Bangladesh's economy expanded by a whopping 5.24% for the year to June 30 – raising annual income per head to US$2,064 – according to provisional figures from the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics. Standard Chartered forecasts that GDP will jump by 5.6% during the current fiscal year until June 30 2021, but the government is aiming for a V-shaped economic recovery and 8.2% growth. The economy is faring a lot better than its regional peers. Moody’s is forecasting that India’

The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank made a spirited effort to help African countries weather the Covid-19-induced economic storm this year but wholesale debt relief is now necessary and African governments must learn not to take on too much debt in the future. Up to 40 Sub-Saharan African countries requested emergency financial assistance from the IMF totalling close to US$16bn this year. Of this amount, as of September 17, the Fund had disbursed US$14.5bn to 30 countries. Furthe

It is hard to overstate the difficulties that Lebanon faces as it tries to avert a humanitarian disaster and an imminent economic collapse. With more than US$90bn in debt and the country’s foreign exchange reserves dwindling fast, the economic situation is dire. “In our scenario analysis, Lebanon may run out of FX reserves within the next 12 months, which will have insurmountable repercussions for the Lebanese economy,” said Ehsan Khoman, head of MENA research and strategy at M

For the past year, up to 13 million Chinese pre-teens have tuned in every day to the China International Television Corporation’s smash-hit animated television show “Legend of the Silk Road”. The animations present the historical, geographical, cultural and social conditions of ancient China exchanging with foreign countries, explained Xue Jijun, chairman of CITC at a press conference in July last year. But there is another agenda to the show. It is a way of subtly showing off

China’s recent bold commitment to become carbon neutral by 2060 demonstrates the top-down policy dynamic that has underpinned the breathtaking growth of the country’s green bond market. As China has begun to address a fragmented regulatory backdrop and move into line with international norms, the direction of market travel is clear - upwards. The need for stringent green bond market regulation has been imperative in China as the market has grown to be the world’s largest for th

The market for insurance-linked securities (ILS) has grown at a heady pace globally in 2020, issuers and investors alike showing interest from a prevention, yield opportunity and correlation perspective. Catastrophe bond issuance has dominated supply, chalking up US$10.4bn of issuance in the nine months to September, according to independent research firm Artemis - some US$2.6bn higher than the same period last year and cementing the growth dynamic of a market in which just under US$42bn of secu

Despite 2020’s unsupportive backdrop – the global pandemic, the oil shock, record sovereign defaults, repeated downgrades and potential crowding-out from increased developed market supply – bond sales for emerging markets credits have boomed this year. Only the weakest EM names have struggled for international market access. But with sentiment souring fast in the short window before the US election, key tests of risk appetite lie ahead. Shrugging off March’s shock when lo

The headlines were bleak from the start. ‘Latin American economy set for biggest crash in 75 years’, wrote Reuters. ‘Fears mount of a fresh Latin American debt crisis,’ wrote the FT. As Latin America became the global epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic, concerns that the region was stumbling towards another ‘lost decade’ were quick to surface. The IMF in June revised the region’s economic growth forecast for this year to -9.4% from -5.2% in April. Mea

At the end of 2019, when word that a contagious virus had taken hold in Wuhan, few could have forecast the extent to which Covid-19 would dominate headlines and affect lives in 2020. Since the first reported Covid-linked death in January, the speed at which the virus spread has been unprecedented. According to the World Health Organisation, by September 19 the virus had appeared in 216 countries, areas or territories, infected over 30 million people and pushed the death count towards the one mil

There can be no doubt about the event that has dwarfed all others this year as far as a large proportion of people across the globe are concerned. The coronavirus pandemic and its repercussions have been front and centre of thinking and planning from a macro to a micro level and look set to remain there for some time to come. The economic fallout from enforced lockdowns and changes in the way in which business is conducted was addressed by central banks and governments around the world, which mo