While the global coronavirus pandemic has put great strain on public finances across the world, it is those countries with weaker national currencies that will feel this pressure more strongly. There is a very real risk of national defaults and of a mutually reinforcing downward spiral of reduced trade and competitive currency devaluations. To prevent the health crisis becoming a financial crisis we need a renegotiation of the global financial architecture to create new institutions that can uphold stability, equity and sustainability between the world's economies. Next year marks 50 years since the ending of the Bretton Woods arrangements and provides an ideal platform for such a negotiation.

The Global Outlook on Financing for Sustainable Development 2021 calls for collective action to address both the short-term collapse in resources of developing countries as well as long-term strategies to build back better following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

'Economic losses from natural disasters totaled $92 billion in 2015.' Such statements, all too commonplace, assess the severity of disasters by no other measure than the damage inflicted on buildings, infrastructure, and agricultural production. But $1 in losses does not mean the same thing to a rich person that it does to a poor person; the gravity of a $92 billion loss depends on who experiences it. By focusing on aggregate losses—the traditional approach to disaster risk—we restrict our consideration to how disasters affect those wealthy enough to have assets to lose in the first place, and largely ignore the plight of poor people. This report moves beyond asset and production losses and shifts its attention to how natural disasters affect people’s well-being. Disasters are far greater threats to well-being than traditional estimates suggest. This approach provides a more nuanced view of natural disasters than usual reporting, and a perspective that takes fuller account of poor people’s vulnerabilities. Poor people suffer only a fraction of economic losses caused by disasters, but they bear the brunt of their consequences. Understanding the disproportionate vulnerability of poor people also makes the case for setting new intervention priorities to lessen the impact of natural disasters on the world’s poor, such as expanding financial inclusion, disaster risk and health insurance, social protection and adaptive safety nets, contingent finance and reserve funds, and universal access to early warning systems. Efforts to reduce disaster risk and poverty go hand in hand. Because disasters impoverish so many, disaster risk management is inseparable from poverty reduction policy, and vice versa. As climate change magnifies natural hazards, and because protection infrastructure alone cannot eliminate risk, a more resilient population has never been more critical to breaking the cycle of disaster-induced poverty.

This paper provides estimates of output multipliers for spending in clean energy and biodiversity conservation, as well as for spending on non-ecofriendly energy and land use activities. Using a new international dataset, we find that every dollar spent on key carbon-neutral or carbon-sink activities can generate more than a dollar’s worth of economic activity. Although not all green and non-ecofriendly expenditures in the dataset are strictly comparable due to data limitations, estimated multipliers associated with spending on renewable and fossil fuel energy investment are comparable, and the former (1.1-1.5) are larger than the latter (0.5-0.6) with over 90 percent probability. These findings survive several robustness checks and lend support to bottom-up analyses arguing that stabilizing climate and reversing biodiversity loss are not at odds with continuing economic advances.

The central theme of this book is national land and infrastructure design in the age of the declining population and the recovery from the Great East Japan Earthquake in the affected regions in Japan. Based on the theory of spatial economics and evidence from Japanese history, the authors show that the growing economy with a population increase develops into a multi-cored and complex structure. In the population decline phase, however, such construction will be destabilized because of agglomeration economies in the central core. Then, a catastrophic shock that strikes may provoke the decline of the lower-rank-size provincial cities and their eventual disappearance if they compete only in lower prices of staple products. Not only is the practice bad for the residents; it also leads to lower national welfare resulting from the loss of diversity and overcrowded big cities. The authors argue that small local towns can recover and will be sustained if they will endeavor in innovative production by making good use of local natural resources and social capital. Under the ongoing declining population in Japan, an undesirable concentration in Tokyo will proceed further with increasing social cost and risk. The recent novel coronavirus pandemic has highlighted that concern.

This edition of the OECD Sovereign Borrowing Outlook reviews developments in response to the COVID-19 pandemic for government borrowing needs, funding conditions and funding strategies in the OECD area.

Broad-based and inclusive financial systems significantly raise growth, alleviate poverty, and expand economic opportunity. Households, small enterprises, and the rural poor often have difficulty obtaining financial services for a multitude of reasons, including transaction costs, perceived risk, inadequate infrastructure, and information barriers. Yet many financial institutions are now making profitable inroads into underserved markets through formal banking, investment in equities, venture capital, postal banks, and microfinance. Access to Finance addresses the challenges of making financial systems more inclusive, emulating successful ventures in new markets, and utilizing technologies and government policies to support the expansion of financial access. The contributors examine many dimensions of financial access, including: • Measuring financial access • Understanding the impact of expanded access • Examining alternative institutional models • Exploring new technologies and information infrastructure • Evaluating government policies toward outreach.