People who look at the Doing Business report’s Trading Across Borders indicator and the Logistics Performance Index (LPI) often wonder why one country can perform well on one of the rankings but…

Valentina Saltane, Dorina Georgieva |

Will cash and checks still exist 15 or 20 years from now given the increasing digitization of money? Is the smartphone our new bank? Will many people working in the financial sector industry lose…

José de Luna-Martínez, Wei Zhang |

In the past decade, the Islamic finance industry has grown at double digits despite the weak global economic environment. By 2020, the Islamic finance industry is projected to reach $3 trillion in…

José de Luna-Martínez, Sergio Campillo Diaz |

In the past several decades Malaysia has witnessed strong economic growth and has become one of Asia’s newly industrialized countries. In one generation it transitioned successfully from low to…

Smita Kuriakose |

It has been almost four years since I first became involved with the regional public-private dialogue initiative, the Caribbean Growth Forum (CGF). In June 2012, I walked into the conference room…

Israel Mallett |

  To function properly, a financial system needs to have two doors in place: an “entry” and an “exit”. The first one enables qualified local or foreign institutions to enter the marketplace to…

José de Luna-Martínez |

School children in Kingston, Jamaica. Strong public financial management affects all facets of government spending, including education. Photo credit: UN Photo/Milton Grant  Finance ministers,…

Samia Msadek |

Understanding Macroeconomic Volatility: Part 2 The fact is that a government can soften a recession by increasing spending (the counter-cyclical approach) to raise demand and output. If government…

Francisco G. Carneiro, Ha Minh Nguyen, Rei Odawara |

Volatility in financial markets gets wide attention in the public eye. Less noticed is what we in the development world call macroeconomic volatility—faster-than-desired swings in the broad forces…

Francisco G. Carneiro, Ha Minh Nguyen, Rei Odawara |

Globally, around 2 billion people do not use formal financial services. In Southeast Asia, there are 264 million adults who are still “unbanked”; many of them save their money under the mattress…

José de Luna-Martínez |