Foreign Affairs committee  I'm hesitating because, like many people around the world, I feel my ability to second-guess what plays well with the voting public has fallen to zero. I know there are people who are skeptical about these leverage arguments. There are a lot of DFIs out there, and there is a susp

Foreign Affairs committee  There's a very simple point to make here, which is to do with your ability to diversify risk within your own portfolio, because you have lots and lots of different investments. If you are quite a small entity, one way of coping with risk is to have lots and lots and lots of very

Foreign Affairs committee  I'll start, although as I start talking, you will hear that it's Diana who completes this thought. CDC has, in my view, a wonderful way of looking at its investment decisions, and it has a great virtue of simplicity. It has this thing called the grid. You can google it and have a

Foreign Affairs committee  I think a difficulty here is whether we are thinking in terms of quite large deals which a DFI might invest in directly. In that case, in any given country, at any given time, you may be able to count those opportunities on the fingers of one hand. Or, are we thinking more about

Foreign Affairs committee  I think it's probably fair, on the assumption that you're already doing everything you can to invest in women-led deals at the large scale when the opportunities present themselves.

Foreign Affairs committee  I was looking at a piece of research that went into countries such as South Sudan, Somalia, and Sierra Leone. They approached all the businesses they could find and asked them where they got their money from, and whom they employ. One of the facts that popped out is that a very l

Foreign Affairs committee  You've put your finger on a tremendously hard question, because elsewhere in the development world everybody is quite rightly expected to be rigorous about the impact they're having, but elsewhere they're doing things where they're trying to achieve quite a well-defined effect on

Foreign Affairs committee  There's a distinction to be made. Do you have tax havens in the structure between the investors and the underlying business that you are invested in? Then, separately, is the underlying business a multinational enterprise that is using tax havens in its operations? Some of the E

Foreign Affairs committee  I'm afraid I have to start by confessing that the sections of the paper that you read must have been written by my co-authors. I wasn't responsible for those myself. Rightly so, there's an awful lot of people asking what role DFIs can play to stabilize situations where you have

Foreign Affairs committee  Perhaps I may add a few words on that. I'd like to talk about the issue of whether you recognize what the DFI does as official development assistance. Now, the rules on that are not finalized yet. Understandably, there can be a political imperative to try to announce or report as

Foreign Affairs committee  No, I won't on that. We'll hear from Diana on that question, if that's all right.

Foreign Affairs committee  Hello. My name is Paddy Carter. I am a senior research fellow here at ODI where I have worked on DFIs. Previously, I was an academic economist. I'm going to hop around the questions that you've posed to try to identify some areas that haven't already been so ably covered by Simo