Mapping 500+ Development Banks

Executive Summary 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 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: First, 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; Second, 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; Third, 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.

To ensure that we build a credible list of PDBs and DFIs, we propose the following three principles: conceptual clarity of qualification criteria, implementation consistency of operational indicators, and case-by-case verification of borderline cases.

First, the conceptual clarity of the qualification criteria is crucial in distinguishing PDBs and DFIs from other institutional arrangements. To answer the question of what PDBs and DFIs are, we propose to distinguish identity from modality. Identity refers to the defining features of PDBs and DFIs that distinguish them from other institutional arrangements, such as government credit programs, aid agencies, and state-owned commercial banks. Modality refers to different features within the PDB and DFI family that reveal their vast diversity. In 8