The world financial crisis that started in the US housing market in 2008 brought into evidence deep failures of prudential oversight, linked for the most part to a failure to comprehend and handle systemic risk in a way that could prevent systemic crises. This paper summarizes the responses to...

Mobile banking services offer great potential to expand financial services, particularly payment services, to the poor. They also provide a convenient and cost effective way to access bank accounts. This paper constitutes a first attempt to explain statistically what factors contribute to mobile...

This paper analyzes the lending behavior of foreign-owned banks during the recent global crisis. Using bank-level panel data for countries in Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia, and Latin America, the paper explores the role of affiliate and parent financial characteristics, host location, as...

Despite their importance, data on the structure of bank credit by maturity are scarce. For Latin America and the Caribbean, data are particularly difficult to obtain, as few banks report loan maturity data in commercial data sets such as Bankscope. With support from the Association of...

Since the introduction of the KiwiSaver scheme in New Zealand in 2006, several countries have implemented, or are in the process of implementing, voluntary funded pension systems with automatic enrollment features. Since most of the literature has focused on countries with the common law...

National Development Financial Institutions (NDFIs) are crucial for mobilizing the required financing, including from private sources, to reach countries' climate and environmental (C and E) objectives. Funding needed to achieve countries' C and E goals is in the trillions of dollars, with many...

In the 1990s many emerging economies in Central Europe and Latin America initiated their pension reforms. While most analysis to date has focused on the accumulation phase, there are a number of lessons to be shared as countries start to prepare the retirement options for their contributors,...

The passivity of the demand for pension products is one of the striking features of mandatory pension systems. Consequently, the provision of multiple investment alternatives to households (multifund schemes) does not ensure that contributions are invested efficiently. In addition, despite the...

Over the past decade or so, most Central and Eastern European countries have reformed their pension systems, significantly downsizing their public pillars and creating private pillars based on capitalization accounts. Early policy attention was focused on the accumulation phase but several...

This paper provides a comparative summary of the payout phase of pension systems in five countries -- Australia, Chile, Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland. All five countries have large pension systems with mandatory or quasi-mandatory retirement savings schemes. But they exhibit important...