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POLICY PAPERS
October 26, 2021
Finance institutions take money from foreign aid budgets to invest in private enterprises. How much should they be given? We can make some progress on that question by looking at the return on investment in the form of higher real incomes for workers and customers, and comparing that to a cash trans...
WORKING PAPERS
September 12, 2018
DFIs are frequently asked to demonstrate their additionality—meaning that they make investments that the private sector would not—but what evidence of additionality would look like is rarely articulated. This paper examines potential quantitative and qualitative evidence.
Blog Post
March 27, 2018
Last year the World Bank adopted a new “cascade” approach that intended to maximise finance for development by prioritising private solutions wherever possible. In what world would this “cascade” algorithm make sense? Without a good answer to that question, the cascade r...
Blog Post
February 09, 2018
Since the 2015 financing for development agreement, donor governments and their development finance institutions have all been singing from the same hymn sheet: we must do more to mobilize private investment. Here I will argue that setting leverage targets in isolation might not get us what we want:...
Blog Post
November 21, 2017
Development finance institutions (DFIs) have long resisted the idea that they ought to support coordinated national development strategies in the countries that they invest in, but if conversations around private roundtables at the recent World Bank/IMF meetings are anything to go by, that’s w...
Blog Post
November 09, 2017
Penny Mordaunt has been confirmed as the UK’s new Secretary of State for Development. Coming fresh to an agenda can be a major asset, but it can be hard to pick out the things that really matter. As civil servants dust off their detailed briefs, we try to stand back and identify five...
Blog Post
October 31, 2017
Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) exist to promote development by investing in the poorest, least developed countries. They often route those investments via holding companies or private equity funds domiciled in tax havens. On the face of it, that seems absurd: tax havens are widely seen...
Blog Post
October 02, 2017
In 2014, Mark Lowcock, then head of the UK’s Department for International Development, pulled off an unexpected coup: securing an agreement between donor governments on new rules for counting official loans as aid. Some neat diplomatic footwork is needed again now, because negotiatio...