• The Global Transparency Resource
• Importance of Transparency
• IFI's Introduced
  • AfDB - African Development Bank
  • ADB - Asian Development Bank
  • BIS - Bank for International Settlements
  • BSTDB - Black Sea Trade and Development Bank
  • CDB - Caribbean Development Bank
  • CEB - Council of Europe Development Bank
  • EBRD - European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
  • ECB - European Central Bank
  • EIB - European Investment Bank
  • IADB - Inter-American Development Bank
  • IFC - International Finance Corporation
  • IMF - International Monetary Fund
  • IsDB - Islamic Development Bank
  • OECD - Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
  • WB - World Bank
  • WTO - World Trade Organisation

EIB European Investment Bank (Luxembourg, Luxembourg)

The European Investment Bank is a lending institution that provides money for various projects both inside and outside of Europe. It is not a development bank in the sense that it has very specific policy goals. While the economic development of Europe is important the bank has more specific goals and it only lends money when it can help to achieve those goals. Therefore they are far more selective in terms of what they will lend money for.

The European Investment Bank exists in order to help Europe to achieve its policy goals. Currently these include integration of the member countries and helping with the development of weak economic areas. The way that they do this is by loaning money to help build infrastructure and to help businesses to grow. In this respect they are like most development banks however since most of the areas where they are lending money are already quite developed the job is much simpler. They primarily focus on helping businesses to grow rather than on the social development of the region.

One of the other major goals of the European Investment Bank is to help to ensure that Europe has the world's leading knowledge based economy. In order to do this they put a lot of money towards research and development projects. The goal is to help to create new technology that can be used to help European businesses to thrive in the modern world. In addition they will also lend money to help take projects from the research and development stage to the stage where they actually have a product that they can take to market.

These days one of the most important issues that any region will face it environmental sustainability. Therefore the European Investment Bank will lend money to projects that can help in this regard. At least that is the theory, in practice this has turned out to be a controversial part of their lending practice. The problem is that in a lot of cases the goals of their projects will conflict and as a result they have funded a lot of projects, especially in the weaker economic regions that are not as environmentally sustainable as a lot of people think that they should be.

The European Investment Bank also does a surprising amount of business outside of Europe. This has again opened them up to a fair amount of criticism. The stated goals of lending to these countries are that they are trying to encourage private enterprise, infrastructure development and environmental sustainability. However they also have a stated goal of security of energy supplies which has led them into a lot of questionable projects, at least projects that conflict with the other goals. While ensuring Europe's supplies of energy are important it is not always in the best interest of the country that they are lending to.