The basic narrative on climate change between the rich and poor worlds has been problematic. The focus on emissions has made industrial countries inadequately sensitive to the unmet energy needs in developing countries. And it has led developing countries to adopt the rhetoric of recrimination...

The paper sets out two views of the facts about the effects of globalization on world poverty and inequality. The bottom line: globalization is not the cause, but neither is it the solution to world poverty and inequality. The paper then explores why and how the global economy is stacked against...

This paper argues that regional public goods in developing countries are under-funded despite their potentially high rates of return compared to traditional country-focused investments. Regional public goods only receive about 2.0-3.5 percent out of total ODA annually according to the definition...

Latin America is marked by high and persistent inequality in income, schooling, and land ownership. In such an unequal environment, the powerful are likely to dominate politics and push for policies that protect their privileges rather than foster competition and growth. As a result, changes in...

The new millennium brought renewed attention to improving the health of women and children. In this same period, direct deaths from conflicts have declined worldwide, but civilian deaths associated with conflicts have increased. Nigeria is among the most conflict-prone countries in sub-Saharan...

In the run-up to the December 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, the authors surveyed members of the international development community with a special interest in climate change on three sets of detailed questions: (1) what action different country groups should take to limit climate change;...

Despite increasing volatility in the global economy, the uptake of the IMF's two precautionary credit lines, the Flexible Credit Line (FCL) and the Precautionary and Liquidity Line (PLL), has remained limited — currently to just four countries. The two new lending instruments were created in...

How should the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) respond to the challenges of the new century? As recently as the early 1990s, governments and policymakers in Latin America and the Caribbean relied on the IDB and other multilateral institutions not only as important sources of finance but...

After a decade of economic reforms that dramatically altered the structure of economies in Latin America, making them more open and more competitive, and a decade of substantial increases in public spending on education, health and other social programs in virtually all countries, poverty and...

Increasing integration has made the great challenge of reducing poverty and advancing human development more achievable than ever, and more dependent than ever on good global economic governance. In this paper I set out the economic logic for why good global economic governance matters for...