In recent years public budgets have become an increasingly prominent issue in the international development debate. For one thing, more and more countries are developing poverty reduction strategies (PRS) or similar national development agendas that need to be translated into medium-term...

Adaptation to climate change is an inevitable challenge, especially in developing countries. Recent calculations show that costs of adaptation and corresponding needs for financial support are high. The international community therefore has to face urgent questions on how to meet these financial...

Programme-based approaches, including sector and general budget support, are core elements of the Paris Agenda for more effective aid. This agenda emerged from an intense international debate that has since the mid 1990s centred mainly on modalities and instruments best suited to improving the...

Multi-Donor Budget Support (MDBS) has its origins in the critique of traditional aid interventions and is aimed at overcoming related deficiencies of aid by avoiding parallel administrative and decision making structures. It is commonly understood not merely as a financing instrument but also as...

The Sachs Report is innovative in that it develops strategies designed to dynamize the economies of the poorest developing countries with ”investments to empower poor people”. It develops and points to approaches for ”pro-poor growth” policies. Yet international development policy would...

Developing countries will be severely affected by the financial crisis. Emerging economies are already suffering from capital outflows and a sudden credit stop. In many low-income countries the financial crisis is exacerbating the ongoing food price crisis, which has already had disastrous...

The development finance system is becoming increasingly complex. New actors and instruments are being created with enormous speed and ingenuity. Yet the multilateral development banks still account for a large share of the public resources used for development finance. Of these, the World Bank...