Review maintains inadequate and inconsistent approach to economic and gender inequality, as well as climate change.
Briefings
Rights
Analysis
Tip of the iceberg: How the call for SDRs reveals the urgency for deeper reforms of the global reserve system to address systemic inequalities
Renewed calls for a substantial SDR allocation raise urgency of reforming the inequitable global reserve ‘non-system’.
IFI governance
Analysis
Gambling with our lives: Global emergencies expose consequences of decades of IMF and World Bank policies
Market-led policy approaches increasingly used to deal with both climate and health emergencies are failing to protect those most vulnerable.
Rights
Analysis
Repairing harm caused: What could a reparations approach mean for the IMF and World Bank?
It is time for the IMF and World Bank to understand their own responsibility and decolonise their approach.
Knowledge
Analysis
Ease of Doing Business – what does it conceal?
As India has risen in the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business rankings, it has seen other key development indicators slip.
Gender
Analysis
Keeping the IMF accountable to women's rights and gender equality at the national level
New IMF gender guidance opportunity for civil society to keep its staff to account.
Finance
Analysis
Bretton Woods at 75
BWP publishes essay series reflecting on the legacy of 75 years of IMF and World Bank policies and power.
Gender
Analysis
The World Bank and gender equality: Development Policy Financing
Critical gender analysis of Bank's Development Policy Financing.
IFI governance
Analysis
The Bretton Woods Institutions and the second crisis of multilateralism
At 75, the World Bank and IMF face a crisis of multilateralism in no small part of their own making as failed economic policies have resulted in skepticism of the international order they helped to create.
Environment
Analysis
Low-carbon infrastructure, sustainable finance, and people-focused development
This briefing emphasises the interdependence between the SDGs and the Paris Climate Agreement, in terms of ensuring that all new infrastructure is climate resilient and aligned with the low- or zero-carbon pathways required to avert catastrophic climate change – which would render achieving the SDGs impossible.
Land
Analysis
The highest bidder takes it all: The World Bank's new scheme to privatise land in the Global South
World Bank Enabling the Business of Agriculture rankings prescribe land privatisation at the expense of family farmers, pastoralists, and Indigenous Peoples.
Finance
Analysis
Debt and gender equality: How debt-servicing conditions harm women in Africa
As debt crises across the African continent continue to soar, concerns are raised about the gendered impact of debt-servicing conditions imposed by international financial institutions.
Featured briefings
13 July 2021
The IMF's Comprehensive Surveillance Review: A bungled attempt at meeting the moment
Review maintains inadequate and inconsistent approach to economic and gender inequality, as well as climate change.
13 July 2021
The Bretton Woods Observer: Summer 2021
30 March 2021