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World Bank Group: Ask Citizens Where Public Money Should Go – The Surprising Results

As citizen engagement gains traction in the development agenda, identifying the extent to which it produces tangible results is essential. Participatory budgeting, a process in which citizens decide upon and monitor budget allocation, offers promising results, including increased local government

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IFC: Capital Markets Key to Development

Ending extreme poverty for good and building shared prosperity across the developing world takes money – a lot of money. Take infrastructure: for the foreseeable future, an estimated $50 billion per year is needed in Africa alone to deliver basic

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Robert J Shiller: Mastering Data

One of the elite Sterling professors at Yale University, he predicted both the dot-com bubble and the collapse of the housing market. Two years ago, he was the joint recipient of a Nobel Prize. There are few people more on

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Keiko Honda, CEO MIGA: Crucial Role for Investment Guarantees

The Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), part of the World Bank Group, is a financial institution exclusively dedicated to political risk insurance and credit guarantees that offer investors a hedge against risk in developing countries. The agency was established in

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Grand Old Party: Wacky Is the New Normal

In contemporary US politics, reality is whatever the eye of the beholder wishes to ignore. Though the art and science of spin has expert practitioners on both sides of the congressional aisle, Republicans seem particularly adept at working the facts

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Book Review: Niall Ferguson’s Civilization – Six Ways the West Beat the Rest

In much the same way Marxists internationalists held on to the belief that the workers’ revolution would sweep the world before it, today’s neoconservatives are convinced theirs is the only way forward. In this, neocons are but the most recent

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Evan Harvey, Nasdaq: Emerging Markets Leverage ESG Strategy

Over the last decade, emerging market exchanges (EMEs) have outperformed the rest of the world in a few key ways related to sustainability performance and disclosure. The primary markets in two emerging economies – South Africa’s Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSX)

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Troy Wiseman: Bamboo – A Sustainable Source of Fibre

Over the last ten years, REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) and REDD+ developments have proved that the price attributed to, and the willingness to pay for, forest based ecosystem services – whether through compliance or voluntary schemes

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World Bank Group: Should Oil Exporters Shift Capital Stock to Renewables?

As the Financial Times pointed out recently, oil companies such as ExxonMobil and Shell would, under measures considered for the global climate pact to be sealed in Paris next year, cease to exist in their current forms in 35 years.

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TD: Making the Environment Part of the Bank’s DNA

When Mike Pedersen joined TD Bank Group in 2007 as Group Head, Corporate Operations, he was tasked with putting an environmental strategy in place for the bank. Early on, he saw the need for full-time executive leadership to drive the

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