The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a major financial agency of the United Nations, and an international financial institution, headquartered in Washington, D.C., consisting of 190 countries. Its stated mission is "working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world." Formed in 1944, started on 27 December 1945, at the Bretton Woods Conference primarily by the ideas of Harry Dexter White and John Maynard Keynes, it came into formal existence in 1945 with 29 member countries and the goal of reconstructing the international monetary system. It now plays a central role in the management of balance of payments difficulties and international financial crises. Countries contribute funds to a pool through a quota system from which countries experiencing balance of payments problems can borrow money. As of 2016, the fund had XDR 477 billion. The IMF is regarded as the global lender of last resort.
A green economy is an economy that aims at reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities, and that aims for sustainable development without degrading the environment. It is closely related with ecological economics, but has a more politically applied focus. The 2011 UNEP Green Economy Report argues "that to be green, an economy must not only be efficient, but also fair. Fairness implies recognizing global and country level equity dimensions, particularly in assuring a Just Transition to an economy that is low-carbon, resource efficient, and socially inclusive."
An emerging market is a market that has some characteristics of a developed market, but does not fully meet its standards. This includes markets that may become developed markets in the future or were in the past. The term "frontier market" is used for developing countries with smaller, riskier, or more illiquid capital markets than "emerging". As of 2006, the economies of China and India are considered to be the largest emerging markets. According to The Economist, many people find the term outdated, but no new term has gained traction. Emerging market hedge fund capital reached a record new level in the first quarter of 2011 of $121 billion. Emerging market economies’ share of global PPP-adjusted GDP has risen from 27 percent in 1960 to around 53 percent by 2013. The 10 largest emerging and developing economies by either nominal or PPP-adjusted GDP are 4 of the 5 BRICS countries along with Egypt, Indonesia, Mexico, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan and Turkey.
BRIC is a grouping acronym referring to the developing countries of Brazil, Russia, India, and China, which are identified as rising economic powers. It is typically rendered as "the BRIC," "the BRIC countries," "the BRIC economies," or alternatively as the "Big Four." The name has since been changed to BRICS after the addition of South Africa in 2010.
A financial centre (BE), financial center (AE), or financial hub, is a location with a concentration of participants in banking, asset management, insurance or financial markets with venues and supporting services for these activities to take place. Participants can include financial intermediaries, institutional investors, and issuers. Trading activity can take place on venues such as exchanges and involve clearing houses, although many transactions take place over-the-counter (OTC), that is directly between participants. Financial centres usually host companies that offer a wide range of financial services, for example relating to mergers and acquisitions, public offerings, or corporate actions; or which participate in other areas of finance, such as private equity, hedge funds, and reinsurance. Ancillary financial services include rating agencies, as well as provision of related professional services, particularly legal advice and accounting services.
The German Institute for Economic Research, or, more commonly DIW Berlin, is a economic research institute in Germany, involved in basic research and policy advice. It is a non-profit academic institution, financed with public grants from the Berlin Senate Department for Economics, Technology and Research and the Federal Department for Economics and Technology. DIW Berlin was founded in 1925 as the Institute for Business Cycle Research and was later renamed.
Simeon Dyankov is a Bulgarian economist. From 2009 to 2013, he was the deputy prime minister and minister of finance of Bulgaria in the government of Boyko Borisov. Before his cabinet appointment, he was the chief economist of the finance and private sector vice-presidency of the World Bank.
Nancy Birdsall is an American economist, the founding president of the Center for Global Development (CGD) in Washington, DC, USA, and former executive vice-president of the Inter-American Development Bank. She co-founded CGD in November 2001 with C. Fred Bergsten and Edward W. Scott Jr. and served as president until 2016. Prior to becoming the President of CGD, Birdsall served for three years as Senior Associate and Director of the Economic Reform Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her work at Carnegie focused on issues of globalization and inequality, as well as the reform of the international financial institutions. During 1993 to 1998, she oversaw a $30 billion public and private loan portfolio at the Inter-American Development Bank, the largest of the regional development banks. Before joining the Inter-American Development Bank, Birdsall spent 14 years in research, policy, and management positions at the World Bank. Most recently she served as the director of the Policy Research Department.
VISTA is an acronym for Vietnam, Indonesia, South Africa, Turkey, Argentina, used in economics in grouping and discussing emerging markets. The concept was first proposed in 2006 by BRICs Economic Research Institute of Japan, but has not been significantly popularised in the academic and business world. This has led to economic experts proposing different definitions and implications of VISTA. While some see the economic potential of these emerging economies as individually promising, others challenge that the concept of economic acronyms is limiting as the countries' social and development factors are usually not taken into account. For investors, VISTA has been considered as an opportunity to enter into a newly–emerging market, particularly following the post-BRICS era.
Beatrice Weder di Mauro is a Swiss economist who is currently Professor of economics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Research Professor and Distinguished Fellow-in-residence at the Emerging Markets Institute of INSEAD Singapore, and senior fellow at the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research (ABFER). Since 2018, she also serves as President of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).
The Financial Stability Board (FSB) is an international body that monitors and makes recommendations about the global financial system. It was established after the G20 London summit in April 2009 as a successor to the Financial Stability Forum (FSF). The Board includes all G20 major economies, FSF members, and the European Commission. Hosted and funded by the Bank for International Settlements, the board is based in Basel, Switzerland, and is established as a not-for-profit association under Swiss law.
Lúcio Vinhas de Souza is a Brazilian-Portuguese economist. His main research areas are global macroeconomics, development economics, finance and country risk, with extensive work experience at the developed economies of the European Union and the US, and in several emerging market regions, from the former Soviet Union to East Asia, Africa and Latin America.
A technological revolution is a period in which one or more technologies is replaced by another novel technology in a short amount of time. It is an era of accelerated technological progress characterized by new innovations whose rapid application and diffusion typically cause an abrupt change in society.
Economic Geography is a peer-reviewed academic journal published quarterly by Taylor & Francis on behalf of Clark University. The journal was established in 1925 and is currently edited by James T. Murphy, Jane Pollard, Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, and Henry Wai-chung Yeung.
Vinokurov, Evgeny is a Russian economist, currently serving as the Chief Economist at Eurasian Development Bank and the Eurasian Fund for Stabilization and Development (EFSD). His research is in macro- and microeconomics, regional integration, global financial and economic architecture and international organizations.
Lourdes S. Casanova is an academic, author and currently a Senior Lecturer of Management at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management and Gail and Rob Cañizares Director of the Emerging Markets Institute. Before her appointment to Johnson School, Casanova was a lecturer in the Strategy Department at INSEAD. She specializes in international business with a focus on Latin America and multinationals from emerging markets. In 2014 and 2015, Lourdes Casanova was appointed as one of the 50 most influential Iberoamerican intellectuals by Esglobal. Also, she is member of the Boyce Thompson Institute.
Jonathan David Ostry is an international economist who has served as Deputy Director of the Research Department and Acting Director of the Asia and Pacific Department at the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC. He is Professor of the Practice at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. He is also a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in London, England. His recent work has focused on the management of international capital flows, in particular the role of capital controls; this work has been influential in bringing about a shift in the institutional position of the IMF on capital controls. Ostry has also published influential studies on the relationship between income inequality and economic growth, where his work—which has featured prominently in the financial press—suggests that high income inequality and a failure to sustain economic growth may be two sides of the same coin. His other work focuses on fiscal sustainability issues. Ostry has many distinguished academic publications, and his work has been cited widely in scholarly journals, and in the press, including The Economist, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Ostry was listed in Who’s Who in Economics in 2003. He was named one of the 100 most powerful people in global finance by Worth magazine in 2016, and as one of the economists whose research shaped the world in 2017.
Erik Berglöf is a Swedish economist, currently the Chief Economist of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the Beijing-based multilateral development bank established in 2016 with a mission to improve social and economic outcomes in Asia. In March 2019 Erik Berglöf was appointed to the European Council's High Level Group of Wise Persons on the European financial architecture for development where Berglöf and eight other economists will suggest changes to the EU's development finance structure. In 2017–2018 Erik Berglöf served on the secretariat of the G20 Eminent Persons Group on Global Financial Governance and on the Governing Board of the Institute for New Economic Thinking in New York.
Pier Carlo Padoan is an Italian economist who served as Minister of Economy and Finance of Italy from 2014 to 2018.
Carolina Cristina Alves is a Joan Robinson Research Fellow in Heterodox Economics at Girton College at the University of Cambridge, a co-founder of Diversifying and Decolonising Economics D-Econ, and an editor of the Developing Economics blog. She sits on the Rebuilding Macroeconomics Advisory Board, the Progressive Economy Forum Council (PEF) and Positive Money.
