development banks, but said that any exploration of capital increases for the institutions can only be considered after implementing reforms aimed at expanding their role beyond poverty reduction to tackle global challenges such as climate change and pandemics.
“We should build better banks, not just bigger banks,” Yellen said.
She repeated her estimate that multilateral development banks could collectively boost lending by $200 billion over a decade from internal resources through balance sheet reforms now being implemented or considered. They could boost this further by implementing recommendations from last year’s G20 Capital Adequacy Framework report, she said.
Among other World Bank reform steps, Yellen said she was pushing for a new set of principles that would allow the “targeted use” of the bank’s concessional financing for global challenges, including climate change and measures to boost such resources.
She said she would like the World Bank to explore options for lending to sub-sovereign and supra-sovereign borrowers like the COVAX vaccine initiative.
Yellen said the United States was committed to implementing a global corporate minimum tax deal reached in 2021 despite the lack of action by the U.S. Congress to do so. She said negotiations on technical details of the deal’s Pillar 1 – reallocation of taxing rights on large multinationals including big technology firms – were “very close” to completion.
Source: Reuters