Exploring the Financial Profiles of Public Development Banks: An Umbrella Paper

This paper contributes to the burgeoning PDB literature by examining their financial profiles in a nuanced and systematic manner. Existing studies often focus on comparing private and public banks (e.g., Boubakri et al. 2005; Cornett et al. 2009; Panizza 2023) and overlook the heterogeneity within public banks’ and PDBs’ specificity. Unlike commercial banks, PDBs do not aim to maximize financial returns but must remain financially viable to sustain their operations and impact. The recent initiative by the Institute of New Structural Economics at Peking University to build the first global database on PDBs and DFIs with the productive collaboration of French Development Agency (AFD), recently joined by FERDI and School of Health Humanities at Peking University, has addressed the definitional gaps, paving the way for focused research on these institutions. Notably, prior work has explored issues such as countercyclicality (Brei and Schclarek 2018; Gong et al. 2023) and long-term lending (Hu et al. 2022; Schclarek et al. 2023; Gong et al. 2023). This study builds on these efforts by analyzing intra-PDB heterogeneity rather than comparing PDBs with commercial banks.