- By refusing to fill vacancies in the World Trade Organization’s Appellate Body, the Trump administration has paralysed the trading system. Anabel González and Euijin Jung argue that the large emerging-market economies – Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Korea, Mexico, Thailand, and others – could help restore the system by giving up the “special and different treatment” offered to them by the US, in return for a US commitment to end its boycott of the nomination of Appellate Body members.
- Shanta Devarajan argues that in many parts of the world, government trust is lost through the mismanagement of their reforms, which end up harming the population they are meant to help. He suggests a new model where governments first commit to redistribute the benefits of their reforms, and then look for efficiency-enhancing policies to pay for it.
- At the World Bank, 2019 was the year of seeking big ideas and transformative solutions to “sustain water resources, deliver services, and build resilience”. Here are the top 9 tweets the Bank received on the topic.
- Dana Vorisek looks at the outlook for Latin America and the Caribbean in five charts, which point to sluggish growth and continued challenges for the region.
- At VoxDev, Shelby Grossman uses a survey of traders in Lagos to examine why some market associations govern well, while others appear to extort traders in their markets.
- The challenges of rich and poor throughout the world are in many ways intertwined – from climate change and technology to democratic deficits and global power shifts. With this in mind, the Overseas Development Institute looks at six global trends for 2020.
- Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, the founder of BRAC and a pioneer in the fight against poverty, has passed away. BRAC, the world's largest non-governmental organization, is estimated to have helped more than 150 million people out of poverty in Africa and Asia.