pilar Garrido Gonzalo, Director, Development Co-operation directorate, OECD
The recent Paris Summit for a New Global Financing Pact turned a page of the development co-operation history that was written in Bretton Woods in 1944. Back then, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were founded with a limited scope, catering to a world of fewer than a hundred independent countries. The focus was on Europe’s reconstruction and balance of payments, illustrated by France’s pioneering IBRD loan. However, the landscape has drastically changed, with over 150 countries striving for high-income status, more than 650 million people in extreme poverty, and urgent challenges stemming from climate change and biodiversity loss.
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Social contracts and social dialogue: A missing link
By Laura Alfers, Director, Social Protection Programme, WIEGO – Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing
Social contracts – the implicit agreements between citizens, the state, workers and enterprises on how to distribute power and resources in pursuit of common goals – are leaving too many workers around the globe without access to social or labour protections. And, while much of the debate about how best to provide these protections focuses on issues like financing, appropriate regulation and policy design – something central to the process of social contract formation is often left out or emerges as an afterthought. That is social dialogue.
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LDC Graduation: Stories of smooth transition
By Ratnakar Adhikari, Executive Director of the Enhanced Integrated Framework Executive Secretariat at the World Trade Organization
Of the 46 least developed countries (LDCs), 16 are at different stages of graduation. And, though graduation offers many opportunities, it also presents its own unique challenges for countries in this category. As such, various international support measures (ISMs) have been put in place, or extended, to ensure smoother transitions and sustained developmental progress in the post-graduation phase.
Two key concerns for LDCs following graduation involve: preferential market access for export, and development assistance, such as concessional financing.
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Getting the balance right between ideas and operations in Multilateral Development Banks
By Rabah Arezki, director of research at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), senior fellow at the Foundation for Studies and Research on International Development (FERDI) and Harvard Kennedy School, former Chief Economist and Vice President at the African Development Bank and former Chief Economist at the World Bank’s Middle East and North Africa region.
Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) have been in the news a lot lately. Leaders have called upon them to step up and help solve some of the world’s most pressing problems such as climate change, the debt crisis and fragility. The discussion on increasing the lending volume committed by MDBs has been at the centre of the policy agenda. But to achieve impact, MDBs must get the balance right between ideas and operations.
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Breaking the chains: how to overcome gender biases for true equality
By Pierre de Boisséson, Economist, and Hyeshin Park, Gender Programme Co-ordinator, OECD Development Centre
We all have biases when it comes to gender roles. From pre-conceived ideas about the kinds of roles men and women take on at home to the types of jobs for which they are suited. Shockingly, a significant portion of the population believes that men should have more rights and opportunities than women. While easily overlooked, these outdated ideas actually have staggering socio-economic ripple effects – limiting women’s agency and costing societies billions, if not trillions, of dollars in lost GDP.
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What does Climate Risk really mean for African economies?
By Anzetse Were, Development Economist and Senior Economist, FSD Kenya
Discussions on green and climate finance in Africa often dwell on two issues. The first is why it’s so difficult to scale-up this type of financing on the continent. The second is the issue of layered risk: some are not keen to layer ‘ESG’ risk on top of ‘Africa’ risk in investments.
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