By: Paula Torrez-Ortiz The Global Economic Governance Initiative (GEGI) within the Boston University Global Development Policy Center works to advance policy-relevant research on international financial, trade and development institutions that play a leading role in global economic governance. As part of this work, the GEGI research team has released four interactive research projects that serve […]
A debt crisis is looming in the Global South, compounded by the threat of climate change. World leaders such as Kristalina Georgieva, David Malpass, the Biden administration and 23 former Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors have added their voices to a growing chorus calling for comprehensive debt relief linked to a green and inclusive […]
By Yaechan Lee The COVID-19 pandemic has increased fiscal pressure on a global scale. Advanced economies, have been able to cope with the new norm thanks to their relatively larger fiscal and policy space and are now anticipating a robust V-shaped economic recovery. Low-income countries (LICs) have been considered most financially vulnerable against this pressure […]
By Xinyue Ma As countries strive to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, the world is in urgent need of liquidity to fill the investment gap in development areas such as public health, climate change, and inequality. In the midst of this, economic risks around the world are straining the so-called Global Financial Safety Net (GFSN), […]
By James Sundquist Are China’s loans to developing countries merely investments in power plants and highways, or do they serve another purpose of bailing out countries in crisis? If so, is China undermining the International Monetary Fund (IMF)? Despite much heated debate over the consequences of Chinese lending, this basic question has remained unanswered. On […]
Since China began lending large quantities of money to the Global South in the mid- 2000s, suspicions have swirled that these loans compete with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), offering comparable amounts of money in exchange for very different promises. Whereas the IMF conditions its loans on commitments to economic reform, China typically lends for […]
By Blake Alexander Simmons and Rebecca Ray As developing countries emerge from the COVID-19 crisis, they will need to pivot rapidly to relaunch their economies. Given the severity of the current economic downturn, the world has an opportunity to pivot to greener and more inclusive forms of economic growth in the next business cycle. Standing […]
Can China implement debt-for-nature and debt-for-climate swaps to protect the environment and reduce global debt? Join Boston University’s Global Development Policy (GDP) Center and special guests Carlos Larrea and Shuang Li for a webinar discussion and interactive launch on Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2021. As the triple crises of climate change, debt and COVID-19 converge and […]
There is a renewed global push to mobilize resources to meet glaring global infrastructure gaps, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Climate Agreement commitments and generally improve standards of living. A core component of such resource mobilization will be the generation of domestic resources through taxation. Whereas tariffs form a miniscule share of public revenue […]
The push for intraregional trade in Africa comes at a pivotal moment for the continent. Across the region, growth in gross domestic product remains very uneven. In large part, this sluggish growth is due to the lackluster performance of the three largest economies. But it is also due to increasing debt vulnerabilities across the continent, […]