Trade finance shortfalls now appear regularly. Does this matter for trade expansion and economic development in developing countries? Global trade finance has resumed following the 2009 global financial crisis. However, the pattern of recovery has been uneven across countries and categories of...

Banks are a critical facilitator of trade. Without bank-intermediated trade finance, global exports and imports would come to a halt. This has been apparent during the episodes of credit rationing that accompany financial shocks. But we have little insight into the drivers of rejection pooling...

Trade finance shortfalls now appear regularly. Does this matter for trade expansion and economic development in developing countries? Global trade finance has resumed following the 2009 global financial crisis. However, the pattern of recovery has been uneven across countries and categories of...

In this paper we analyze the role of the IMF and the World Bank in triggering changes in the political regime, i.e., democracy and autocracy. We develop a theoretical model which predicts that anticipation of financial flows from international financial institutions may trigger political regime...

Why would bilateral donors intermediate aid through a multilateral and not extend aid directly? This paper suggests a trade-off: multiple bilateral donors for each recipient may imply coordination and strategic problems but intermediating through a multilateral may dilute individual donor...

Sustainable development is a long-term process, and as such must be examined carefully. Development implies structural changes of many different types, ranging from purely economic aspects to those affecting the personal circumstances of people. Changes take time, all the more so when dealing...

Differences in economic and theological approaches to debt cancellation result from differences in disciplinary assumptions in respect of purpose, method, and argument. We argue that they provide alternative commentaries upon the need for debt cancellation, but that it is not possible to...

Efforts to realize the issue of development-focused Special Drawing Rights (SDR) by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have been on-going for many years. Recently, however, the campaign first gained a new momentum immediately after the Asian financial crises with the new liquidity problems of...

This paper reviews the main obstacles to human and social development posed by the current external debt burdens of the least development countries. In particular, it analyses the shortcomings of the mechanisms and thresholds used to assess the sustainability of debt levels in the HIPC...

Official flows account for close to half of capital flows to developing countries, and close to 90 per cent of receipts for Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper documents trends in these official flows over the last three decades. The most striking trend has been declining aid volume. Following two...