Nepal, July 21 -- A decade ago this summer, a 41-year-old economist stood among the architects of one of the fastest, most credible disaster assessments a poor country has ever produced. Nepal's National Planning Commission (NPC) had one month to answer a pressing question after the 2015 earthquakes killed nearly 9,000 people: How much would it cost to rebuild and could the world be persuaded to pay for it?

Swarnim Wagle, then a member of the Commission, steered that process jointly with the World Bank, UNDP, the EU, ADB and JICA to deliver on June 15, 2015, a Post Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA) which put the damage at roughly $7 billion and reconstruction needs at $6.7 billion, about 30 percent of GDP. Ten days later, at the Internati...