The Business of Development: Trends in Lending by Multilateral Development Banks to Latin America, 1980-2009

In this paper we investigate how country shareholding arrangements affect the lending of multilateral development banks (MDBs) under different economic conditions and over time. To do so, we consider three different types of MDBs - one dominated by non-borrowers (the World Bank), another controlled by borrowing countries (the Corporación Andina de Fomento, CAF), and a third where control is more evenly split between borrowers and non-borrowers (the Inter-American Development Bank, IADB) - and a common set of borrowing countries in Latin America. Descriptive statistics as well as econometric analysis based on seemingly unrelated regression estimation (SURE) and panel regressions indicate that the lending of the three MDBs does indeed react in a systematically different way to specific economic conditions. As a general trend, countries increasingly favor the CAF and IADB as a source of multilateral borrowing, while during crisis times World Bank lending tends to increase significantly and more strongly than lending by the CAF. IADB lending also increases very strongly during crises, but remains at a relatively high level throughout. In line with expectations based on the different shareholder arrangements, the paper also finds links between borrower government policy stances and World Bank/IADB lending, but none for the CAF. --

What will the Ukraine conflict mean for multilateral development finance?

The sudden re-calibration of geopolitics in the weeks since Russia launched its bloody invasion of Ukraine is a truly tectonic event that is reverberating through multilateral institutions.The World Bank, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have suspended activity in Russia. On 11 March, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that the European Union (EU) was working to suspend Russia's membership at "multilateral financial institutions, including the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank"--an unprecedented move.The Global South has been more ambivalent. China and India have not joined economic sanctions, nor have a number of other countries across the developing world. Thirty-five countries abstained from voting against Russia at the UN General Assembly on 2 March, including Bangladesh, Bolivia, El Salvador, Pakistan, Senegal, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. Despite this ambivalence, even Southled institutions like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and New Development Bank (NDB) have announced a temporary halt to operations in Russia and Belarus.It is too soon to know where this will all lead, with bullets still flying in Ukraine. Nonetheless it is worth considering how the conflict might affect multilateral development banks (MDBs)--critical institutions in international development cooperation

The business of development: borrowers, shareholders, and the reshaping of multilateral development lending

This thesis seeks to understand how shifts in global economic power affect the policies and practices of multilateral development banks (MDBs). The study proposes three hypotheses. First, the “business” of development lending has changed radically in recent years as a result of the rise of middle income economies that now have a variety of options for sovereign borrowing—a reality thus far largely overlooked in academic research on MDBs. Second, a key factor defining the operational characteristics of the 20-odd MDBs in existence is the relative balance of power between borrower and nonborrower shareholders in MDB governance. Third, the financial pressures inherent in MDBs’ organizational models limit the options for MDB operations and shape how they will react to evolving market conditions. To test these hypotheses, the study examines several inter-related areas of MDB history and current operations, using as cases the World Bank (controlled by non-borrowing countries), the Inter-American Development Bank (control divided between borrowers and non-borrowers) and the Andean Development Corporation (controlled by borrowing countries). The analysis of the MDBs is complemented with case studies of Colombia and Ecuador, two countries with extensive borrowing histories with all three MDBs, to understand the demand side of development lending from the point of view of borrowing country government officials. The thesis finds compelling evidence in support of all three hypotheses, which suggests that the prevailing academic view that MDBs can be understood by focusing on the organization itself while ignoring the views of borrowers is not sufficient to understand the complexities of multilateral lending. MDBs are not all-powerful, but rather one resource among many at the disposal of governments to further their development, with varying competitive characteristics that impact the demand for their loans by borrowing countries in the current global context

Sustainability and infrastructure investment: national development banks in Africa

This repository item contains a working paper from the Boston University Global Economic Governance Initiative. The Global Economic Governance Initiative (GEGI) is a research program of the Center for Finance, Law & Policy, the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, and the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. It was founded in 2008 to advance policy-relevant knowledge about governance for financial stability, human development, and the environment.The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the activities of NDBs in Africa, and present two case studies of South African NDBs—Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) and the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC)—that may provide lessons for other NDBs in Africa and beyond. Where data permit, the paper considers general characteristics of the NDBs as well as specific information regarding investment in sustainable infrastructure

Social Sensing of Floods in the UK

"Social sensing" is a form of crowd-sourcing that involves systematic analysis of digital communications to detect real-world events. Here we consider the use of social sensing for observing natural hazards. In particular, we present a case study that uses data from a popular social media platform (Twitter) to detect and locate flood events in the UK. In order to improve data quality we apply a number of filters (timezone, simple text filters and a naive Bayes `relevance' filter) to the data. We then use place names in the user profile and message text to infer the location of the tweets. These two steps remove most of the irrelevant tweets and yield orders of magnitude more located tweets than we have by relying on geo-tagged data. We demonstrate that high resolution social sensing of floods is feasible and we can produce high-quality historical and real-time maps of floods using Twitter.Comment: 24 pages, 6 figure

From institutional integration to institutional demise: The disintegration of the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC)

This paper presents an in-depth contextual analysis of the rise and recent demise of the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC). The IIRC entered its ‘Breakthrough Phase’ for Integrated Reporting (<IR>) in 2013 and progressed to its ‘Momentum Phase’ in late 2018. The ‘Global Adoption Phase’ of <IR> was expected to commence in 2021 and conclude in 2026. However, by the middle of 2023, the IIRC ceased to exist as a separate entity and the future adoption of its much vaunted <IR> Framework was fundamentally uncertain. Drawing on a comprehensive examination of documentary evidence and a series of 34 in-depth interviews with key players associated with the IIRC’s development, this paper studies how and why the IIRC went so rapidly from being a notable ‘is’ to a definitive ‘was’ in less than a decade. Our analysis traces the IIRC’s shifting strategic priorities in pursuit of a new corporate reporting norm and illustrates how these priorities underpinned a concerted effort at institutional integration in the corporate reporting field. We show how the nature of this attempted integration eventually led to the IIRC’s demise. In seeking to understand the IIRC’s strategic choices and actions we pinpoint the significance of ‘invisibilities and exclusions’, ‘the dance of agency’, and ‘conceptual promiscuity’. We conclude that the IIRC’s ultimate legacy may not be what it integrated in terms of corporate reporting but what it chose or was required to exclude or to forget

Approaches to consent in public health research in secondary schools

OBJECTIVES: We assess different approaches to seeking consent in research in secondary schools. DESIGN: We review evidence on seeking active versus passive parent/carer consent on participant response rates and profiles. We explore the legal and regulatory requirements governing student and parent/carer consent in the UK. RESULTS: Evidence demonstrates that requiring parent/carer active consent reduces response rates and introduces selection biases, which impact the rigour of research and hence its usefulness for assessing young people's needs. There is no evidence on the impacts of seeking active versus passive student consent but this is likely to be marginal when researchers are directly in communication with students in schools. There is no legal requirement to seek active parent/carer consent for children's involvement in research on non-medicinal intervention or observational studies. Such research is instead covered by common law, which indicates that it is acceptable to seek students' own active consent when they are judged competent. General data protection regulation legislation does not change this. It is generally accepted that most secondary school students age 11+ are competent to provide their own consent for interventions though this should be assessed individually. CONCLUSION: Allowing parent/carer opt-out rights recognises their autonomy while giving primacy to student autonomy. In the case of intervention research, most interventions are delivered at the level of the school so consent can only practically be sought from head teachers. Where interventions are individually targeted, seeking student active consent for these should be considered where feasible