By Kofi Gunu, Marina Zucker-Marques and Rishikesh Ram Bhandary On March 28, 2025, Myanmar suffered a magnitude 7.7 earthquake, which caused devastating loss of life and property. Current reports put the death toll over 3,400, with 4,671 injured and 214 missing. As survivors continue to tally up the damage from this shock, this much is […]
The current international financial architecture is misaligned with the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement. External financing flows to emerging market and developing economies, excluding China, need to increase by at least $1 trillion annually by 2030, but the highest level in the past decade was roughly one-third of what is […]
In the 2024 United Nations Pact for the Future, global leaders committed to scaling up and reforming international financial institutions to make them fit to meet the global challenges of the 21st century. Moving forward, there are two vital opportunities for the global community to revive global efforts to address these urgent challenges: the Fourth […]
By Naomi Frim-Abrams On February 26, 2025, the Spring 2025 Human Capital Initiative (HCI) Seminar Series at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center hosted Kristopher Velasco, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, to share his work “Queering Repression: How the Global Crackdown on Civil Society Affects LGBT+ NGO Foundings.” Velasco’s research explores how […]
By Tim Hirschel-Burns Financing for Development Conferences – the chief event in the United Nations (UN) system on mobilizing the resources needed to achieve development – don’t come around very often: a decade ago in Addis Ababa, negotiators produced the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, which offered a comprehensive framework to guide development policymaking over the […]
By Chiara Mariotti and Richard Kozul-Wright 2025 will be a pivotal year for development and climate cooperation, with financial matters coming to the fore at a range of key policy events, from the upcoming Finance in Common Summit taking place at the end of February in Cape Town to the 30th United Nations Climate Change […]
International financing for development has persistently fallen short of developing country needs. That gap has widened dramatically with the onset of the climate crisis, where the costs of climate inaction far outweigh the financing needed in developing countries to catalyze low-carbon, socially inclusive and resilient growth trajectories and adapt to climate-related shocks that are already […]
By Tim Hirschel-Burns In late June, the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) will take place in Seville, Spain. Despite challenging geopolitical circumstances, the conference – which is the first in 10 years and almost certainly the last FfD before the critical 2030 milestone – will still play a key normative role as […]
By Tim Hirschel-Burns 2025 admittedly presents a dubious landscape for achieving substantive global economic governance reforms. The scale of needs is large—achieving development and climate goals demands trillions more in annual financing and a reorientation of our economic system—while our political context is trending in the wrong direction, with countries cutting international investments and geopolitical […]
The most notable milestone of 2024 was the 80th anniversary of the Bretton Woods institutions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and World Trade Organization. This anniversary came as calls for ambitious global economic governance reforms gain momentum in key fora, and developing country frustrations with the existing system continue to grow. 2024 […]