Nowadays Public Development Banks (PDBs) and Development Financing Institutions (DFIs) are experiencing a renaissance worldwide as their usefulness is increasingly recognized by both academics and policymakers. PDBs and DFIs are public financial institutions initiated by governments to proactively achieve public policy objectives. They are potentially useful policy instruments for fixing market failures, incubating markets, coordinating public policies with stakeholders, and promoting economic structural transformation in an equitable and sustainable manner. But not all PDBs and DFIs have achieved positive development outcomes as expected. To fulfill their development potential, it is important to rigorously examine their roles, operations, and effectiveness to avoid pitfalls. But the in-depth academic research is scarce. One major reason behind the paucity of research is the lack of systematic efforts to identify these public financial institutions and collect relevant data.

To fill this gap, the development financing research program of the Institute of New Structural Economics at Peking University (INSE) initiated to build the world's first development financing institution database in September 2017. Recognizing INSE's pilot effort, French Development Agency (Agence Française de Développement, AFD), aims to identify those that could form a world coalition to emphasize the importance of incorporating the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into the corporate strategies of PDBs and DFIs. On that basis, the INSE and the AFD have collaborated to build on the INSE’s pilot effort to strengthen first ever comprehensive database on PDBs and DFIs with rigorous criteria and methodologies.

The database initiated by INSE and then collaborated between INSE and AFD aims to allow researchers to not only identify PDBs and DFIs worldwide in a comprehensive manner but also provide the information on their basic profile and financial indicators (such as official mandate and total assets). We hope that our pilot and persistent efforts to build the comprehensive database can promote original research on the rationales, operations, governance and performance of PDBs and DFIs to enhance our understanding of such important public financial institutions and realize their full potentials.