Designing and rating insurance products requires both science and judgment. In developing and emerging economies, actuarial procedures must be robust and implementable, as well as offering a sufficient degree of transparency and flexibility so as to allow expert judgment to be incorporated. This...

The weather index insurance market in India is the world's largest, having transitioned from small-scale and scattered pilots to a large-scale weather based crop insurance program covering more than 9 million farmers. This paper provides a critical overview of this market, including a review of...

This paper examines how a country's weak institutions and polarized government can affect the likelihood of its default on sovereign debt. Using a data set of 90 countries, it shows that strong institutions are associated with fewer sovereign default crises. In addition, when institutions are...

The Thailand Village Fund is the second-largest microcredit scheme in the world. Nearly 80,000 elected local Village Fund committees administer loans that reach 30 percent of all households. The value of Village Fund loans has remained steady since 2006, even without new infusions of government...

This paper studies the impact of a large debt relief program, intended to attenuate investment constraints among highly-indebted households in rural India. It isolates the causal effect of bankruptcy-like debt relief settlements using a natural experiment arising from India's Debt Relief Program...

This paper presents the latest update of the World Bank Bank Regulation and Supervision Survey, and explores two questions. First, were there significant differences in regulation and supervision between crisis and non-crisis countries? Second, what aspects of regulation and supervision changed...

Deposit insurance is widely offered in a number of countries as part of a financial system safety net to promote stability. An unintended consequence of deposit insurance is the reduction in the incentive of depositors to monitor banks, which leads to excessive risk-taking. This paper examines...

The paper presents the policymakers’ perspective on the reforms undertaken to manage states’ debt and ensure solvency. While the sustained high growth rates of the Indian economy played a part in alleviating the interest burden on debt and ensuring that the debt does not grow in an explosive...

This paper takes a hard look at the experience with official intervention in sovereign debt crises, focusing on debt crises of the 1980s, Russia in 1998, Argentina in 2001, and Greece in 2010. Based on the track record, the authors argue that in situations where countries face a solvency...

Just before the 2008-09 global financial crisis, policymakers were concerned about the rapid growth of bank credit, particularly in Europe; now worry centers on a potential global credit crunch led by European banking institutions. Overall, credit conditions across Europe deteriorated markedly in...