Against the backdrop of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) increasing focus on crisis prevention measures and the G20’s discussion of “global safety nets”, this paper analyses the IMF’s tools for crisis prevention, with particular emphasis on the recently developed Flexible Credit...

The global economic and financial crisis affected countries all over the world. Although, poorer economies were on average less affected by the crisis, some developing countries still experienced considerable output losses. This paper shows that households living in developing countries were in...

This article makes the case for strengthening co-operation between regional financing arrangements (RFAs) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and examines ways to do so. It argues that ex ante co-operation between RFAs and the IMF is needed to reduce the risk of co-operation failing in...

The availability of trade finance can be an important driver for international trade. This paper analyses the effect of trade finance on the trade flows of industrialized, emerging and developing economies and focuses in particular on the role of trade openness. We use Berne Union data on export...

The invention of Bitcoin in 2008/2009 gave consumers and businesses the possibility to transfer money nationally and internationally on a truly peer-to-peer basis (i.e. without a trusted central party such as a bank). Few people realised the full potential of the technology in the early days,...

This discussion paper examines how private capital can be mobilised for sustainable infrastructure, with particular reference to the newly created Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the New Development Bank (NDB), also known as the BRICS Bank. These banks are an important addition to...

This paper investigates the empirical significance of push- and pull factors of different types of capital flows – FDI, portfolio and “others” (including loans) – to emerging market and developing economies. Based on an extensive quarterly mixed time-series panel dataset for 32 emerging...

The UN Conference on Financing for Development in Addis Ababa in July 2015 will pave the way for the implementation of the post-2015 development agenda. The Briefing Paper series “Financing Global Development“ analyses key financial and non-financial means of implementation for the new...

In September 2015, the United Nations (UN) adopted a new global development framework, the “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”, which includes the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs thereby replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were supposed to be realized...

Mitigating climate change and limiting global warming to no more than 2°C require a fast and radical transformation of politics, the economy and society. Worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases need to fall to zero by 2100. Action needs to be even faster in the case of carbon dioxide (CO2),...