Finance

At IISD, we believe that the financial system needs to serve as the nervous system of the global economy rather than its master. The core of our work on finance stems from our conviction that the root causes of the 2007 crisis remain largely unaddressed.

Broader structural reforms are needed if the financial system and sector are to deliver on sustainable development. Moreover, these reforms need to be implemented in a coordinated manner across industrialized and lower-income geographies.

Our experts help governments decide when it makes sense to employ sustainable industrial policy and what tools to use in pursuing it. The questions faced by governments are both economic (What sectors are ripe? What tools are effective?) and legal (What are the challenges imposed on governments by international trade and investment law?).

IISD's analysis includes in-country work that focuses on the unique and common challenges faced by particular policy-makers, and by more cross-cutting work that tries to find general themes of value to those policy-makers from across a number of countries and research efforts.