The low-carbon transition requires substantial financial mobilisation, yet it is unclear whether banks’ public climate commitments represent real change or simply greenwashing. This column uses unique survey data from 335 banks across 33 emerging markets to examine their internal green practices and lending approaches. The authors find that climate-committed banks score substantially higher on green […]
The World Bank has long recognized the critical importance of agricultural extension services – ranging from training and data to technology transfer – which make up the second-largest share of its agriculture portfolio. Yet farmers have often been slow to adopt the very methods and tools these services are designed to deliver—limiting their own productivity and […]
How does generative AI affect real workplace productivity? This column reports results from an experiment at the National Bank of Slovakia, where staff were randomly assigned GPT-4o access while completing routine and non-routine tasks. The model improved output quality by up to 44% and cut completion time by 21%, with the largest gains on non-routine, […]
