Overview and Concept

The 2026 Annual Meetings arrive at a moment when the central question facing the multilateral system isone of burden-sharing. Traditional donors are retrenching: aid budgets across the G7 are falling in real terms, the United States has stepped back from institutions including the WHO, and major replenishments are landing below expectations. Financial pressures have intensified even as governance reform has stalled, with successive shareholder reviews — including the 2025 IBRD review — concluding without realignment.

Against this backdrop, the role of China is under-examined. China’s position is one of tension: it continues to describe itself as a developing country and a member of the Global South, yet stands on the cusp of graduation to high-income status; and it remains both a borrower from, and recipient within, the multilateral institutions it increasingly helps to fund. China has sharply increased its concessional contributions to the World Bank’s IDA — rising from 28th- to 5th-largest donor in a decade — yet its formal voice and shareholding in the World Bank remain largely static, and its voluntary contributions to other multilateral bodies have plateaued over the last five years. In parallel, China continues to advance alternative platforms of its own, including the AIIB, the NDB and the newly agreed SCO Development Bank. The tension is perhaps sharpest on climate, where China’s multilateral contributions effectively count toward collective international climate targets under the post-COP29 framework, even as it resists binding commitments and treats its contributions as voluntary. With the US retreating from the climate agenda, China’s weight as funder, shareholder and agenda-setter is increasingly decisive.

This session will present new CGD research mapping China’s engagement across the multilateral development banks, the vertical funds and the UN system — the first comprehensive update to the landmark 2021 CGD study led by Scott Morris in five years — and will use it as a shared factual baseline for a panel discussion bringing together Chinese and non-Chinese perspectives. The aim is to explore what China’s shifting willingness and ability to contribute mean for burden-sharing and governance reform, including for replenishments, the reform of voice and shareholding, and the future financing of a system under fiscal strain. Convening this conversation in Bangkok offers a rare opportunity for genuine dialogue with China onits multilateral role, rather than a Western conversation about it.

Guiding Questions

• Where, and through which channels, does China now contribute to the multilateral system — and whereare its notable absences? What explains the pattern of selectivity in its engagement
• What would meaningful reform of voice and shareholding in MDBs look like from Beijing’s perspective,and from that of traditional shareholders and borrowing members? What, if any, is the space forcompromise?
• What does the growth of China-led platforms — the AIIB, the NDB and the SCO Development Bank —mean for the legacy Bretton Woods institutions? Are these complements, competitors, or both?
• On climate finance, how should China’s rising multilateral contributions be recognised within collectiveinternational goals?
• As China’s economic weight grows, how should its willingness and ability to contribute be assessedagainst expectations of burden-sharing, particularly amid retrenchment by traditional donors?

Overview and Concept

Seventy-three percent of the world’s population lives in middle-income countries. Yet, since the 1990s, only 34 middle-income countries have successfully transitioned to high-income status, while 108 have remained at the middle-income level. Europe stands out, with 14 of the 34 economies that achieved high-income status being European economies. Asia and the Pacific have also experienced significant economic transformation, including successful transitions in economies such as the Republic of Korea and Singapore, while many middle-income economies continue to face challenges in sustaining productivity growth and structural transformation.

The Europe–Asia Dialogue, held during the 2026 IMF–World Bank Annual Meetings in Bangkok, will bring together policymakers, experts from think tanks and universities, and representatives of international and regional organizations. It will examine the diverse development trajectories of economies in Europe and Asia and the Pacific, with a focus on common policy lessons as well as strategies that need to be adapted to different historical, institutional, and economic circumstances.

The discussion will focus on productivity growth, demographic change, innovation and inequality, as well as innovation and R&D, industrial diversification and upgrading in global value chains, human capital and higher education, and regional cooperation. It will consider how economies can sustain growth as they move toward higher levels of income and productivity, and how experiences from Europe and Asia and the Pacific can provide insights for other economies.

Guiding Questions

• What factors have shaped differences in economic performance across economies in Europe and Asia and the Pacific?
• How can economies sustain productivity growth and structural transformation as they move toward higher income levels?
• What lessons can be drawn from European and Asian economies that have successfully transitioned to high-income status?
• What roles do innovation and R&D, industrial diversification, value-chain upgrading, human capital, and higher education play in advancing to high income?
• Which policy lessons can be applied across regions, and which need to be adapted to specific national circumstances?
• How can regional cooperation and international and regional institutions support economies seeking to sustain growth and advance to high-income status?

Overview and Concept

Central banks and financial authorities face two technology transformations moving on very different clocks. Artificial intelligence is already changing how institutions analyse data, organise work, supervise firms and defend critical systems. Quantum computing remains experimental, yet the migration required to protect cryptographic trust must begin well before a sufficiently capable machine exists.

The common challenge is not predicting the technology perfectly, but deciding how a public institution should act before certainty while preserving judgement, accountability, independence and public trust. For AI, the immediate task is to move from fragmented experimentation to measurable value at scale. For quantum computing, near-term computational value remains uncertain, but the security transition is already actionable.

The roundtable therefore advances a two-speed agenda: scale AI deliberately by prioritising high-value applications and embedding risk, ethics and human accountability from the outset; and prepare for quantum early by identifying cryptographic exposure, building crypto-agility, protecting long-lived information and coordinating migration across the financial ecosystem.

Across both technologies, the discussion will examine how central banks can avoid both hype and paralysis: acting early where delay compounds risk while resisting premature technology bets that are not linked to mandate value.

Participants

Governors and deputy governors; chief services, operating, technology, data and security officers; heads of monetary policy, supervision, financial stability and payments; selected academics, financial-market infrastructure leaders and technology experts. Confirmed anchor participant: Chief Services Officer, European Central Bank.

Guiding Questions

• Where can AI materially improve policy outcomes, resilience or institutional effectiveness, and how should that value be measured?
• How should supervisory and financial-stability frameworks evolve as AI becomes more autonomous, concentrated and systemically embedded?
• What no-regret quantum-readiness actions should central banks initiate now, and what should remain exploratory?
• Which capabilities must be owned internally, which can be shared, and where can external dependence be accepted without weakening institutional agency?
• How can central banks build scarce technology capability while retaining vendor neutrality, accountability and strategic optionality?

Overview and Concept

The Borrowers’ Platform is the first standing, UN-anchored space in decades in which sovereign borrowers can meet as a bloc. Agreed at the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development in Sevilla in June 2025 and serviced by UNCTAD, it was launched at the April 2026 Spring Meetings and holds its first annual meeting this month. The asymmetry it answers is by design: creditors coordinate through the Paris Club, the G20 Common Framework and the IMF’s roundtables, while borrowers negotiate one at a time. Fifty-four countries, home to 3.4 billion people, now spend more on interest than on health or education.

This session convenes the day after that meeting and asks what members should do with the agenda they have just set. Panelists will take up the openings ahead: reform of the IMF’s Catastrophe Containment and Relief Trust; debt sustainability analysis that measures development and climate needs rather than repayment capacity alone; shock-contingent clauses as default contract terms; debt legislation that curbs holdout litigation and ring-fences social spending; and transparency rules that bind creditors as tightly as borrowers. Underneathsits a question of political economy: whether the platform stays with peer learning, which creditors will tolerate, or builds toward the coordinated positions that would shift bargaining power, and whether workers and parliaments have standing in it.

Guiding Questions

• The platform has just set its first work program. What belongs at the top of it, and whatcan wait?
• Where does information sharing stop being enough, and coordinated positions becomenecessary?
• What would it take for borrowers to produce debt sustainability analysis credibleenough to sit alongside the IMF’s?
• Which reforms can borrowers advance as a bloc without creditor consent, and whichrequire creditors at the table?
• The CCRT review opens in 2027/28. Is a joint borrower position on eligibility and accessrealistic by then?
• How do parliaments, unions and civil society get standing in a platform built of financeministries?

Overview and Concept

Emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs) face a persistent gap between perceived and actual investment risk, a gap that drives up the cost of financing and holds back capital flows that these markets need. Closing this gap requires better data: verified, project-level evidence on default, recovery, and return that investors, creditrating agencies, and regulators can act on. Several initiatives are now working to buildthis evidence base, including EMInvest, the EMInvest Performance Database, alongside complementary efforts such as GEMs and the Financing Africa Forward Risk-Return Data Hub.

This roundtable aims to bring together governments, financial institutions, credit rating agencies, and regulators to take stock of this progress and to demonstrate that these initiatives are coordinated rather than duplicative. The discussion will surface early learnings on where private investment performance data adds value across three levels of the system: at transaction level, sharper pricing and a supplement to sovereign risk proxies; at strategic level, a stronger evidence base for internal and client conviction on EMDE allocation; and at market level, an input into rating methodologies and regulatory engagement on EMDE asset risk weightings. It will also highlight concrete progress fromthe ongoing data initiatives, including EMInvest, GEMs and Financing Africa Forward Risk-Return Data Hub. This is intended to move interest toward engagement: building the willingness of international and EMDE commercial investors to contribute data overtime, and giving regulators and rating agencies a clearer sense of how they might eventually draw on it, so that the different parts of the data ecosystem move forward together.

Guiding Questions

• What concrete progress have initiatives such as EMInvest, GEMs, and theFinancing Africa Forward Risk-Return Data Hub made over the past year, and howdo these efforts complement rather than duplicate each other?
• Where in the investment decision chain, transaction pricing, portfolio allocation,or rating and regulatory methodology, does private investment performance dataoffer the clearest near-term value?
• What would encourage more international and domestic financial institutions tocontribute performance data, and what remains a barrier?
• How should credit rating agencies and regulators engage with pooled EMDEperformance data as it becomes available, and what would give them confidenceto act on it?
• How should this agenda connect to multilateral processes already underway,including the Africa Expert Panel and South Africa’s G20 Presidency?

Overview and Concept

Governments have always accumulated obligations and exposures outside direct central-government borrowing. State-owned enterprises, subnational entities, public banks, guarantees, long-term contracts, public–private partnerships and commodity-linked financing are not new. Yet the prevailing legal and institutional architecture for debt governance has developed primarily around discrete categories of public and publicly guaranteed borrowing. We refer to this architecture—rules on authorization and borrowing, professional debt-management institutions, and arrangements for transparency and oversight—as Debt Governance 1.0. Institutions and actors charged with implementing these rules recognize that risks also ariseelse where, but adaptation remains uneven, responsibilities are fragmented, and risks keep crossing institutional and legal perimeters.

These challenges are increasingly important as low- and lower-middle-income countries seek tomeet substantial infrastructure and energy investment needs under constrained fiscal and debtconditions. Financing through SOEs and utilities, reliance on long-term offtake agreements,guarantees and project-finance structures can mobilize investment that might otherwise notoccur. It can also defer or obscure public costs, particularly where returns depend on tariffs,subsidies, foreign-currency revenues or other public support. Allocating an obligationcontractually to an SOE, utility or private investor does not necessarily remove the underlying financing gap. In recent experience, gaps have resurfaced through arrears, subsidies,recapitalizations, guarantee calls, pressure on public banks or transfers to the sovereignbalance sheet.

The central challenge is to preserve governments’ capacity to mobilize essential investmentwhile ensuring that public costs and exposures are properly assessed, authorized, monitoredand reviewed. Governments should not avoid all risk: an approach focused exclusively onlimiting fiscal exposure may reduce one vulnerability while contributing to persistent underinvestment. The goal is for governments to exercise agency, to identify the risks they are prepared to assume to enable necessary investment, on what terms and through what governance processes–and for accountability institutions to exercise informed, constructive oversight. Debt Governance 2.0 extends and builds on the prevailing governance frameworks to map the institutional reforms required to achieve this goal. Rather than simply expanding the definition of public debt, it would complement existing controls with a dynamic approach to public financial risk governance: considering the policy rationale for investment alongside assets, liabilities, contracts and financial flows; assessing economic, financial, fiscal and social viability together; tracking how exposures migrate; and examining where benefits, risks and losses ultimately fall. The objective is to help governments distinguish risks consciously and sustainably assumed forlegitimate policy objectives from those that are hidden, mispriced or allocated to institutions unable to bear them.

Guiding Questions

• Why are financing structures outside traditional sovereign borrowing created, and whatinvestment or policy objectives do they serve?
• How should economic, financial, fiscal and social viability—and the assumptionsunderpinning each—be assessed together?
• Which risks should governments assume to enable investment, and which should remainwith investors or other parties?
• How do risks evolve across contracts, institutions and balance sheets, and where do theresulting costs and losses ultimately fall?
• Who should assess and authorize public risk, and how should its expected cost bedisclosed, budgeted and monitored?
• What information and warning signs should trigger reassessment, mitigation, repricing orrenegotiation?
• How should responsibilities be divided among finance ministries, debt managementoffices, sector institutions, SOEs, regulators, central banks, public banks and oversightbodies?
• Which improvements require legislation, and which depend primarily on mandates,coordination and accountability?

Overview and Concept

The SDGs succeeded in building a universal platform and unified vocabulary for development, yet the focus beyond 2030 must shift from ambitious new targets to systematizing delivery and establishing durable institutional and fiscal mechanisms that lock in accountability. This session examines what worked within the SDG framework, the concrete policy choices and implementation models that drove poverty reduction and integration across climate, development, and peace. It also asks how to scale and replicate those mechanics. Beyond this, it examines what paradigm shift is required: moving away from the neoliberal orthodoxies that guided the SDG era toward frameworks centered on domestic resource mobilization, public investment, and strategic state capacity.

Participants will address the structural blockages that impede implementation: reforming global financial architecture to reflect country priorities rather than external conditionality, embedding accountability and civil society participation, and ensuring country-led strategies for domestic resource mobilization and technology transfer that are genuinely owned by the Global South.

Guiding Questions

• What changes to the international financial architecture are non-negotiable for aBeyond-2030 agenda?
  
• How do we ensure that developing countries’ priorities – rather than externalprescriptions – are driving financing decisions?
• How do we reconcile climate finance obligations with the debt constraints facing theGlobal South’s most vulnerable countries?
• Which sectors or investments should be shielded from privatization logic and de-risking?
• How do we move from measuring progress to guaranteeing implementation andaccountability?

Overview and Concept

National monetary systems bundled currency, issuance, regulated intermediaries, reserves, settlement, distribution, regulation and central-bank support. Digital money is unbundling these functions: a claim may be denominated in one currency, issued elsewhere, backed in a third location, distributed through a global wallet and settled on a token network.

Stablecoins are the immediate catalyst, but the emerging architecture is broader. Tokenised deposits, e-money, retail or wholesale CBDC, tokenised central-bank money and new cross-border payment arrangements may coexist and interoperate — or fragment into separate pools of liquidity, data and trust.

The opportunity is substantial: faster cross-border payments, 24/7 settlement, more contestable distribution, programmable transactions and a settlement layer for tokenised finance. The risk is that innovation in one layer weakens the connections that keep money interchangeable at par and credible in stress.

The policy challenge is therefore not to preserve today’s bundle unchanged or select one winning instrument. It is to decide which functions can safely become modular, which must remain anchored in central-bank money and public oversight, and how public and private forms of money should coexist.

The choices are interdependent: settlement access shapes singleness; interoperability shapes competition; and wallet, data and cross-border rules shape visibility, substitution risk and regulatory arbitrage. The operating model matters as much as the rulebook. Authorities need senior ownership, a target architecture, a common risk and data model, stage gates from experiment to scale and joint crisis playbooks. Domestic and cross-border arrangements must allocate oversight, data access and backstop responsibilities explicitly.

Key Design Choices

1. Define the role and perimeter: determine which forms of digital money should serve retail, wholesale and cross-border use cases; which currencies, users and activities are permitted; and how foreign arrangements are recognised.

2. Design the claim and issuer regime: clarify the legal nature of the claim, eligible issuers, reserve, capital and liquidity requirements, redemption at par, safeguarding and treatment in insolvency.

3. Preserve the public monetary anchor: determine access to central-bank settlement, the role of CBDC or tokenised central-bank money, and interoperability and finality requirements that preserve the singleness of money across ledgers and payment rails.

4. Govern distribution, data and integrity: set rules for wallets, identity, consumer protection, privacy, financial-crime controls, operational resilience, custody and critical providers.

5. Manage system effects and stress: assess bank funding, transmission, currency substitution and capital flows, and establish liquidity, resolution, payment-continuity and cross-border crisis arrangements.

Guiding Questions

• What target monetary architecture should authorities aim for, and which outcomes should determine the role of each form of digital money?
• How should central-bank money, tokenised deposits and stablecoins interact to preserve singleness, competition and innovation?
• Which issuer, reserve, redemption, settlement and interoperability requirements are non-negotiable, and where can models differ?
• How should supervision, financial integrity, data governance and crisis management work across wallets, providers and borders?
• What are the implications for bank funding, transmission, digital dollarisation and capital flows, and what must be decided in the next 12–24 months?

Overview and Concept

This invitation-only roundtable will take stock of the key economic and policy priorities emerging from the IMF Annual Meetings across major regions of the world. It brings together policymakers, business leaders and chief economists to exchange regional perspectives on the economic outlook and the changing geoeconomic environment.

The discussion will explore how the global race for artificial intelligence is reshaping growth prospects, financial markets, competitiveness and geopolitical alliances, and what these shifts imply for regional policy frameworks. Participants will consider the opportunities and risks created by AI-driven choices, with particular attention to macroeconomic outcomes, capital allocation and the evolving architecture of international economic cooperation.

Guiding Questions

• What are the principal economic and policy priorities emerging from the IMF Annual Meetings acrossthe major regions of the world?
• How is the global race for artificial intelligence reshaping regional growth prospects and productivity?
• What are the implications of AI investment and adoption for financial markets and capital allocation?
• How are geoeconomic competition and technological change affecting competitiveness andgeopolitical alliances?
• How should regional policy frameworks adapt to the opportunities and risks created by AI-driveneconomic choices?
• What do these shifts imply for the evolving architecture of international economic cooperation?

Overview and Concept

The IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings return to Bangkok for the first time since 1991, a year that marked the apparent triumph of convergence, the expansion of global trade, and the beginning of Asia’s extraordinary economic transformation. Thirty-five years later, the world that gathered in Bangkok in 1991 is barely recognizable. The assumptions that markets would converge, institutions would strengthen, and growth would be shared have been tested by the global financial crisis, the pandemic, and a new wave of geopolitical fragmentation that challenges the foundations of the multilateral order.

Against this backdrop, the Global Macro programme steps back from daily data and market noise to examine the monetary and financial order now taking shape. It brings together central bankers, economists, policy leaders, and market experts to consider the forces shaping global growth, the rethinking of monetary policy in a shock-prone world, and the consequences of fragmentation for financial stability and economic governance.

The programme also focuses on monetary sovereignty and emerging-market resilience. Discussions will address digital money and stablecoins, de-dollarisation, capital-flow and commodity volatility, China’s evolving economic model, and the renewed controversy over global imbalances. Across the day, participants will ask whether institutions designed for an integrated global economy can adapt to a more fragmented and contested international system.

Guiding Questions

• What is driving the global economy in 2026, and is the AI investment wave a genuine productivity shift?
• How is the U.S. Federal Reserve navigating heightened global uncertainty, and what will its policy and regulatory choices mean internationally?
• How should monetary-policy frameworks evolve in a world of more frequent supply shocks?
• What opportunities and risks do stablecoins and new cross-border settlement rails create, and how can economies preserve monetary sovereignty?
• How can emerging economies in Asia and Latin America defend policy autonomy and financial resilience amid fragmentation, high debt, and volatile capital flows?
• Are current developments pointing toward meaningful de-dollarisation?
• How are China’s domestic-demand, monetary, fiscal, trade, and investment dynamics changing, and what do they imply for global growth?
• How should policymakers understand and respond to renewed global imbalances?

Overview and Concept

This high-level dialogue brings together policymakers, experts, and regional institutions to explore how Central Asia and the Middle East can contribute to the 2026 G20 agenda. The discussion will focus on regional connectivity, value-chain development, infrastructure investment, and the role of regional institutions in strengthening economic cooperation, resilience and sustainability.

The programme concludes with a curtain-raiser presentation of the key findings of the EFSD flagship report on labor markets in Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. The research examines demographic trends, labor migration, informality, productivity, and structural barriers to job creation, highlighting actionable, country-specific policy insights for improving labor-market outcomes and supporting long-term development.

Guiding Questions

• How can Central Asia and the Middle East contribute more effectively to the 2026 G20 agenda?
• How can stronger regional connectivity and value-chain development support economic cooperation andresilience?
• What role can infrastructure investment and regional institutions play in advancing sustainable growth?
• What are the key demographic, migration, informality, productivity, and job-creation challenges facinglabor markets in Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan?

Overview and Concept

Once debt restructuring is achieved, what comes next? Stabilizing a distressed economy is necessary, but it cannot be the end goal: a path built only to maximize repayments in the short term leaves countries exposed to the next shock, starves investment and medium-term growth, and strains social support. Moving from stabilization to recovery requires the deliberate provision of fiscal space, new money and, above all, trust and coordination among the country in recovery, its creditors, and multilateral lenders. The IMF program, underpinned by a macroeconomic framework and conditionalities, is where that common ground is forged.

Despite well-known critiques, at least some recent debt restructuring cases seem to have remained more focused on stabilization than long-term development. The session will explore how countries that have recently undergone debt restructuring have fared and how policymakers can devise more pro-development strategies.

Guiding Questions

• Pivoting towards growth: How can countries respond to the challenge of stabilization without sacrificinginvestment and growth? In practice, the restructuring process seems often to take investment as anafterthought. How can investment be kept high and efficient even after a restructuring?
• Financing the recovery: Fiscal constraints tend to remain tight long after a debt treatment, FDI is difficultto attract, and domestic savings remain scarce. What can be done to finance the recovery and actuallyencourage investment?
• The political and social dimension: Human costs of restructuring are typically large and persistent.Social spending remains low for years, slowing human development. How have policymakers protectedthe poorest? What does it take to maintain the domestic consensus on which a multi-year programdepends? What are the key internal political constraints?
• Trust, coordination and comparability: Lengthy, poorly coordinated negotiations have raised costs anderoded trust. What would rebuild trust between borrowers, multilateral lenders and other creditors—andcould more transparent, comparable program reporting be part of the answer?

Overview and Concept

This event, organized by the Center for Global Development, will examine one of the central development finance challenges of the coming decade: how low-income countries (LICs) can simultaneously maintain macro and debt sustainability and invest in growth, at a time of larger and more frequent shocks, sharply reduced aid, higher borrowing costs, and heavy debt service burdens. Adding to the challenge, IMF net flows to LICs are projected to turn negative by the end of the decade, as the exceptional COVID-era lending wave starts to come due. This raises questions about how to ensure the Fund’s concessional lending frame worksand program design are adequately calibrated for this fundamentally changed environment.

The panel will bring together senior policymakers, development finance officials, and independent experts to discuss what this changed environment means for the IMF role in LICs in the context of the broader development finance architecture — including what a more adequate and effective response might look like in terms of finance volumes, policy prescriptions, and program design. The discussion will be framed by newCGD analysis on IMF net financing flows to LICs.

Guiding Questions

• How can low-income countries maintain macroeconomic and debt sustainability while continuing toinvest in growth in an environment of larger and more frequent shocks?
• What do sharply reduced aid, higher borrowing costs, and heavy debt-service burdens mean for thefinancing available to low-income countries?
• What are the implications of IMF net financing flows to low-income countries turning negative by the endof the decade as COVID-era lending comes due?
• How should the IMF’s concessional lending frameworks be calibrated for this changed financingenvironment?
• How should IMF program design and policy prescriptions evolve to better balance stabilization, debtsustainability, and growth?
• What would a more adequate and effective IMF response look like in terms of financing volumes, policyprescriptions, and program design?
• What role should the IMF play within the broader development finance architecture for low-incomecountries?

Overview and Concept

Developing countries continue to face significant liquidity pressures, with high debt service constraining critical spending programs and limited fiscal space to absorb further shocks. For countries with deeper solvency issues, the delays and uncertainty associated with the Common Framework have discouraged timely debt restructuring. On both fronts, pressures are only likely to intensify as pandemic-era borrowing comes due in a more challenging economic and financing environment.

This strengthens the case for practical near-term reforms that can make a difference for countries facing debt pressures. Building on our April 2026 discussions in Washington, DC, this roundtable aims to identify concrete recommendations for consideration by the international community, including during the UK’s presidency of the G20 next year. What are the most urgent problems to address and the most promising avenues for action? What political economy constraints stand in the way of the proposals that could make a difference, and how can support be built to move these initiatives toward implementation?

The conversation will bring together senior representatives from finance ministries, international financial institutions, academia, and the policy community to identify priorities for action, examine the principal obstacles to progress, and consider the technical and political work needed to advance them.

Guiding Questions

• Our April roundtable identified key political and financing constraints to reform. What progress have participants made since then on consensus-building or technical work for initiatives that could overcome these constraints?
• What near-term steps could the international community take to help countries manage the upcoming repayment hurdle given countries’ limited access to new affordable financing?
• What are the most promising and practical reforms to address some of the key obstacles preventing debt restructurings from being timely, predictable, and effective in restoring debt sustainability?
• What concrete reform initiatives should the UK prioritize during its G20 presidency, and what political or technical work is needed to advance them?

Overview and Concept

Monetary sovereignty has never been absolute. Throughout history, money has repeatedly moved beyond the institutions and borders designed to contain it — from foreign coinage and private banknotes to Eurodollars, offshore banking and currency substitution. Stablecoins and tokenised money are the latest chapter in that evolution.

At the same time, the exercise of monetary authority has become inseparable from technology. Payments, settlement, supervision, monetary operations, crisis response and policy analysis increasingly depend on cloud platforms, data infrastructures, software supply chains, AI systems, communications networks and external providers.

These two developments are converging. New forms of digital money can shift control over payments, savings and cross-border flows, while technology concentration and geopolitical fragmentation can shift control over the infrastructure through which authority is exercised.

The traditional debate — whether stablecoins or foreign technology “threaten sovereignty” — is too narrow. Sovereignty is multidimensional and relative, encompassing the unit of account, means of payment, store of value, monetary-policy transmission and stabilisation capacity, control and visibility across critical infrastructure, and institutional agency.

Different jurisdictions face different sovereignty questions. Reserve-currency issuers may seek to extend monetary reach; Europe may prioritise control of critical payments and technology infrastructure; emerging markets may focus on digital dollarisation and capital-flow dynamics; and highly open financial centres maybe most concerned with cross-border liquidity, visibility and crisis transmission.

The objective is not technological or monetary self-sufficiency. It is to make dependence deliberate: identifying which capabilities require enduring institutional control, where diversification and exit options are necessary, and where trusted market or cross-border solutions remain appropriate.

Core Themes

Reframing monetary sovereignty for the digital era

Monetary sovereignty is not a binary condition and cannot be reduced to control over currency issuance. A jurisdiction may retain its domestic unit of account while losing influence over payment channels, savings behaviour, data visibility or crisis transmission. The relevant question is which policy capabilities are weakened, which opportunities emerge and which compensating tools are available.

Stablecoins, tokenised money and the next evolution of monetary control

Stablecoins create a globally accessible foreign-currency store of value and can lower the friction of cross-border currency substitution. At scale, they may affect payments, savings, bank funding, policy transmission, capital flows and the role of central-bank money. Policy responses should connect prudential rules, reserve and redemption standards, data access, payments oversight, monetary analysis and crisis preparedness.

Technology sovereignty and the institutional control dilemma

Critical financial mandates increasingly depend on infrastructure and providers outside the institution or jurisdiction. Geopolitical fragmentation, provider concentration, export controls, sanctions, extraterritorial legal reach and fragile supply chains turn technology decisions into strategic choices. Institutional agency is built through architecture, procurement, legal protections, partnerships,governance, skills and investment.

Different strategic positions, different sovereignty strategies

The United States, Europe, emerging markets, GCC economies and Asian financial centres face different combinations of monetary reach, infrastructure dependence, digital dollarisation, cross-border liquidity and technology exposure. No jurisdiction can replicate another’s playbook; each must combine its strategic advantages with proportionate management of dependencies.

From abstract sovereignty to practical institutional agency

Authorities should begin with mandate-critical capabilities and explicit risk appetite. For each capability, they should determine the required degree of control, acceptable dependencies, interoperability requirements, substitution options and crisis arrangements. Success is not maximum ownership, but the ability to continue acting, adapting and deciding as conditions change.

Guiding Questions

• Which dimensions of monetary sovereignty are changing most rapidly, and which matter most for different jurisdictions?
• How could stablecoins, tokenised deposits and new payment networks alter monetary transmission, funding, currency substitution and crisis dynamics?
• Which technology dependencies create strategic exposure for financial authorities, even when operational resilience standards are met?
• What should remain under institutional control, what can be shared, and where is dependence acceptable?
• How can authorities preserve openness, interoperability and innovation while retaining the ability to act under stress?

Overview and Concept

Two critical sessions on international tax cooperation respond to an urgentneed to streng then domestic resource mobilization, restore fairness in tax systems, and ensure that globalization and international cooperation contribute to sharedprosperity.

Session 1

“Building Consensus: UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation”

The negotiations on the United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation represent the most significant reform effort in global tax governance in decades. As negotiations enter increasingly substantive and politically sensitive stages, there is an urgent need for governments to exchange views, clarify priorities, identify red lines, and explore areas where consensus may be achievable. This session will provide a space for senior policymakers from developed and developing countries to engage in a constructive dialogue on the future of international tax cooperation and the prospects for building broad-based agreements under the UN process.

Guiding Questions

• How should a fair allocation of taxing rights between residence and source countrieslook in the Convention, particularly to ensure that developing countries can tax a fairershare of profits generated through markets, users, services and economic activity withintheir jurisdictions?x
• Given the diversity of national interests, where is consensus possible—and how cannegotiators pursue broad participation in the Convention and Protocols withoutweakening ambition or preserving existing imbalances?

Session 2

“Taxing the Super-Rich: National Experiences and Global Pathways Forward”

The concentration of wealth at the top of the distribution has reached unprecedented levels, generating renewed interest in policies aimed at taxing extreme wealth. In recent years, proposals for wealth taxation, minimum taxation of billionaires, inheritance taxation reforms, and enhanced transparency measures have gained increasing political momentum at national, regional, and international levels. At the same time, governments face important questions regarding the design, implementation, and coordination of these policies. The growing international debate presents an opportunity to examine existing experiences, assess policy options, and identify pathways for greater international cooperation. This session will bring together policymakers and experts to discuss the rationale, feasibility, and political prospects for taxing the super-rich, while exploring how these efforts can contribute to reducing inequality and strengthening fiscal capacity.

Guiding Questions

• While international coordination advances, what concrete progress can governmentsmake nationally on the taxation of high-net-worth individuals, including throughminimum effective taxes, capital gains and wealth taxation, inheritance taxes andstronger transparency measures?
• What can countries achieve more effectively through a coalition such as the SevillaPlatform for Action—from coordinating reforms and developing shared evidence toaddressing tax avoidance and reducing the risks of tax competition?

Overview and Concept

When G20 Finance Ministers asked the International Financial Architecture Working Group in 2023 to chart a path to better, bigger, and more effective multilateral development banks, they called for transformational reforms. The 2024 G20 Roadmap translated that ambition into thirteen concrete recommendations on operating as a system, mobilising private capital, expanding lending headroom, and directing concessional resources to where they matter most.

A new report, titled, ‘More critical than ever: strengthening growth and resilience through the MDBs’, produced by researchers from four independent think tanks, takes stock of progress and identifies the priorities for the way ahead. It finds that two years on, the MDBs have responded on a broad front, with progress on balance sheet optimisation, instruments from hybrid capital to guarantee platforms coming online, and institutions that once worked in parallel increasingly working in concert. While the direction of travel is right, the pace is not. Aggregate commitments have grown by less than ten per cent in real terms, much of the new headroom sits unused, and private capital mobilisation, while being impressive in the aggregate, has actually fallen in the low-income countries that need it most.

That shortfall would matter in any circumstance, but in the present context, it matters far more because the ground has shifted beneath the reform effort itself. Since 2023, development finance has become scarcer and dearer, official development assistance has suffered its steepest recorded fall, and China has turned from net financier to net extractor leaving the MDBs as the only institutions that still combine long-term, affordable finance with technical depth and convening power. At the same time, conflict, trade tensions and a broader questioning of multilateralism have raised the bar for what these institutions must demonstrate to clients and shareholders alike, even as the energy and climate agenda has grown at once more contested and more urgent. The MDBs cannot navigate this alone.

This event provides an opportunity for national and MDB leadership to set out their perspective on how the MDB system can help to strengthen growth and resilience in a challenging world.

Overview and Concept

This “Curtain Raiser” will present key findings from the Eurasian Fund for Stabilization and Development’s flagship research on labor markets. The data-driven initiative analyzes labor-market dynamics across Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan using a combination of macro- and micro-level data to
identify the country-specific institutional and structural factors shaping employment outcomes.

The research examines the relationship between demographic change, economic growth, structural transformation, migration, informality, and the creation of high-productivity employment. It moves beyond aggregate labor statistics to identify actionable and context-specific levers for improving labor-market outcomes, while highlighting the policy trade-offs governments face as they seek to combine social stability with long-term productivity and development.

The Bangkok session is intended to share evidence on these labor-market challenges, stimulate discussion among policymakers and international institutions, and introduce the broader EFSD research agenda. It will also invite participants to the EFSD flagship conference planned for the end of October 2026.

Guiding Questions

• Which demographic trends influence the development trajectories of labor markets?
• Do recent structural shifts generate high-productivity jobs?
• How do mass labor migration and an incomplete demographic transition transform labor markets and the economies of origin countries?