Statement delivered by Ms. Alexia Latortue, Assistant Secretary, U.S. Department of Treasury
V20 MINISTERIAL DIALOGUE X
16 April 2023
Ms. Alexia Latortue, Assistant Secretary, U.S. Department of Treasury
My late father from a V20 country, Haiti, always used to say “Al enposib el gade nou”, “We are beholden to the impossible,” and so I’m firmly committed to creating possibilities against all odds. More importantly, so is Secretary Yellen and the whole Treasury Department and so I want to share with you four areas in which we are trying to create possibilities.
The first one has been touched upon and it is involving the MDBs to be suitable to the 21st century challenges, climate being topmost among those. We started with the World Bank. I don’t play baseball either. First base we need a home run across vision and mission, incentive structures, operational models and financing capacity. I will not lay out the whole agenda. I will make two points here.
The first one is we’ve asked the World Bank to really help figure out how to integrate vulnerability and the resource allocation decisions of the institution. That is critical work ahead.
Secondly, many of you have spoken about concessionality. And so we need to think about how to raise concessional finance, but also how to spend it to the places where the highest impact is. So a framework, principles to think about how to use concessionality, absolutely for low-income countries and targeted places for middle-income countries is another ask.
Let me move to the second area for possibilities for us. It’s looking at the climate finance architecture and trying to leverage it in a more strategic way to increase volume, to increase effectiveness, to make it easier for countries to access funding already available. So, we’re doing a review of the architecture to try to make it more effective.
Thrilled to be co-chairing the Green Climate Fund; welcome Mafalda as the incoming head of the Green Climate Fund. There’s a lot to do here. It’s a replenishment year. We’ll all have to sort of deliver for that. Also, very pleased to be working with the State Department on the transition committee for the loss and damage arrangements including the Fund so big work ahead this year.
The third area is just to echo what’s been said about debt vulnerabilities. It’s a top priority to address this as an interrelated piece of addressing the climate crisis. And the last piece I want to focus on is what we’re doing to integrate climate and transition risks into our macroeconomic models.
With that, I’ll state the U.S. government is both honored and humbled to be part of this really important table of Spring Meetings.
Thank you.
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