The new report Low Carbon Transition has just been published jointly by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

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To mark the launch of Low Carbon Transition, the joint special report on climate change launching this Wednesday, we asked the authors of the report to produce a handy glossary explaining the key terms

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Every three years the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) conducts knowledge tests among 15-year old secondary school students in all OECD and a number of non-OECD countries.

In the EBRD countries of operation, the top performers were Estonia, Poland and Slovenia (in that order, with Estonia leading in all three disciplines). The lowest average scores were recorded in Azerbaijan, Albania and the Kyrgyz Republic, the latter also being the weakest performer globally.

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Little is known about the exact nature of regional differences in terms of constraints to doing business. Broadly, two sets of indicators of the regional business environment are available. The first is objective measures of its various components, such as infrastructure, financial deepening or registered crime. The second is subjective expert assessments of the quality of institutions and investment risk in the regions.

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With the exception of those countries with the largest pre-crisis credit booms, credit growth is recovering across the region.

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In the wake of the 2007–2009 economic crisis, the virtues and vices of financial globalization are being re-evaluated. Financial links between countries, particularly bank lending, have been singled out as a key channel of international crisis transmission. The International Monetary Fund and the G-20 have identified the volatility of cross-border capital flows as a priority related to the reform of the global financial system.

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By Piroska Nagy, Franziska Ohnsorge, Peter Sanfey

Steady private-sector led growth but increasing downside risks

Our estimate for overall growth in 2010 remains at around 4.2 per cent for the region, with upward revisions in most countries but downward revisions …

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As the global financial crisis deepened post-Lehman, trade finance saw a sharp volume drop in the EBRD region. This reflected a complex combination of demand and supply factors, although an IMF-BAFT (Bankers’ Association for Finance and Trade) survey suggests that on balance most of the contraction in trade volumes is explained by demand side effects.

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Foreign currency (FX) lending is widespread in many parts of emerging Europe, with more than half of all bank loans in Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Romania, and Serbia currently denominated in (or linked to) a …

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By Franto Ricka and Jeromin Zettelmeyer

The world has been abuzz with discussions about the implications of both simultaneous quantitative easing (QE2) in the US, UK and Japan, and capital controls and competitive depreciations in emerging markets (EMs). What would such a scenario imply for the transition region?

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