Ambition and reality

Paris financing summit falls short of its targets

French President Emmanuel Macron hosted what he called the “Summit for a New Global Financing Pact” last week. The summit’s agenda was greatly ambitious. It aimed to address an entire complex of different issues affecting developing economies in general: From debt sustainability to the financing of adaptation to climate change. It ended with some clear steps forward but without a conclusion commensurate to the scale of its ambition. This is hardly to be considered surprising, since some of the problems it aimed to address are intractable. What the summit did do is clarify, far more effectively than ever before, exactly