On the afternoon of March 24th, at the 2024 annual meeting of the China Development Forum, World Bank Group President Peng Anjie stated in his speech that in order to address the intertwined challenges of climate, vulnerability, and inequality, more private sector capital should be allowed to enter developing economies to enhance its impact and create employment opportunities.
Peng Anjie pointed out that each of us is aware of the powerful forces and rapid changes facing the international community - persistent poverty, prolonged conflicts, and difficult to cope with climate crises. The intertwined challenges and complex problems have formed a perfect storm, exacerbating inequality together. In developing countries, economic growth is declining, from 6% to only 4% in two decades. For every one percentage point of economic decline, 100 million people fall into poverty. At the same time, the debt of the entire emerging market is increasing.
Peng Anjie pointed out that China's success is of great significance, as it has led to a decrease in the global poverty rate from 44% to 9%. This once again proves that creating employment opportunities is the most reliable way to eliminate poverty and develop prosperity.
Peng Anjie pointed out that in the past year, the World Bank has developed a new vision - to build a world free of poverty but on a livable planet. The World Bank is striving to become a better bank, including squeezing out balance sheet moisture, taking on more risks, supporting more investment projects, and improving capital utilization efficiency.
How to address the intertwined challenges of climate, vulnerability, and inequality? Peng Anjie believes that fighting alone is not enough. Even if governments, multilateral institutions, and charitable organizations work together, they still cannot provide the trillions of dollars needed annually to address climate, vulnerability, and inequality. We in the international community need the scale, resources, and intelligence of the private sector. Last year, the World Bank Group mobilized $41 billion in private capital for emerging markets and raised $42 billion from the private sector through bond issuance. "But the reality is that we need to make more progress in attracting private sector investment," he said.
Peng Anjie revealed that this summer, the World Bank will launch a new guarantee platform to simplify processes, enhance accessibility, and accelerate payment execution. This will help the World Bank achieve its goal of doubling the annual guarantee issuance scale to $20 billion by 2030, and gradually double the amount of private capital mobilized by the World Bank.
The World Bank is also striving to find new ways to mitigate foreign exchange risks and has started several years of work on establishing securitization platforms for emerging markets, making it easier for institutional investors such as pension funds, insurance companies, and sovereign wealth funds to inject their $70 trillion funds into developing countries.
Peng Anjie stated that the World Bank's proprietary data should become a global public good, and sharing this data can help boost investor confidence. Starting next week, the World Bank will advance this work in three new ways: first, a consortium of development agencies will release private sector recovery rate data by national income level. Secondly, in addition to contributing a dataset to the consortium, the World Bank will also release private sector default data segmented by credit rating. Finally, we will share statistical data on sovereign defaults and recovery rates that can be traced back to 1985.