Introduction The present report builds on the inaugural New Structural Economics Development Financing Research Report titled “Mapping Development Finance Institutions Worldwide: Definitions, Rationales, and Varieties” by the Institute of New Structural Economics (INSE) at Peking University. The objective of the present report is to refine the qualification criteria of public development banks (PDBs) and development financing institutions (DFIs) and propose potential typologies to reveal their vast diversities. Recognizing INSE’s pilot effort to build a comprehensive list of PDBs and DFIs worldwide, the Agence Française de Développement (AFD aims at identifying those that could form a world coalition to emphasize the importance of incorporating the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into the corporate strategies of PDBs and DFIs. On that basis, INSE and AFD have collaborated to build on INSE’s pilot effort to strengthen the first ever comprehensive database on PDBs and DFIs with rigorous criteria and methodologies. Our aim is to make three decisive contributions: (1) refine the qualification criteria and operational indicators of PDBs and DFIs to clearly distinguish them from other institutional arrangements, including (but not confined to) government credit programs, aid agencies, grant-executing agencies, state-owned commercial banks with policy functions, cooperative banks initiated by practitioners from specific sectors such as agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, and fishery, and private financial institutions such as microfinance institutions initiated by private actors whose aim is in line with public policy objectives; (2) identify a comprehensive list of PDBs and DFIs currently active in every part of the world in a consistent manner on the basis of empirical evidence; and (3) classify PDBs and DFIs into different categories to reveal the vast diversity within the PDB and DFI family by collecting their basic information (such as official mandate) and basic financial indicators (such as total assets). This systematic effort to identify PDBs and DFIs worldwide will lay the foundation for rigorous academic research in the future. In the report, we use “PDBs” and “DFIs” to refer to all samples in our database. These terms include almost all public financial institutions in line with our proposed qualification criteria, including multilateral development banks, national development banks, subnational development banks, equity investment funds, and guarantee funds. Yet the terms PDB and DFI are not universal. Depending on the country, institutions are sometimes referred to as policy banks or promotional banks, which are subcategories of national banking systems that clearly separate these specialized development-oriented banks from profit-driven commercial banks. See Box 1 on the justification for choosing the terminology of PDBs and DFIs. In total, we have identified 527 PDBs and DFIs, among which 510 (97%) are PDBs, 4 (1%) are equity funds, and 13 (2%) are guarantee funds.1
As the business model of insurance companies differs from that of banks and equity funds, the present report temporarily excludes public policy-oriented insurance companies such as China Export & Credit Insurance Corporation and Korea Trade Insurance Corporation. 1
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