From February 26 to 28, 2025, the Public Development Banks (PDBs) and Development Financing Institutions (DFIs) database team attended the fifth edition of the “Finance in Common Summit (FiCS)” in Cape Town, South Africa.

At the FiCS 2025, we presented our vision, progress and prospects of our database project and launched the fifth public development finance flagship database report, featuring new data insights. To advance the collaborative efforts on database building, we hosted a roundtable discussion on “The Future of PDB Analytics – New Data, New Knowledge” to present frontier research comparing financial profiles of national development banks with those of commercial banks based on the original data collection, explore current initiatives and their potential for collaboration, identify key topics for future focus, and examine the role of AI in data collection and analysis.

A.   Release of the Fifth Public Development Finance Flagship Database Report

In the first quarter of 2025, the PDBs and DFIs Database officially launched its fifth flagship report, titled Exploring the Financial Profiles of Public Development Banks: An Umbrella Paper, co-authored by Florian LEON*, Jiajun XU*, Régis MARODON, Wenna ZHONG, Sitraka RABARY, and Jean-Baptiste JACOUTON (*co-first authors).

This 2025 flagship database report is dedicated to collecting firsthand data on PDBs’ financial profiles to examine the extent to which they can be financially viable while fulfilling public policy objectives. It provides a first-of-its-kind analysis of 259 PDBs’ financial profiles over a six-year period (2018–2023). The key finding of the analysis is that a vast majority of PDBs have positive financial returns at least as presented in their profit-and-loss statements. Another preliminary finding is that observable characteristics (e.g., size, age, mandate) are weakly related to variations in financial results across PDBs. What matters for PDBs is their ability to remain financially viable in the long term, enabling them to reinvest in future development projects and to support activities and sectors that private markets often neglect. We hope that our original dataset can lay the foundation for promising research directions on PDBs’ financial profiles.

If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to contact the corresponding author, Professor Jiajun XU, at jiajunxu@pku.edu.cn.

B.    Data Disclosure

a)      7 Financial Indicators of 259 PDBs for the Fiscal Years 2018-2023

To promote original research in the field of public development finance and unlock the full potential of PDBs and DFIs, the database team has collected and disclosed a comprehensive dataset on financial profiles used in the analysis for the fifth flagship report.

The dataset includes 7 key financial indicators - total assets, total equity, total liabilities, net income, profit before tax, net interest income, and number of employees - of 259 PDBs, covering the six-year period from 2018 to 2023.

b)      Total Assets of 536 PDBs and DFIs for Fiscal Year 2023

The database team periodically collects and updates data on the total assets of all institutions included in the database. In this quarter, we collected the total assets of 536 PDBs and DFIs from 155 countries and economies for the fiscal year 2023, which collectively amount to 23 trillion USD.

Our data collection method combines natural language processing and manual data collection, with rigorous quality control. To collect publicly available financial data as comprehensively and accurately as possible, we have conducted three rounds of quality control, including a cross-checking, a double-checking and final verification by a team of researchers from the Public Development Finance research program at the Institute of New Structural Economics (INSE) and the School of Health Humanities (SHH) at Peking University (PKU), the French Development Agency (Agence Française de Développement, AFD) and the Foundation for Studies and Research on International Development (Fondation pour les Études et Recherches sur le Développement International, FERDI).

Forthcoming Steps

In the next step, the database team will carry on collecting the six financial indicators for the fiscal years 2018-2023 for the remaining PDBs and DFIs that are not included in the data sample of the fifth flagship database report, including total equity, total liabilities, net income, profit before tax, net interest income, and the number of employees.

To learn more, please visit our data visualization website (http://www.dfidatabase.pku.edu.cn/) and download the database for free. For using the information from the database, please cite: Xu, Jiajun, Régis Marodon, Xinshun Ru, Xiaomeng Ren, and Xinyue Wu. 2021. “What are Public Development Banks and Development Financing Institutions? ——Qualification Criteria, Stylized Facts and Development Trends.” China Economic Quarterly International, volume 1, issue 4: 271-294; database DOI: https://doi.org/10.18170/DVN/VLG6SN.

We welcome feedback from academia, policymakers, practitioners from PDBs and DFIs, and other stakeholders to provide constructive suggestions and fill gaps in the database. Please contact us at nsedfi@nsd.pku.edu.cn.