Climate-Related Development Finance, Energy Structure Transformation and Carbon Emissions Reduction: An Analysis From the Perspective of Developing Countries

With the frequent occurrence of extreme weather in cities, economic, ecological and social activities have been greatly impacted. The adverse effects of global extreme climate and effective governance have attracted more and more attention of scholars. Considering the differences between developed and developing countries in climate response capacity, a key issue is how to encourage developed countries to provide adequate assistance to developing countries and enhance their enthusiasm to participate in addressing climate change challenges. Given this background, we evaluated the carbon emission reduction effects of developing countries before and after a “quasi-natural experiment” which involved obtaining the assistance of climate-related funding from developed countries. Specifically, we analyzed the assistance behavior for recipient countries and found that climate assistance can effectively reduce the carbon emissions level of recipient countries, and this result has a better impact on non-island types and countries with higher levels of economic development. Furthermore, the achievement of this carbon emissions reduction target stems from the fact that climate assistance has promoted the optimization of the energy structure of recipient countries and promoted the substitution of renewable energy for coal consumption. In addition, climate-related development finance plays a significant role in promoting the scientific and technological level of recipient countries, especially the development impact of the adaptive climate-related development finance. Therefore, this paper suggests that the direction of climate assistance should focus more on island countries and countries with low economic development level, and pay more attention to the “coal withdrawal” of recipient countries and climate adaptation field.

The Role of Microfinance in Africa

This chapter examines the role of microfinance in developing countries, particularly Ghana and Nigeria. The chapter begins with an overview of the link between microfinance, poverty, and women empowerment in the chapter introduction. The background to the chapter sets out the main difference between microfinance and microcredit. The role of microfinance in contemporary development finance is then discussed. In this context, existing literature on the role of microfinance in reducing poverty, women empowerment, and microenterprise growth is extensively reviewed. Key solutions and recommendations are then presented next, followed by future research direction and the chapter conclusion.

The New Asian Development Finance

The recent challenges posed for multilateralism and the emergence of a sustainable development regime have pushed countries to engage in more flexible, issue-based development finance initiatives and institutions. These changes have profoundly impacted how China conceives and delivers its development finance. How is China’s development finance being shaped by other countries’ experiences? How has China been shaping development finance globally? This article argues that China’s development finance has been increasingly market-oriented, concerned about financial and environmental sustainability, and delivered through hybrid bilateral–multilateral channels, particularly since the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative. Shaped by the changes that China experienced at both international and domestic levels, these new features signal the rise of a ‘new Asian development finance’ that is refocusing the global debate on the importance of combining aid, trade, and investment under financially and environmentally sustainable frameworks, and channelling development finance through multilateral channels to catalyse structural transformation.

The structural power of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) in multilateral development finance: A case study of the New Development Bank

The emergence of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) as an alternative force to the West has ignited a debate within the discipline of international political economy on the nature of the group’s rise. Global governance scholars either debate the role of the BRICS in transforming the world order (playing the game) or focus on the domestic sources of the BRICS nations’ preference formation (the position of states within the game). This article goes beyond the game-versus-player debate, by focusing on the structural power of the BRICS to ‘change the rules of the game’. The article investigates how the BRICS-created New Development Bank as an alternative circuit for actors to exchange goods in the area of development finance has been integrated into global governance. The article argues that the New Development Bank does not grant the BRICS the structural power needed to change the rules and norms that underpin the game.

Geolocated dataset of Chinese overseas development finance

China is now the world’s largest source of bilateral development finance and will likely continue to play a prominent role in sovereign lending through its multi-billion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative. This paper introduces major methodological enhancements in tracking this finance: the use of an original application programming interface (API) to gathers news in multiple languages; double-verification of every record to ensure every finance commitment has been formalized; and visual geo-location to trace the precise footprint of every project. The resulting dataset enables economic, environmental, and social analyses with high-precision spatial accuracy, as well as spatiotemporal monitoring by project stakeholders and enhanced planning by project managers. It covers the years 2008–2019 to enable analysis before and after the announcement of the Belt and Road Initiative. It includes 862 finance commitments, 669 of which have geographic location, to 94 countries across the world.