Daily Times

Odile Renaud-Basso, the first female president at Europe’s development bank, hopes to restore the EBRD’s green investment targets while addressing workplace equality as Covid-hit economies recover.

Before presiding over her first EBRD annual meeting this week, in an interview with AFP, Renaud-Basso also highlighted the rapid workplace digitalisation that is affecting the bank’s regions of investment as well as her own institution.

A former head of the French Treasury, in November Renaud-Basso took the helm at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development — founded in 1991 to help former Soviet bloc countries switch to free-market economies.

The lender, whose shareholders comprise almost 70 countries, has grown to invest in 38 emerging economies spanning central and eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.

“On average, 2020 was less negative than expected” in the EBRD’s countries of investment, Renaud-Basso told AFP.

This year the EBRD foresees “much better than expected” economic growth across its countries of investment, after most economies contracted last year owing to pandemic turmoil, she said.

The bank is to publish its latest forecasts on Tuesday.

Renaud-Basso pointed to rebounds in manufacturing and industrial production, as well as the positive impact of higher commodity prices for the better-than-expected outlook.

But “big uncertainties remain”, with countries reliant on tourism, notably Tunisia, hit hard by Covid-19 travel restrictions.

Elsewhere, “Lebanon remains very difficult after minus 25 percent GDP in 2020, so this has a huge impact on the average”. A political crisis has left the country without a functioning government since the last one resigned after a huge explosion killed dozens and destroyed swathes of Beirut in August 2020.

The EBRD last year invested a record 11 billion euros ($13.4 billion) across emerging economies meanwhile, to help counter fallout from the coronavirus crisis. That marked a 10-percent increase from 2019.

Green target

No stranger to transition projects, the EBRD is targeting 2025 as the year when more than half its investments will be in green projects.

“We were very close to this objective in 2019 but with the crisis the figure has dropped” to under 30 percent last year, the bank chief said.

“The objective is to increase again… (to) 40 percent in 2021.”