Over the period 2019-21, Albania had to confront dual shocks: the 2019 earthquake and the COVID-19 pandemic. Both had sizable impacts on the country's economy. The COVID-19 pandemic took a heavy toll on an economy already affected by the earthquake in 2019. Key sectors were put in lockdown in...

Over the years, the demand for seamless and inexpensive cross-border payments has grown in parallel with growth in international e-commerce, remittances and tourism. Yet, cross-border payments have not kept pace with the intensive modernization that has characterized domestic payment services...

In recent years, due to innovations in technology, the concept of digital currency has emerged out of the desire of some private entities to replicate specific properties of cash in the digital space. Digital currencies have been issued in various electronic formats and value propositions, and...

Payment and settlement systems and services have become vital components of the economic life of contemporary societies. Over the last decades, they have gone through several waves of reforms that have changed the landscape of the national payments system (NPS) in virtually every country in the...

Emerging technology curation series aims to capture and share Korea experience and lessons learned in regard to exploration and adoption of emerging technologies like blockchain, AI, edge-computing, internet of things (IoT), 5G, et cetera Korea blockchain ecosystem is the first of the series and...

Governments face growing contingent liabilities from disasters as they tend to shoulder a significant share of disaster response and recovery costs. Disaster shocks increase government expenditure and hamper economic activities. An increasing number of countries are developing financial...