Development and Public Banks

Development finance institutions (DFIs), also known as public development banks (PDBs) are public financial institutions initiated and steered by governments with explicit official missions to promote public policy objectives, and public development banks (PDBs) are the main category. DFIs are experiencing a renaissance worldwide, but there is limited academic research examining their roles, operations, and effectiveness.

This book attempts to fill this gap by bringing together world-renowned scholars who discuss in detail the economics and the social consequences of both development banks and public banks. Combining together, the chapters in this volume discuss topics from sustainability, development impact of financial instruments, a new development financial architecture, and the interaction with existing international rules like the Basel Accord. This book will be of particular interest to students, scholars, and researchers of development finance, global governance, and international political economy.

The chapters in this book were originally published in the Review of Political Economy.

Stephany Griffith-Jones is the Financial Markets Program Director at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University, USA. She is also a Board Member of the Central Bank of Chile. Her research interests include global capital flows, with special reference to flows to emerging markets; macro-economic management of capital flows in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa; proposals for international measures to diminish volatility of capital flows and reduce likelihood of currency crises; analysis of national and international capital markets; and proposals for international financial reform.

Régis Marodon is Senior Advisor on Sustainable Finance at the Agence Française de Développement (AFD), France. With a Ph.D in Development Economics, he previously performed research assignments for the World Bank. At the AFD, he contributed extensively to development financing in many African, Mediterranean, and Latin American countries, and was consecutively the Director for Turkey, Mexico, and Latin America. He joined the CEO advisory staff of the AFD in 2016 on sustainable finance matters and is an active member of many international networks on that issue.

Louis-Philippe Rochon is Full Professor of Economics at Laurentian University, Canada, where he has been teaching since 2004. He is the editor-in-chief of the Review of Political Economy. He is the Founding Editor (now Emeritus) of the Review of Keynesian Economics. He has widely published in post-Keynesian economics, and monetary theory and policy. He has been a visiting professor in over a dozen universities around the world.

Jiajun Xu is Assistant Professor and the Executive Deputy Dean of the Institute of New Structural Economics at Peking University, China. Xu initiates the International Research Initiative of Development Financing Institutions Working Groups, and currently acts as the General Secretary of the Global Research Consortium on Economic Structural Transformation (GReCEST) and the Invited Researcher at the Public Policy Research Center of the Counsellors’ Office of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China. Her research focuses on development financing and global economic governance.