Social infrastructure has endured a long period of neglect in most developed and emerging countries, with chronic underinvestment exposed by the coronavirus crisis 2020. The financial crisis 2007/08 led to a slow revival of economic infrastructure policies, and a growing involvement of...

The European Commission's current initiative to commence consultations on the action plan to build a Capital Markets Union is to be welcomed. The objective must be to create a stable and sustainable financial system, providing all households and companies with appropriate access to financial...

Much of the current policy debate on adaptation to climate change has focussed on estimation of adaptation costs, ways to raise and to scale-up funding for adaptation, and the design of the international institutional architecture for adaptation financing. There is however little or no emphasis...

An increasing proportion of greenhouse gas emissions is produced in urban areas in industrializing and developing countries. Recent research shows that per capita emissions in cities like Bangkok, Cape Town or Shanghai have already reached the level of cities like London, New York or Toronto....

By raising money from a large number of people via the internet, crowdfunding offers the promise of a “democratization of finance”. Recently, the crowdfunding of large-scale urban projects appears to have gained traction as a handful of high-profile real estate and infrastructure projects...

Most cities enjoy some autonomy over how they tax their residents, and that autonomy is typically exercised by multiple municipal governments within a given city. In this chapter, we document patterns of city-level taxation across countries, and we review the literature on a number of salient...

Numerous microfinance initiatives around the world aim to alleviate poverty in developing countries. However, debate persists about their effectiveness and sustainability – a concern for transnational corporations and the international business community, which contribute about $9.4 billion to...

Urban land governance is one of the central challenges not just for urban but also more broadly for global development in times of rapid urbanisation. This paper advances a fresh perspective to look at urban land by exploring to what extent it could be characterised as a resource curse problem....

This paper brings financial centres into the debate on the causes and consequences of the global financial crisis, by focusing on New York and London. It argues that the degree of commonality, complementarity and connectivity between the two leading global financial centres justifies the use of...