Tag: kevin p. gallagher

Trading Away Budget Space? How Trade Liberalization is Crunching Developing Country Budgets

By Devika Dutt and Kevin P. Gallagher The long-standing gridlock in trade negotiations in the World Trade Organization (WTO) has shifted the focus of trade negotiations to bilateral and plurilateral trade and investment agreements. Since the inception of the WTO in 1995, over 2,000 regional and bilateral trade and investment treaties have been negotiated and […]

Webinar Summary – “Small is Beautiful”: A New Era in China’s Overseas Development Finance?

By Hua-Ke (Kate) Chi On Thursday, January 26, the Boston University Global Development Policy (GDP) Center hosted a webinar discussion for the 2023 update of the China’s Overseas Development Finance (CODF) Database, a global, harmonized, validated and geolocated database recording loan commitments from two major development finance institutions (DFIs) in China, the China Development Bank […]

Investor-State Dispute Settlement: Obstructing a Just Energy Transition

A controversial legal process known as investor-state dispute settlements (ISDS) is making it difficult for governments to mobilize finance for ambitious climate action. When assets are protected by international investment treaties, like the Energy Charter Treaty, legal claims can be brought against countries by investors who feel they are negatively impacted by government policies. For […]

“Keep the Receipts”: The Political Economy of IMF Austerity During and After the Crisis Years of 2009 and 2020

In 2009, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved reforms to make short-term operations available to low-income countries and reform lending to higher-income countries. Many scholars have noted that the 2008 Global Financial Crisis appeared to loosen austerity measures in favor of more counter-cyclical approaches. However, it remains an open question whether the IMF followed through […]

Around the Halls: Readout from the Bali G20 Summit

In parallel to a chaotic 27th UN Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, leaders of Group of 20 (G20) countries met in Bali, Indonesia from November 15-16 for the G20 Leaders’ Summit against a backdrop of worsening climate impacts, an ongoing energy crisis, Russia’s war in Ukraine and skyrocketing inflation. Expectations for the […]

Webinar Summary – The ‘China Boom’ in the Amazon Basin: Social and Environmental Regulation amid a Commodity Supercycle

By Yudong (Nathan) Liu On Tuesday, October 11, 2022, the Boston University Global Development Policy (GDP) Center hosted a webinar discussion with Paulo Esteves, Coordinator of the Socio-Environmental Platform and the Global South Unit for Mediation at the BRICS Policy Center of the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro and Rebecca Ray, Senior Academic […]