The mission of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is to promote international financial stability through liquidity support, surveillance and capacity building. Emerging market and developing countries frequently turn to the IMF during balance-of-payments distress. IMF liquidity support comes with conditionalities that require borrowing countries to commit to a series of policy reforms. These conditionalities have […]
International financial institutions (IFIs) are increasingly expected to support environmental and climate goals. Among them, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) plays a central role in shaping economic policy across much of the Global South through its lending programs. However, little systematic evidence exists of the environmental consequences of these programs, including their potential effects on […]
By Xia Li A new power plant can look like a straightforward win for a fast-growing economy. It means more electricity for homes, hospitals, factories and schools. But our new study suggests the story is far more complicated. Today, every major energy investment is increasingly shaped by two climate realities at once. First, there’s the […]
By Kevin P. Gallagher and Gregory T. Chin More than any time since their founding in 1944, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, known as the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs), are undergoing important changes. China has played a significant role in driving those changes such that a new global economic order may […]
By Samantha Igo As a record-breaking heat wave strains energy grids and risks public health across Europe, policymakers, activists and experts convene in Seville, Spain from June 30 to July 3 for the highly anticipated 4th International Conference on Financing for Development (FFD4). These rather rare policy events (the last was 10 years ago in […]
Multilateral development banks (MDBs) play a key role providing developing countries with affordable, long-term finance. In 2024, to help meet development challenges, the Group of 20 (G20) agreed on a roadmap to make the MDBs bigger, better and more effective and recommended MDBs conduct resource needs reviews to assess adequacy of resources to meet shareholder […]
Developing countries are facing dramatic debt and development crises where, to meet obligations to their external creditors, debt-distressed countries are sacrificing investments in education, healthcare, infrastructure and climate resilience. A reason for the debt situation is that the international community failed to address the flaws in the global financial architecture and to enable and embolden […]
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 […]
While the macroeconomic significance of climate change has been understood in academic scholarship for a long time, policy engagement on this topic is rather new. While initiatives such as the Network for Greening the Financial System and the Coalition of Finance Ministers for Climate Change have emerged, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – the only […]