Nowadays Public Development Banks (PDBs) and Development Financing Institutions (DFIs) are experiencing a renaissance worldwide as their usefulness is increasingly recognized by both academics and policymakers. PDBs and DFIs are public financial institutions initiated by governments to proactively achieve public policy objectives. They are potentially useful policy instruments for fixing market failures, incubating markets, coordinating public policies with stakeholders, and promoting economic structural transformation in an equitable and sustainable manner. But not all PDBs and DFIs have achieved positive development outcomes as expected. To fulfill their development potential, it is important to rigorously examine their roles, operations, and effectiveness to avoid pitfalls. But the in-depth academic research is scarce. One major reason behind the paucity of research is the lack of systematic efforts to identify these public financial institutions and collect relevant data.

To fill this gap, the development financing research program of the Institute of New Structural Economics at Peking University (INSE) initiated to build the world’s first development financing institution database in September 2017. Recognizing INSE’s pilot effort, French Development Agency (Agence Française de Développement, AFD), aims to identify 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, the INSE and the AFD have collaborated to build on the INSE’s pilot effort to strengthen first ever comprehensive database on PDBs and DFIs with rigorous criteria and methodologies.

The database will be officially launched during the second Finance in Common Summit on 19-20 October 2021. Jiajun Xu, principal investigator and Executive Deputy Dean of the Institute of New Structural Economics at Peking University, and Régis Marodon, co-principal investigator and Special Advisor on Sustainable Finance of French Development Agency, will co-present the database at 3:30-4:00 PM (Beijing time) of the plenary session on 20 October 2021.

The Summit will be hosted by Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (CDP), the Italian National Promotional Institution and Financial Institution for Development Cooperation, in partnership with the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and with the support from all the members of the Finance in Common Coalition. It will be held in Rome and in digital format, and will gather the whole development bank community, comprising more than 500 PDBs and other key stakeholders (governments, central banks, private sector, civil society, think tanks and academia, etc.).

We welcome students and colleagues who are interested in the Summit to participate in the FIC summit by registering through the following link: https://www.financeincommon2021.org/register.