Event Summary
Speakers
- Samantha Cook, Senior Financial Sector Specialist
- Hitoshi Bana, Senior Adviser
- Luis de la Plaza Brigas, Lead Financial Officer/Debt Capital Markets & CBP
Description
Thursday 28 November, 09:30 – 11:00, Nicolae Balcescu Room
Sustainable economic development can be curtailed by the negative impact of natural disasters. One of the World Bank’s strategic priorities is to assist countries in their efforts to reduce the negative fiscal impacts of natural disasters. In line with this, the World Bank and the IMF are working on improving the quantification of budgetary impacts and impacts on debt sustainability to minimize the macro-fiscal impacts in advance of an event.
Analytics has guided the development and subsequent adoption of pre-arranged financial instruments to provide finance when its needed urgently most, which is immediately after a disaster hits. Supporting the accessibility of such instruments, the World Bank has developed a flexible platform for its clients to access international markets for risk transfer schemes. Over the past years, a range of countries, including Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Philippines, Jamaica have partnered with the World Bank in bringing to market sizeable, innovative transactions in recent years.
This session will showcase some of this collaboration sharing country experience from a number of countries.
Speaker bios
Samantha Cook has been with the World Bank Crisis and Disaster Risk Finance team since 2012 and has over 10 years of experience in the design and implementation of sovereign disaster risk financing instruments. Samantha was instrumental in the establishment of the Pacific Catastrophe Risk Insurance Company and its regional catastrophe risk insurance scheme. She has experience of working in Asia, Pacific, Africa and more recently Europe. Prior to joining the Bank Samantha worked in both central and investment banking as a macroeconomist and has been leveraging this expertise to ensure that crisis and disaster risk is recognized as a macro-fiscal issue.
Dr. Hitoshi Bana has over 30 years of extensive national and international experience in technical and administrative management in disaster and water resource areas in the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MLIT) of the Government of Japan, and in technical cooperation with developing countries to strengthen national capacity for disaster risk reduction, emergency response and reconstruction. Dr Bana has an academic background of hydrology and river engineering. He has Ph.D. in Environment and Resource Engineering and MSc. in Forest Science. He speaks Japanese and English. He is from Japan.
Luis de la Plaza is the Lead Financial Officer for the World Bank Treasury, where he has worked for over 15 years leading the work globally in designing customized financial solutions for clients in infrastructure, energy, disaster risk financing and other sectors. Prior to joining the World Bank, Luis worked in investment banking for more than 12 years in various positions as Director at ABN AMRO Rothschild, Head of Asian Equity and Derivative Syndication and at J.P. Morgan, Vice President, Equity Capital Markets, Derivatives and Corporate Finance in Madrid, New York, London and Hong Kong. Luis, a Spanish national, holds a PhD in Financial Economics from Universidad Complutense de Madrid, an MA in International Economics & Emerging Markets from Johns Hopkins’ School Advanced International Studies (SAIS), an MBA from University of Michigan, and a BA in Economics from Universidad Autonoma de Madrid.