Japan has an impressive history when it comes to aid, industrial policy, and infrastructure development, both as a country that saw meteoric development of its own, and as a country that has been one of the world's largest donors for decades. Looking towards an uncertain future in which...

The OECD Survey on Blended Finance Funds and Facilities represents a major step forward to consolidate evidence and provide further policy guidance in support of the OECD DAC Blended Finance Principles, whose focus is unlocking commercial finance for the Sustainable Development Goals. This...

This study investigates transition finance in Lebanon, an upper middle-income country in the MENA region transitioning from a significant adverse shock. Lebanon’s development path has been historically non-linear and, most recently, the Syrian conflict adversely affected the country’s...

The development community agrees on the need to address conflict and fragility for global security and sustainable development. In such complex situations, programming should strive to include multiple actors at various levels of society. Although the use of private investment in fragile...

Forced displacement, including refugee flows, is a global phenomenon. As of 2018, 26 million people were refugees. Financing from the international community makes a significant contribution to supporting refugees and host communities. But in order to meet those needs effectively and...

The OECD Survey on Blended Finance Funds and Facilities represents a major step forward to consolidate evidence to inform policy makers and market players in the blended finance field, as they strive to both mobilise and shift financing towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This...

The Addis Ababa Action Agenda raises the urgency to address growing financing and capacity needs at all levels of government in developing countries (para. 34) while the 2030 Agenda calls to “localise” the SDGs. In its High Level Communiqué of 31 October 2017, the DAC stressed that...

Using a new dataset for 41 German non-governmental organizations (NGOs), we analyze the allocation of NGO aid across recipient countries in a Tobit regression framework. By identifying for each NGO the degree of public refinancing, we address the largely unresolved issue of whether financial...

The grant element is the “gift portion” of a financial transaction. The mathematical technique for arriving at a precise grant element percentage was first proposed by John Pincus of the RAND Corporation in 1963, and developed mathematically by Göran Ohlin of the Development Centre in 1966....