This post argues that the outbreak of the sub-prime mortgage crisis prompted banks to screen and monitor their corporate borrowers more carefully. This “wake-up call” was particularly strong for relatively opaque loans. It already materialised before the Lehman Brothers collapse…

By Franziska Ohnsorge, Yevgeniya Korniyenko and Philipp Hochreiter

Private sector credit growth continues to be subdued in most of EBRD’s countries of operation (COOs), despite a gradual recovery of trade, industrial production and capital inflows in the second quarter of…

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…

Authors: Franziska  Ohnsorge, Piroska M Nagy, Peter Sanfey

We’ve just published our latest update on Emerging Europe and Central Asia’s economic outlook which indicates that the recovery in the transition economies is progressing with important exceptions, and highlights the key…

The EBRD’s new website is up and running, and we’d love to hear what you think of it.

We’ve entirely rebuilt ebrd.com from the ground up, with a fresh visual design, new structure, additional features and improved content. The aim was…

The EBRD received hundreds of entries for its “Born in ‘89″ essay competition, which invited people from the EBRD region to share their experiences of growing up in the years after the fall of the Berlin wall.

Finalists…

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…

More than 2,000 people from all over the world are arriving in Zagreb, Croatia as the EBRD’s 19th Annual Meeting (AM) and Business Forum gets under way.

Participants will be able to assess the latest political, economic and…

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…

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…