Following the chaotic Copenhagen conference of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), policymakers and pundits have discussed the G-20 as an alternative forum for advancing climate change diplomacy. This paper assesses the risks and rewards of tackling climate change in the G-20...

To what extent do the World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank remain central today and how much influence do they still wield in shaping the global agenda? While several studies have traced the development of various intergovernmental organizations (IGOs),...

Of the dozen or so issues on the agenda when the Group of Seven held its annual meeting in Cologne in June, 1999, few captured the attention of the world as much as debt relief for the poorest and most indebted nations. In the past half-decade, wide-ranging and active support has developed for...

We present a two-step approach of assessing whether major donors of foreign aid have met recent demands for less proliferated and better coordinated aid efforts. First, we calculate Theil indices revealing the concentration of each donor's aid on recipient countries and specific aid sectors....

In this paper we update previous work that categorizes foreign aid projects in terms of their likely impact on the natural environment. We then document trends in the global distribution of environmental aid over time and show that environmental aid has increasingly focussed on global...

This paper demonstrates why an increased quantity of funding as claimed by big health lenders is not effective to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). An alternative funding mechanism linking the disbursement of matching grants with a minimum provision level is suggested. In order to...

Against the background of a longstanding discussion of advantages of bilateral and multilateral aid approaches the paper discusses mainly two aspects: (i) The distinction between bilateral and multilateral development cooperation is in practice often not clear. In particular, the EU aid approach...

In 2014 over $60 billion was mobilized to help developing nations mitigate climate change, an amount equivalent to the GDP of Kenya. Interestingly, breaking from the traditional model of bilateral aid, donor countries distributed nearly fifty percent of their aid through multilateral aid funds...

The mixed record on the 2015 Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets and the focus on global public goods in post-MDG debates questions the future of traditional development co-operation (official development assistance, ODA). Meanwhile, international financial crisis and fiscal retrenchment...

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...