Jiajun Xu is the co-founder (together with Professor Justin Yifu Lin) and Executive Deputy Director of the Centre for New Structural Economics at Peking University, Beijing. Xu worked as a Junior Research Specialist at the United Nations' High Level Panel Secretariat on the Post-2015 Development Agenda responsible for the research on development financing and South–South Cooperation. She also worked as an international consultant on debt sustainability in the World Bank and productive capacity building for least-developed countries at the UNDESA Committee for Development Policy Secretariat. Xu holds a D.Phil. (Ph.D.) from the University of Oxford.

• Introduction; 1. IDA burden-sharing: the unresolved puzzle; 2. Three power plays behind the politics of IDA burden-sharing; 3. IDA in the 1960s: hegemonic leadership amid bipolar geopolitics; 4. IDA in the 1970s: a turbulent era with accelerated burden-shifting; 5. IDA in the 1980s: the rise and retreat of the 'Reagan revolution'; 6. IDA in the 1990s: the struggle for power and fairness in a unipolar world; 7. IDA in the new millennium: leadership in transition?; 8. China's ascendancy: influence from within and impact from outside; Conclusion; Bibliography.

'Dr Xu, a pioneer of research on China´s role in global development finance, illuminates with in-depth empirical and institutional knowledge the changing power dynamics of multilateral development banking, a crucial step toward a new multipolar world order.' Helmut Reisen, Universität Basel, Switzerland, head of ShiftingWealth and former Director of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Developemt Center