Many governments have started issuing 'green' bonds tied to expenditures on projects with environmental objectives such as climate change mitigation. While well-intentioned, issuance of a green bond by an investment-grade sovereign has no environmental impact, leaves funding costs unchanged,...

In this paper we document the stylized facts about the relationship between international oil price swings, sovereign risk and macroeconomic performance of oil-exporting economies. We show that even though being a bigger oil producer decreases sovereign risk–because it increases a...

Ausgelöst durch das Zusammentreffen niedriger Zinsen in reichen Ländern und einem hohen Finanzierungsbedarf für Infrastruktur in vielen ärmeren Ländern befindet sich die Verschuldung der Länder des Globalen Südens seit Jahren auf einem dramatisch hohen Niveau. Hohe Schuldendienstzahlungen...

We gather extensive global price and volume information to establish that exhaustible mineral commodities are both affordable and abundant. On average, we extract a kilogram of mineral for every 5$ of GDP, at a cost of 1⁄4$. We predict that economic growth will progressively decouple from...

In their recent provocative book Why Nations Fail, political scientist Daron Acemoglu and economist James A. Robinson contend that nations fail when they become “extractive” in their exercise of political power. According to the authors, the neoliberal system of market-centred competition...

When it comes to assess the sustainability of fiscal policy and public debt in Andean countries, two idiosyncratic facts of fiscal revenues have to be considered. First, fiscal revenues coming from natural resources represent up to 44% of total fiscal revenues, producing a strong correlation...

This study investigates transition finance in Lebanon, an upper middle-income country in the MENA region transitioning from a significant adverse shock. Lebanon’s development path has been historically non-linear and, most recently, the Syrian conflict adversely affected the country’s...