Four years ago, the G-7 pushed through an unprecedented initiative forcing the international financial institutions to cancel 100 percent of their outstanding debt claims on the world’s poorest countries. Through the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI), these heavily indebted poor...

Zimbabwe is embarking on a long, complex, and difficult journey to rebuild its economy, which has been shattered by years of neglect and destructive government policies. If the final political hurdles are overcome? hopefully sooner rather than later—the new coalition government will be faced...

The people of Southern Sudan are scheduled to vote in a referendum on whether to remain unified with the central government in Khartoum or break away to form a new, fully independent country. While the Khartoum government remains committed to a unified Sudan, all indications suggest that the...

This paper focuses on how budgetary scorekeeping systems affect governments’ ability or willingness to support innovative development finance initiatives and explores several options to overcome the restrictions the systems often impose. As a starting point, it assumes that donor governments,...

In this working paper, the authors introduce an MDG Progress Index to assess how on or off track countries are toward MDG targets. They find evidence of dramatic achievements by many poor countries, such as Honduras, Laos, Ethiopia, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Nepal, Cambodia, and Ghana. These...

With the Millennium Development Goals deadline only five years away, the international donor community faces significant challenges due to the global economic crisis, record government deficits, and simultaneous funding requests from nearly every multilateral development institution. This paper...

The World Food Programme has world-class logistics, but its ability to manage financial risk is extremely limited. The WFP procures 100 percent of its food through spot markets, which subjects it to substantial commodity and transport price risks and significant delays delivering food. Relying...

After a decade of economic and political reforms that dramatically altered the structure of economies in Latin America, poverty and high inequality remain deeply entrenched. Integration into the global economy in the 1990s brought increased prosperity only to a small minority of households in...

This paper applies a new approach to the estimation of the impact of policy, both the levels and the changes, on wage differentials using a new high-quality data set on wage differentials by schooling level for 18 Latin American countries for the period 1977-1998. The results indicate that...

In this working paper I define inclusive growth as growth conducive to increasing the size and economic command of the middle class. I suggest a definition of the middle class based on absolute and relative measures of country-based income distributions, and present evidence of change in the...