Why should multilateral lending exist in a world where private capital markets are well developed and governments have their own bilateral aid programmes? If lending by the World Bank, IMF, and regional development banks has an independent rationale, it must rest on advantages generated by the...

How is lending to developing countries from bilateral and multilateral creditors affected by sovereign defaults? The existing empirical literature on reputational costs of defaults focuses on lending from private creditors. Many developing countries, however, mostly rely on grants and loans from...

As we witness profound changes in the global economy, and as it becomes apparent that the so-called “Revived Bretton Woods System” may be nothing more than a temporary non sustainable financing of the US structural internal imbalance, favored by the global role of the dollar, which has...

Multilateral development finance is at a critical juncture. In the past 70 years, it has developed through four distinct stages. The Bretton Woods conference established the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in 1944 to finance post-war reconstruction and stabilize the global...

Efforts to realize the issue of development-focused Special Drawing Rights (SDR) by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have been on-going for many years. Recently, however, the campaign first gained a new momentum immediately after the Asian financial crises with the new liquidity problems of...

Climate change poses three specific but interrelated policy challenges: climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation (which includes building up resilience) and managing transition risks. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a multilateral institution with global reach and...

The total funding envelope for World Bank projects is often divided among various state and non-state actors, each of which can have competing ideas about or interests in the project. How does the division of financing relate to overall project effectiveness? I argue that too many funding...

Multilateral development finance is at a critical juncture. In the past 70 years, it has developed through four distinct stages. The Bretton Woods conference established the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in 1944 to finance post-war reconstruction and stabilize the global...

This paper tests the effect of sovereign debt structure on default likelihood. Sovereign debt structure is identified on the basis of maturity, creditor type and currency composition. The paper uses panel logit model to estimate the likelihood of default. The results provide evidence that...

In this paper, we examine the effect of IMF (imposed) programs on countries income inequality for the period 1963-2015. To deal with selection bias, we use a potential outcomes framework, which does not rely on the selection of matching variables and has the further advantage of uncovering the...