Recap
The World Bank has released its flagship publication, the World Development Report, each year since 1978. With the publication of the 2024 report, the authors moved in a new direction: they created a transformative summer school format that brought the report's audience and its authors into the same seminar room for two weeks. The inaugural Growth Academy.
Week one ran at the Becker Friedman Institute at UChicago. Week two moved to the World Bank Group headquarters in Washington. Faculty included three Nobel laureates, the World Bank's Chief Economist, and the senior academic voices of modern growth economics. An Indonesia mini-academy followed within months. The AI for Development roundtable that seeded WDR 2026 was the chain reaction.
