The United States government has made repeated declarations over the last decade to align its assistance programs behind developing countries’ priorities. By utilizing public attitude surveys for 42 African and Latin American countries, this paper examines how well the US has implemented this...

In recent years, a number of private foundations and organizations have launched ambitious initiatives to support promising entrepreneurs in developing countries, on both a for-profit and not-for-profit basis. Many of these programs have focused exclusively on building business capacity. While...

Even under conservative assumptions, IDA will likely face a wave of country graduations by 2025. We project that it will lose more than half of its client countries and that the total population living in IDA-eligible countries will plunge by two-thirds. The remaining IDA-eligible countries will...

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...

In this paper, four categories of existing resource-mobilization options are examined, including (1) transportation levies; (2) currency and financial transaction taxes; (3) capitalization of IMF Special Drawing Rights (SDRs); and (4) the sale, mobilization, or capitalization of IMF gold....

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...

In September, world leaders will assemble in New York to review progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Ahead of the ensuing discussions, we examine how individual countries are faring towards achieving the highly ambitious MDG targets. We outline a new MDG Progress Index,...

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...