The three large South Asian countries (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh), which are the focus of this report, have drawn up large power capacity addition plans to provide for the rapidly increasing electricity demand in the region. The global financial crisis (the crisis), which became acute from September 2008 with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, has had a widespread impact across the world and across sectors through inducing recessionary conditions including falling demand, freezing financial markets, and loss of confidence. The purpose of this report is to assess whether the ambitious plans of these countries were adversely affected by the global financial crisis, and where relevant, to be able to plan better for such future shocks. The report is structured as follows: it starts with the executive summary. After this introductory chapter (chapter one), there are detailed country chapters (chapter two to four) which, inter-alia, map the different sources of financing available to the power sectors in the three target countries and discuss how these sources were affected by the crisis (if at all). An important aspect of this assessment has been the attempt to ring-fence the impact of the crisis per se on power sector projects...

This paper examines the factors that determine banking flows from advanced economies to emerging markets. In addition to the usual determinants of capital flows in terms of global push and local pull factors, it examines the role of bilateral factors, such as growth differentials and economic size, as well as contagion factors and measures of the depth in financial interconnectedness between lenders and borrowers. The analysis finds profound differences across regions. In particular, in spite of the severe impact of the global financial crisis, banking flows in emerging Europe stand out as a more stable region than is the case in other developing regions. Assuming that the determinants of banking flows remain unchanged in the presence of structural changes, the authors use these results to explore the short-term implications of Basel III capital regulations on banking flows to emerging markets.

This paper discusses the key regulatory, market and political failures that led to the 2008-2009 United States financial crisis. While Congress was fixing the Savings and Loan crisis, it failed to give the regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac normal bank supervisory power. This was a political failure as Congress was appealing to narrow constituencies. In the mid-1990s, to encourage home ownership, the Administration changed enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act, effectively requiring banks to lower bank mortgage standards to underserved areas. Crucially, the risky mortgage standards then spread to other sectors of the market. Market failure problems ensued as banks, mortgage brokers, securitizers, credit rating agencies, and asset managers were all plagued by problems such as moral hazard or conflicts of interest. The author explains that financial deregulation of the past three decades is unrelated to the financial crisis, and makes several recommendations for regulatory reform.

The global financial crisis has not only dealt a major blow to the global economy, but also shaken confidence in economic management in the developed world and the economic models that guide it. The crisis has revealed major market failures, especially in the housing bubble and its transmission to the financial system, but also glaring state failures that propagated and exacerbated the crisis. Will the events of the past two years lead to major shifts in thinking about development economics, and should they? This paper assesses that question for several key domains of development thinking, including the market-state balance, macroeconomic management, globalization, development financing, and public spending. On the one hand, changed global circumstances and new awareness of vulnerability should lead to some policy changes, as developing countries take steps to reduce and buffer risks, including risks generated in developed countries. At the same time, the crisis should largely reinforce the Post-Washington Consensus on development that has emerged over the past decade -- a world view that aims to achieve private sector-driven growth but sees a facilitating role for the state...

The financial crisis arose in the industrial countries, but has affected developing countries through higher interest rates, sharp changes in commodity prices, and reductions in investment, trade, migration and remittances. For most low-income countries, shocks that affect food prices or wage rates for unskilled workers seem likely to have the largest impact on poverty, with the declines in key food prices associated with the crisis helping to reduce poverty, while declining trade, investment, and remittance flows have had adverse impacts on the poor. Policies to address the crisis must include measures to deal with financial sector problems, the resulting reductions in aggregate demand, and the particular vulnerabilities of poor people. Given the complexity of the impacts from financial crises and commodity price shocks, there is a strong case for developing better social safety net policies that can offset the adverse impacts of a wide range of different shocks on poor people without creating costly market distortions.

Using a multi-country panel of banks, the authors study whether better capitalized banks fared better in terms of stock returns during the financial crisis. They differentiate among various types of capital ratios: the Basel risk-adjusted ratio; the leverage ratio; the Tier I and Tier II ratios; and the common equity ratio. They find several results: (i) before the crisis, differences in capital did not affect subsequent stock returns; (ii) during the crisis, higher capital resulted in better stock performance, most markedly for larger banks and less well-capitalized banks; (iii) the relationship between stock returns and capital is stronger when capital is measured by the leverage ratio rather than the risk-adjusted capital ratio; (iv) there is evidence that higher quality forms of capital, such as Tier 1 capital, were more relevant. They also examine the relationship between bank capitalization and credit default swap (CDS) spreads.

The recent global financial crisis has shaken the confidence of developed and developing countries alike in the very blueprint of financial and macro policies that underlie the western capitalist systems. In an effort to contain the crisis from spreading, the authorities in the US and many European governments have taken unprecedented steps of providing extensive liquidity, giving assurances to bank depositors and creditors that include blanket guarantees, and structuring bail-out programs that include taking large ownership stakes in financial institutions, in addition to establishing programs for direct provision of credit to non-financial institutions. Emphasizing the importance of incentives and tensions between short term and longer term policy responses to crisis management, this paper draws on a large body of research evidence and country experiences to discuss the implications of the current crisis for financial and macroeconomic policies going forward.

The international financial crisis has severely affected the value of pension fund assets worldwide. The unfolding global recession will also impose pressures on public pension schemes financed on a pay-as-you-go basis, while limiting the capacity of governments to mitigate both of theses effects. Governments are reacting to these events in different ways. Some are asking whether the balance between funded defined-contribution and unfunded pension schemes should be reconsidered. A few have already taken actions to reverse prior reforms. This note discusses the potential impacts of the financial crisis on fully funded and pay-as-you-go retirement-income systems in World Bank client countries, and identifies key short-and medium-term policy responses.

The authors analyze the role of institutions in resolving systemic banking crises for a broad sample of countries. Banking crises are fiscally costly, especially when policies like substantial liquidity support, explicit government guarantees on financial institutions liabilities, and forbearance from prudential regulations are used. Higher fiscal outlays do not, however, accelerate the recovery from a crisis. Better institutions less corruption, improved law and order, legal system, and bureaucracy do. The authors find these results to be relatively robust to estimation techniques, including controlling for the effects of a poor institutional environment on the likelihood of financial crisis and the size of fiscal costs. Their results suggest that countries should use strict policies to resolve a crisis and use the crisis as an opportunity to implement medium-term structural reforms, which will also help avoid future systemic crises.

Financial systems can contribute to economic development by providing people with useful tools for risk management, but when they fail to manage the risks they retain, they can create severe financial crises with devastating social and economic effects. The financial crisis that hit the world economy in 2008-2009 has transformed the lives of many individuals and families, even in advanced countries, where millions of people fell, or are at risk of falling, into poverty and exclusion. For most regions and income groups in developing countries, progress to meet the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 has slowed and income distribution has worsened for a number of countries. Countries hardest hit by the crisis lost more than a decade of economic time. As the efforts to strengthen the financial systems and improve the resilience of the global financial system continue around the world, the challenge for policy makers is to incorporate the lessons from the failures to take into consideration the complex linkages between financial...

This paper investigates the effect that tight credit conditions had on outward foreign direct investment flows during the 2008-2010 global financial crisis. A difference-in-differences approach is used to isolate a "credit channel" impact of the global financial crisis on foreign direct investment. The global financial crisis had a stronger negative impact on the relative volume of outward foreign direct investment in financially vulnerable sectors in more financially developed countries, especially if these countries also experienced a banking crisis. These results suggest that lack of access to external finance can partly explain the drop in foreign direct investment during the global financial crisis.

For many years, microfinance has been the poster child of governments, policymakers, and international organizations with the goal of lifting millions of people out of poverty. The notion that microfinance can pursue and achieve the intertwined goals of development and financial profitability without friction predominated. This dual opportunity, combined with a huge untapped market for financial services at the bottom of the pyramid attracted large amounts of funding from international capital markets, triggering unprecedented levels of growth. Until the global financial crisis, the sustainability of the resulting market growth had not been significantly questioned. As the crisis unfolded during the end of 2007, there seemed to be consensus among microfinance practitioners, analysts, and other industry experts that this crisis will be different. The microfinance industry braced itself for anticipated liquidity crunches, increase in costs of funds, and foreign exchange, as well as a sharp rise in portfolio arrears. This paper will: review recent publications that have drawn conclusions on the effects of the global financial crisis based on empirical data research; draw the conclusion that proper governance and risk management systems are essential and can have avoided many of the problems specific microfinance institutions (MFIs) faced during the financial crisis; and highlight Basel framework sections relevant to MFIs and demonstrate how these can be applied to strengthen MFIs.

Throughout the financial crisis, new private activity has continued to take place in developing countries with projects being tendered and brought to financial closure. In the first months of the full-scale of the financial crisis (Aug-Nov 2008), the rate of project closure was 26 percent lower than in the same period in 2007. However, since then private activity recovered and the project closure rate in Aug-Dec 2008 was just 15 percent lower than in the same period in the previous year. The slowdown reflects an initial impact of the financial crisis which has made financing (both debt and equity) more onerous and difficult to secure. Infrastructure projects are facing higher cost of financing, and lower demand for infrastructure services is beginning to impact some sectors. The major impact to date is projects being delayed, and, to a lesser extent, cancelled. Transport and energy are the worst affected sectors so far, while Europe and Central Asia (ECA) and upper middle income countries are the most affected groups of countries. It is too early to assess the full impact of the crisis on new Public Private Infrastructure (PPI) projects. Financial markets remain volatile while the financial crisis has now turned into a global economic crisis. As the 'flight to quality' sets in for banks and other financiers...

This brief country case study on Turkey aims to summarize the fundamental developments in the banking sector, which represents almost 90 percent of the financial sector in the country. The brief has two parts. The first covers the 2001 financial crisis and the developments until end of 2007, the year before the global financial crisis of 2008 started. The second part focuses on the macro-prudential policies applied by the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey in response to the global financial crisis in three phases: (i) full liquidity support after Lehman Brothers' collapse (September 2008), (ii) the exit strategy (April 2010), and (iii) the new policy mix (final quarter of 2010).

This report takes stock of enterprise sector performance in the Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region and its key drivers: access to finance, infrastructure, and labor. It is the second of two complementary reports that examine selected trends emerging from the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) data that are of immediate policy relevance to ECA countries. Both reports draw primarily on information from data collected prior to the crisis. This report also uses data on employment and access to finance collected during the crisis in a subset of ECA countries. The global financial crisis has had enormous consequences for firms' access to finance, the availability of qualified workers, and the ability of governments to provide (and of private sector to obtain) reliable infrastructure services. The extent and impact of these constraints is yet to be determined but their presence at a time of economic growth suggests they may re-emerge during the post-crisis economic recovery. The BEEPS captures information on a number of aspects of the business environment. This report highlights the elements of firm finance...

The world is currently still struggling with the aftermath of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Following a description of the eruption, evolution and consequences of the global crisis, this paper reviews alternative hypotheses for the causes of the global financial crisis as well as their empirical evidence. The paper refutes the frequently voiced view that the global crisis was caused by global imbalances that reflected economic policies of East Asian countries. Instead, it argues that global imbalances were the result of excess demand in the United States, resulting from both the public debt in the United States arising from the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars and tax cuts and the overconsumption by households supported by the wealth effect from the housing bubble in the United States. The housing bubble itself was the outcome of the Federal Reserve's low interest rate policy in the aftermath of the burst of the "dot-com" bubble in 2001, the lack of appropriate financial regulation, and housing policies aimed at expanding the mortgage market to low-income borrowers. It was possible to maintain the large trade deficits of the United States for such a long period of time because of the dollar's reserve currency status. When the housing bubble in the United States burst...

Development assistance from Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and Arab financial institutions has been responsive in addressing development and humanitarian needs in many developing countries. Since the global financial crisis (2008-2011), the combined net official development assistance (ODA) from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE peaked at US$ 6.5 billion in 2008at the height of the global financial crisis. It has since remained relatively high at US$ 4.8 billion annually on average. Total ODA from the three also increased significantly as a share of gross national income, yielding a weighted average of 0.55 percent during 2008-2011, compared to 0.49 percent in the previous four years. The share of Arab financial institutions' aid to International Development Association (IDA) recipients grew by 9 percentage points between 2005-2007 and 2008-2012, reaching 47 percent of total commitments. The overall annual average of financial assistance provided to Arab Spring countries by Arab financial institutions in 2011 and 2012 was slightly higher than the average during the global economic and financial crisis...

While there is a consensus that the 2008-2009 crisis was triggered by financial market disruptions in the United States, there is little agreement on whether the transmission of the crisis and the subsequent prolonged recession are due to credit factors or to a collapse of demand for goods and services. This paper assesses whether the primary effect of the global crisis on Eastern European firms took the form of an adverse demand shock or a credit crunch. Using a unique firm survey conducted by the World Bank in six Eastern European countries during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, the paper shows that the drop in demand for firms' products and services was overwhelmingly reported as the most damaging adverse effect of the crisis. Other "usual suspects," such as rising debt or reduced access to credit, are reported as minor. The paper also finds that the changes in firms' sales and installed capacity are significantly and robustly correlated with the demand sensitivity of the sector in which the firms operate. However...

Brazil, as the rest of Latin America, has experienced three cycles of capital inflows since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. The first two ended in financial crises, and at the time of writing the third one is still unfolding, although already showing considerable signs of distress. The first started with the aftermath of the oil-price increase that followed the 1973 ?Yom Kippur? war; consisted mostly of bank lending; and finished with Mexico?s 1982 default (and the 1980s ?debt-crisis?). The second took place between the 1989 ?Brady bonds? agreement (which also marked the beginning of neo-liberal reforms in most of Latin America) and the Argentinian 2001 crisis. This second cycle saw a sharp increase in portfolio flows and a rise of FDI, and ended up with four major crises (as well as the 1997 one in East Asia) as newly-liberalised middle-income countries struggled to deal with the problems created by the absorption of those sudden surges of inflows ? Mexico (1994), Brazil (1999), and two in Argentina (1995 and 2001). Finally, the third inflow-cycle began in 2003 as soon as international financial markets felt reassured by the surprisingly neoliberal orientation of President Lula?s government; this cycle intensified in 2004 with a (mostly speculative) commodity price-boom...

Em busca das razões que ocasionaram a crise financeira mundial, diversos aspectos relacionados à regulamentação dos mercados têm sido discutidos. Na área de contabilidade, questiona-se, especialmente, se a mensuração pelo valor justo (fair value), caracterizada por sua inerente subjetividade, teve algum impacto na deflagração ou no agravamento da crise financeira mundial. Dentro desse contexto, o presente estudo tem como objetivo identificar a percepção de especialistas em economia e mercado financeiro no que diz respeito ao impacto da mensuração a valor justo na crise financeira mundial. Para isso, foram realizadas entrevistas semiestruturadas com 13 profissionais com extenso conhecimento nas áreas de economia e mercados financeiros, incluindo os ex-ministros da Fazenda e os ex-presidentes do Banco Central do Brasil. Os resultados encontrados indicam que a contabilidade a valor justo não teve um papel decisivo na deflagração da crise financeira e que tampouco poderia ter evitado a mesma. Ao contrário, alguns especialistas mencionaram que a crise global talvez fosse descoberta mais tardiamente, caso os bancos não utilizassem uma contabilidade baseada no valor justo. Para os entrevistados, entre os principais fatores que ocasionaram a crise financeira...