The organization I used to work for in the Caribbean spent a lot of time pushing for this kind of thing. I'm thrilled to see it actually being used!
I would add that nobody there had a good word to say about the World Bank.
My impression is the IMF is much less a force for cutting services since maybe as far back as the Great Recession and they're more likely to instruct countries to raise taxes on the wealthy or improve services. I think when the ECB was preaching austerity to Greece the IMF was protesting. That could be an oversimplification.
The World Bank I know less about except they're more about building infrastructure than policy.
I used to work a lot with the Inter-American Development Bank. They seems alright. Or, at least, willing to pay for me to look at hurricane damage in the Bahamas, which was part of the process for funding recovery loans.
Did people watch Twisters? I thought it was fun, but this kind of issue is a major subplot.
I saw the one with Kevin Bacon, or was that Tremors? I wonder if you could insert a clause against graboid infestation.
World Bank, from the limited perspective of my mate Joe, spends most of its time funding recycling sites and bin lorries, and then checking back six months later to see rather fewer bin lorries than they expected and a few very shiny new Audis being driven by local alcaldes.
They may do other things but Joe is the bin lorry chap so that's his focus, to the exclusion of all else except his wife, his kid, and the works of various magical realist authors.
Mario Vargas Llosa probably wrote a book about bin lorry fraud.
We went on holiday to the spice islands and he couldn't stop interrogating taxi drivers about local refuse collection practices.
Joe, this is. Not Mario Vargas Llosa. I wouldn't go on holiday with Mario Vargas Llosa. Doesn't strike me as z nice guy.
The World Bank now offers two-year disaster pauses at no extra fee on new loans to island nations and other small economies, in one of the biggest official pushes yet to foster adoption of the clauses.
In a paper this month the IMF also detailed how it would treat these clauses alongside other climate change-linked bonds when it analyses sustainability of country debts. "The resulting reduction in the need to borrow in the face of natural disasters would mitigate the impact of the negative shock on debt burden indicators," the fund said.
Despite this, pause clauses have so far failed to take off in bond markets. After Grenada, only Barbados has included provisions in international bonds, including debt restructured in 2018.
A friend of mine works for the World Bank. It certainly seems villainous how much he travels, considering that he has a wife and one-year-old kid back home.
14: same for Joe. Dude is working on two projects which are six time zones apart and he lives five time zones away from the nearer one.
If I existed in his state of semi-permanent jet lag I don't think I'd need to bother with reading magical realism. I'd just look out of the window and think "huh, that's a 400-year-old conquistador on a bus driven by a giant jaguar".
I've worked for the WB and for I(A)DB. The keywords is "bank": their whole incentive structure is lending as much as they can, mostly to middle income countries that will likely repay. They have an army of economists trained at top US (some European) universities that spend their time doing very sophisticated technical work to satisfy the cumbersome bureaucratic requirements they themselves impose on countries in order to disburse such loans. They also have country, project, or sector specialists that focus on the "softer" side of the loans on technical assistance projects - mainly meeting with government officials to develop the bank-client relationship - some of them are in-country but at the WB they mostly travel non-stop from DC. A smaller team of the top PhD economists are in the research practices and operate basically as an econ department in any top university, mostly publishing papers that no one apart from other academic economists ever reads. And then there's a bunch of finance and operations people that do, well, finance and operations.
I've worked for the WB and for I(A)DB. The keywords is "bank": their whole incentive structure is lending as much as they can, mostly to middle income countries that will likely repay. They have an army of economists trained at top US (some European) universities that spend their time doing very sophisticated technical work to satisfy the cumbersome bureaucratic requirements they themselves impose on countries in order to disburse such loans. They also have country, project, or sector specialists that focus on the "softer" side of the loans on technical assistance projects - mainly meeting with government officials to develop the bank-client relationship - some of them are in-country but at the WB they mostly travel non-stop from DC. A smaller team of the top PhD economists are in the research practices and operate basically as an econ department in any top university, mostly publishing papers that no one apart from other academic economists ever reads. And then there's a bunch of finance and operations people that do, well, finance and operations.
I'm slightly sceptical of 18-19 because the World Bank doesn't actually use the category of "middle-income country" - they talk about lower, lower-middle, upper-middle and high. Middle-income would be too broad to be useful (it would include Mexico, Angola and Ukraine) and so people who work for the WB don't use it.
The biggest WB debtors at present are India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Pakistan - three lower-middle and one upper-middle. But that may also reflect that those are very big countries - there just aren't very many countries that the WB still classes as "lower-income" and they aren't very large. Ethiopia's probably the biggest. Also of course some of that debt may date from when they were considerably poorer...
A consequence of the OP is that I occasionally see job ads for titles like "Principal Catastrophe Analyst"*, as the bonds are generally known as catastrophe bonds, or more adorably, cat bonds.
*if you were thinking of either issuing such things or investing in them you'd obviously want to have some idea how often the catastrophes come along, how bad they are, etc, so basically a more exciting way of saying actuary
Cat bonds I remember attracting a lot of attention in the mid-2000s - they were a bit more than the payment holidays in the OP, because the idea was IIRC that the bondholder paid the issuer a coupon every year unless there was a catastrophe in which case the issuer paid the bondholder a massive amount. Faster than trying to raise funds from charities or governments.
I remember "parametric catastrophic bonds" which paid off based on certain parameters. Like if you get 4 inches of rain it pays off, but 3.9 inches and you get nothing. One problem is that the parameters are somewhat independent from the amount of damage actually caused.
22: yes, that rings a bell, and was in fact one of the issues with them IIRC - you really want one that pays off based on damage done, but that's very difficult to quantify at the time.
Yeah, my job used to be quantifying the damage done and that's..... difficult.
23: The AI apocalypse should be able to help with that: quite quickly taking eg. before and after satellite pictures and getting a rough count of roofs blown off, steets covered in mud/water, night lights not shining, etc.
Also we could use chatGPT to write the report.
Cat bonds are mainly issued by reinsurers as a capital/risk management tool, though there are a handful of sovereign and supranational issuers as well. And in one case I wrote about way back in the day, FIFA.
FIFA corrupt, but is it an actual catastrophe?
" children" - normal
" legal children" - less usual, sounds like you meant to say "legitimate" or to emphasise that whatever age they are, they're legally children
"biological children" - also perfectly normal, making the distinction around adoption, stepchildren etc
"physical children" - getting slightly unusual but maybe someone might use this when designing school buildings - you might say "the school can accommodate 200 physical children but educate many more remotely online"
"economic children" might use this for some sort of macro analysis of school fees, consumption etc
"chemical children" - presumably the little bundles of joy that arrive as the result of My Chemical Romance
"astronomical children" - idk maybe very tall
"microbiological children" weird
"pathological children"
"ontological children"
"archaeological children"
Ornithological children- brought by storks
Botanical children- found under gooseberry bushes