In November 2015, CGD published a report titled Unintended Consequences of Anti–Money Laundering Policies for Poor Countries. Today we release a follow-up to that report. Policy Responses to De-risking: Progress Report on the CGD Working Group’s 2015 Recommendations takes stock of accomp...

Eight years and millions of mobile financial transactions later, we came together again at a private CGD roundtable in London to discuss the potential of mobile banking and savings for women’s economic empowerment. We were pleased to hear the richness of research evidence and interventions on ...

While the immediate and direct effects of implementing Basel III regulatory reforms in emerging markets and development economies (EMDEs) are in these countries’ banking systems, there might also be effects beyond them on other segments of the financial system. In this blog post, I will focus ...

The adoption of Basel III by developing countries raises the question of what the impact of such regulatory reform will be on volume, cost, and composition of domestic credit in these economies and for the development of financial systems more generally. This is against the background of many emergi...

Responding to the latest assessment of Mexico’s implementation of the Basel III recommendations, the Mexican authorities argued that regulations for countries hosting foreign banks’ subsidiaries and for the parent countries of the subsidiaries should be aligned “in order to prevent...

Just as Basel III, among other factors, played a role in the decline in the volume of cross-border lending from advanced economies to EMDEs, it created incentives for a shift in the composition of these flows. Banks’ exposures to certain business lines have been a...

A sense of urgency was present at a recent World Bank Spring meeting on financial inclusion. This is not surprising, given the Bank’s ambitious goal of Universal Financial Access by 2020. Two years to go and globally about 1.7 billion adults remain unbanked—close to 1 billion of the...