The Centre for Finance and Development (CFD) is an interdisciplinary research centre at the
Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies which is housed at the
Maison de la paix in
Geneva. The Centre is staffed by several prominent economists such as: director Nathan Sussman, deputy-director
Ugo Panizza, Lore Vandewalle, Cédric Tille, and
Charles Wyplosz
Charles Wyplosz (born 5 September 1947 in Vichy, France) is a French economist. He is an editor of the International Centre for Economic Policy Research's VoxEU and is currently the director of the International Centre for Monetary and Banking S ...
.
Founding
The Centre for Finance and Development was founded in 2012 with a grant of the Pictet Foundation for Development.
It was formally inaugurated by
Harvard
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
professor
Ricardo Hausmann
Ricardo Hausmann (born 1956) is the former Director of the Center for International Development currently leading the Center for International Development’s Growth Lab and is a Professor of the Practice of Economic Development at the John F. ...
in September 2012. The Centre's first director was
Jean-Louis Arcand. From 2016,
Ugo Panizza was director of the CFD, after which Nathan Sussman took over his role in 2019.
Expertise
The Centre specifically focuses on research in the following fields:
*
Financial inclusion and access to financial markets in
developing countries;
*
Impact investing and SDG investing;
* Scaling up investment in
Small and Medium Enterprises
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) or small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are businesses whose personnel and revenue numbers fall below certain limits. The abbreviation "SME" is used by international organizations such as the World Bank ...
in developing countries and
SME finance;
*
Fintech and technological developments in developing countries;
* Alternative sources of funding (
microfinance
Microfinance is a category of financial services targeting individuals and small businesses who lack access to conventional banking and related services. Microfinance includes microcredit, the provision of small loans to poor clients; savings ...
or
microinsurance);
*
Sustainable development
Sustainable development is an organizing principle for meeting human development goals while also sustaining the ability of natural systems to provide the natural resources and ecosystem services on which the economy and society depend. The des ...
.
Activities
The Centre's faculty regularly publishes their research in academic journals, books and the Centre's own research paper series. The research output includes the influential
Too Much Finance
"Too Much Finance?" is a scholarly paper by Jean-Louis Arcand, Enrico Berkes, and Ugo Panizza. The paper was originally described in a 2011 VoxEU column, in 2012 it was issued as IMF working paper, and in 2015 was published by the Journal of Econ ...
paper, the research for which was done at the Centre for Finance and Development.
Furthermore, the Centre regularly hosts conferences and public lectures. In 2017, the CFD hosted the second edition of the DebtCon conference on
sovereign debt. In 2018, the Centre hosted a two-day conference on
blended development finance together with the
Center for Global Development and the
CDC Group. In 2019, it hosted the annual lecture of the
with Santiago Levy and hosted the first annual conference of the Private Sector Development Research Network, a network involving the
International Finance Corporation,
CDC Group,
Internationanl Growth Centre and other institutions in the field. Since 2020, the Centre also hosts an online
seminar series on
economic history, the International Macro History Online Seminar.
External links
Centre for Finance and Development official website
References
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Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies
Maison de la Paix
Economic research institutes
Research institutes in Switzerland
Schools in Geneva
Organizations established in 2012
2012 establishments in Switzerland