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Taking departure in the premise that donor and recipient priorities differ with regard to the marginal costs and benefits associated with attacking global environmental externalities, and hence the relative importance attached to the global environment, this paper seeks to scrutinize specific global environmental transfer mechanisms in the light of proposed definitions of global environmental assistance and global environmental compensation. It is argued that most global environmental transfer mechanisms possess distinct compensatory elements, and that additionality of these transfers is essential in order to ensure that existing development assistance is not crowded out. Specifically, this should be achieved either directly through separation of funds for global environmental and local developmental purposes or indirectly through increased considerations for local development objectives directly in global environmental transfer design.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the relative effectiveness of bilateral and multilateral concessional debts on economic growth in 32 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries over the period 1985–2016.

The recently developed dynamic panel autoregressive distributed lag models which comprise three different estimators, the mean group, pooled mean group (PMG) estimator and dynamic fixed effect, were applied to estimate the model. Following these estimators, the Hausman test was employed to determine the efficient and consistent estimator.

The results showed that bilateral concessional debts had a negative impact on growth. From the findings, a 1 percent increase in bilateral concessional debts induced economic growth to decline by 38.1 percent points in the short run, and by 7.1 percent points in the long run; convergence to long-run equilibrium adjusted at the speed of 90 percent on an annual basis. Multilateral concessional debts were found to have a positive impact on growth both in the short and long run. The coefficient of the error term was negatively signed and indicates that deviations from the long-run equilibrium path were being corrected at the speed of 89.4 percent annually.

To the authors’ best knowledge, empirical studies that specifically seek to examine how bilateral and multilateral concessional debts impacted on growth are yet to attract the attention of researchers. As a result, this study will complement related extant growth studies, especially in the case of SSA.

The People's Republic of China (PRC) is the world's largest official creditor nation with its outstanding debt claims on the rest of the world totaling an estimated US$5.5 trillion in 2019 or more than 6% of global GDP. However, given Beijing’s very limited transparency in its disclosures when it comes to its external lending (and now its alleged culpability in the spread of the coronavirus) the accusation that the PRC has for years engaged in “debt-trap diplomacy” has come under renewed scrutiny. Specifically, the charge is that the Chinese government, which is the world's leading creditor lending via its multibillion dollar “Belt and Road Initiative” as well as various state-owned and controlled entities, lures developing countries, in particular, low-income countries, with easy money to fund often economically unviable projects. This is because China's ultimate goal is to get access to the borrowers' local markets and natural resources and indirectly controlling or outright seizing assets and resources, including extracting economic and political concessions when these countries fail to service their loans – which is often given at market or above-market interest rates and carry shorter maturities, thereby requiring regular refinancing. This paper reviews this claim and concludes that it seems exaggerated.

This study contributes to the debate about the sustainability of Chinese loans in Africa. The literature suggests that economic growth is among other crucial debt dynamic indicators for assessing debt sustainability in the economy. However, this hypothesis has hardly been tested in the current case due to data ambiguities on Chinese loans to Africa. Following China Africa Research Initiative (CARI)'s initiative to ameliorate these data challenge, this study utilises CARI's dataset in a GMM panel VAR framework for the period (2000–2018) to explore the dynamic relations between Africa's growth and Chinese loans. The methodology is theoretically underpinned by the exogenous growth models that consider physical capital accumulation in the form of savings as a prime growth stimulus in the economy's production function. Thus, Chinese loans are typically viewed as physical capital input that directly adds to Africa's physical capital accumulation. It was found that Africa's growth responds positively to Chinese loans but only in the short run. In the long run, the effects of shocks to Chinese loans on Africa's growth phase out despite the inclusion of merchandise trade as a productivity factor in the model. The findings suggest that Chinese loans can boost Africa's growth through physical capital accumulation. Nonetheless, for growth to continue in the long run, these loans ought to be effectively invested in productive economic sectors that can generate productivity-enhancing economic incentives and enough savings for repayment. This initiative should be complemented by reforming institutions involved in acquiring, investing and servicing Chinese loans.

The regularity of default by countries on their sovereign debt has led to the establishment of a number of evolving institutions or “Clubs”. These institutions' objective is to optimise the impact of imminent default or actual default on both international lending and borrowing. The purpose of this article is to discuss the informal institutions concerned with managing debt between national governments – the Paris Club, between governments and commercial banks – the London Club – and the currently ad hoc dealings with sovereign bonds.

The Clubs' changing approaches through the increasing depth and number of international financial crises from the Latin American debt crises of the 1980s, the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s and the circumstances of the ex‐Soviet economies, plus the ongoing debt sub‐Saharan African debt crisis are discussed.

The shifts in the principles underlying the debt management system are manifest by the changing content of reschedulings, from simply deferring payments to actual reduction in their present value.

The functioning of principles of comparable treatment of all creditors are discussed with respect to the growing need for a body representing bondholders' interests.

The paper highlights the IMF's multiple and sometimes conflicting roles in the international financial system.

The relationship between accounting and fiscal rules has long been controversial. Financial statements conform to accounting principles and methods regardless of tax rules. This independence generates important permanent and temporary differences between accounting and taxable income. The paper analyses the behaviour of listed Spanish firms in this accounting‐taxation relationship 1996‐1998, the extent of introduction of the inter‐period income tax allocation method, and the number and types of permanent and temporary differences reported. Most firms adopt the income tax allocation method, and report the differences, although they do not always specify which transactions provoked them. Among the long list of operations that generate differences, the most frequent are income tax expense, welfare schemes, provision for pensions, monetary correction, accelerated depreciation, or exemption for reinvestment. Although the number and kind of differences vary through time, the variation is not statistically significant. This is the first study analysing such differences for a European Union state.

Climate finance is regularly not only seen as a tool to efficiently combat global warming but also to solve development problems in the recipient countries and to support the attainment of sustainable development goals. Thereby, conflicts between distributive and allocative objectives arise, which threaten the overall performance of such transfer schemes. Given the severity of the climate change problem, this study aims to raise concerns about whether the world can afford climate transfer schemes that do not focus on prevention of (and adaptation to) climate change but might be considered as a vehicle of rent-seeking by many agents.

Future designs of international transfer schemes within the framework of the Paris Agreement are to be based on experience gained from existing mechanisms. Therefore, the authors examine different existing schemes using a graphical technique first proposed by David Pearce and describe the conflicts between allocative and distributional goals that arise.

In line with the famous Tinbergen rule, the authors argue that other sustainability problems and issues of global fairness should not be primarily addressed by climate finance but should be mainly tackled by other means.

As there is still ongoing, intense discussion about how the international transfer schemes addressed in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement should be designed, the research will help to sort some of the key arguments.

There are prominent international documents (like the Paris Agreement and the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development) seeking to address different goals simultaneously. While synergies between policies is desirable, there are major challenges for policy coordination. Addressing several different goals using fewer policy instruments, for example, will not succeed as the Tinbergen Rule points out.

The integration of co-benefits in the analysis allows for taking into account the social effects of climate policy. As the authors argue, climate finance approaches could become overstrained if policymakers would consider them as tools to also solve local sustainability problems.

In this paper, the authors will not only examine what can be learnt from the clean development mechanism (CDM) for future schemes under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement but also observe the experiences gained from a non-CDM scheme. So the authors pay attention to the Trust Fund of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) which was established with global benefit orientation, i.e. – unlike the CDM – it was not regarded as an additional goal to support local sustainable development. Yet, despite its disregard of local co-benefits, the authors think that it is of particular importance to include the GEF in the analysis, as some important lessons can be learnt from it.