Contributions published at Banking (Urs Birchler)

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Was die SP vermutet hat, betrachtet sie nun als erwiesen: Gemäss einer Studie, die sie in Auftrag gegeben hat, sind Grossbanken gefährlich für die Volkswirtschaft. Zur Lösung des Problems braucht es laut der Studie Massnahmen auf verschiedenen Ebenen.

Der Druck aus dem Ausland auf das Schweizer Bankgeheimnis trifft auch die unabhängigen Vermögensverwalter. Besonders die in der Westschweiz und im Tessin ansässigen Unternehmen verwalten viele Vermögen von Kunden mit Domizil im Ausland.

Medical products used in the developed world often fail to adequately serve resource-limited settings where electricity, transportation and health care workers are not readily available. We suggest that the problem is not only a lack of coordinated financial resources to purchase existing medical products, but also a lack of products that are specifically designed for resource-limited settings. While donor organisations with a focus on global health are increasingly willing to bear the additional financial risk for the research and development of such high-impact medical products, corporations are still reluctant to take their best scientists and engineers away from more commercially attractive projects. Universities, on the other hand, given their teaching and research missions, are well positioned to engage in such high-risk development projects. A group of biomedical, engineering, business and social science researchers at Northwestern University (NU) propose a creative model to address significant social and health needs. The team's initial product focus is a rapid test for diagnosing infants with HIV. The NU model aligns the incentives and expertise of industry, donors and academia to innovate medical products, such as the infant HIV diagnostic test, for resource-limited settings.

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This study examines a method to collect and explore data on the conditions that could lead to crises due to microfinance clients’ over-indebtedness. A simplified version of one of the main approaches to early warning systems, the “signaling approach”, is proposed to construct a composite index for predicting over-indebtedness crises in the microfinance industry. The index is built for a sample of 13 countries, among them countries where overindebtedness crises and other repayment occurred in the past. Data stems from a triangulation of primary and secondary data sources. The sample results in a preliminary classification of the countries according to their current risk for an over-indebtedness crisis. The study suggests the proposed preliminary composition of the index and makes recommendations on the data collection for further validation of the index before it is expanded to a larger set of countries.

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