By Samantha Igo Rachel Nolan, a Core Faculty Member of the Human Capital Initiative at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center and an Assistant Professor of International History at the BU Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, has been awarded a New Directions Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation to expand her study of […]
By Naomi Frim-Abrams On April 9th, the Boston University Global Development Policy Center hosted Shaheen Naseer, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford, as a part of the Spring 2025 Human Capital Initiative (HCI) Seminar Series. She discussed her recent work on the unintended consequences of gender-sensitive reform and leadership pipelines in Pakistan’s civil […]
By Julie Radomski, Zara Albright and Rebecca Ray As Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) leaders prepare for the upcoming China-CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) Forum in Beijing, the meeting should be viewed less as a venue for announcing major new commitments and more as a continuation of existing diplomatic and economic dialogues. […]
By Praveena Bandara Since the beginning of this year, the US has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, cut back on the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) – which supported low-carbon technology (LCT) industries – and implemented staggering tariffs on its largest LCT trade partner, China. A new journal article published in Science finds that China is […]
A new class of low-carbon goods and services forms the essential inputs for the global transition to lower-carbon and climate-resilient economic growth paths. By constructing a new dataset of such low-carbon technology (LCT) trade, a new journal article published in Science by Praveena Bandara, Rebecca Ray, Jiaqi Lu and Kevin P. Gallagher finds that the […]
In September 2021, Chinese leader Xi Jinping pledged that China would stop financing new overseas coal-fired power plants and instead pledged to ramp up support for renewable energy projects. This announcement marked an important shift in China’s global energy policy, with potential to fill the glaring gaps in the financing necessary for the energy […]
By Julian Watrous and Stephen Paduano The last two decades have seen a fundamental shift in global sovereign lending patterns. By the late 2010s, China emerged as the world’s largest official bilateral creditor. China’s record of infrastructure financing, primarily through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), is now well-known. More recent, and less theorized, is […]
Since its founding, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has in theory sought to act as the international “lender of last resort,” providing financing to countries facing balance-of-payments and macrofinancial pressures. However, in the 21st century, the landscape of international rescue lending has shifted. China has become the world’s largest bilateral lender, providing assistance comparable to […]
By Nathalie Marins Over the past few years, public debt has returned to the spotlight, especially in developing economies. Once seen as a tool for economic development and crisis response, debt has been increasingly perceived as a significant risk to economic stability and growth. With global shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic, rising interest rates in […]
The concept of policy space, especially fiscal space, has become increasingly important as policymakers strive to balance the need for increased public investment with concerns about debt sustainability. However, there is still no consensus on the definitions of policy space and external sustainability. A new working paper by Nathalie Marins seeks to contribute to this discussion […]