EBRD Blog

European Bank for Reconstruction and Development

Should Governments Regulate Away FX lending?

By Jeromin Zettelmeyer and Piroska M. Nagy

“Financial dollarisation” – domestic borrowing and lending in foreign currency (FX), even when the borrower’s income is in domestic currency – is back on the policy agenda. Unlike the 1990s, the victims of…

New lease of life for Croatian children's home

The EBRD aims to increase energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions through all our projects in every sector. To mitigate the environmental impact of of holding the EBRD Annual Meeting in Zagreb we are investing in a social project…

Sleepless in Seattle?

Actually, “trapped in Toronto” is more like it (love the alliteration). Trapped in room 412 of the Marriott on the heels of a youth conference, the G20 (Y), that brought hordes of bright young people from Russia, China, France and…

Mongolian microfinance: Some first insights from a randomised field experiment

In Mongolia, as in numerous other countries, microfinance has attracted attention as a potentially powerful tool to generate pro-poor growth. Many Mongolians live in poverty and income disparities between urban and rural areas are significant. The rural economy remains vulnerable…

Kazakhstan’s Missing Middle

By Ralph De Haas and Asel Isakova

Why do private equity funds have difficulties with finding interesting mid-sized investment opportunities in Kazakhstan? And why does economic diversification remain such an elusive policy goal for the Kazakh government?

These are complex…

EBRD launches Transition Report 2009

Today the EBRD published its annual Transition Report, which covers the past year’s developments in countries of the EBRD region and analyses their macroeconomic performance and transition to market economies.

 
 The question this year has been whether that

…

Stress testing of banks and policy implications

Recent stress tests, while admittedly not perfect, have proven useful to bring a degree of clarity over banks’ portfolio quality. When backed by credible financing plans, the tests have helped confidence in battered banking sectors. In Europe two major regional…

A look at non-performing loans: the boomerang effect

Authors: Ralph De Haas and Stephan Knobloch , 16 July 2009.

When the  global financial crisis hit the transition region, worries among policy makers  centred on the local banking systems and the potential for financial contagion  from west to east. And when…

The "invisible hand" of advanced country central banks in emerging markets

We all know that most emerging market economies have limited policy room to deliver massive counter-cyclical crisis response. This affects their risk perception, investor confidence, and capital inflows. Indeed, most emerging markets have limited fiscal space (except for those with…

In defense of foreign banks

‘Banker’ has recently become somewhat of a dirty word and ‘foreign banker’ a most reviled sub-species. Over the last months foreign banks have, amongst other things, been accused of abandoning some of the emerging markets that have contributed so much…

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