Aurelien Kamdem Yeyouomo

Aurelien Kamdem Yeyouomo
Visiting postdoctoral fellow affiliated to the Center for Finance and Development

Résumé

Developing countries face severe climate losses yet often receive climate finance that is slow, fragmented, and difficult to deploy. Weak public finance management, limited state capacity, and opaque reporting reduce the credibility of spending plans and constrain absorptive capacity. Many governments also struggle to adopt digital governance tools that could strengthen transparency and improve the conditions under which climate resources are allocated and executed. These tools include integrated financial management systems, electronic procurement with open contract registers, climate related budget tagging, and digital reporting platforms that generate clearer and more reliable financial records. This project investigates whether progress in digital governance can reshape the institutional environment that structures climate finance and whether climate finance itself encourages investment in digital public management.

The study assembles a new annual panel of 111 developing countries for 2003 to 2023 that links a standardized measure of digital governance capacity to detailed records of climate finance commitments and disbursements from major international providers. The empirical strategy will apply panel local projections to trace dynamic relationships in both directions. Identification will draw on variation from donor budget cycles and from pre-announced national digital projects, supported by country and year fixed effects and extensive controls for macroeconomic conditions, institutional quality, and climatic shocks.
The project aims to provide new evidence on how digital public finance management shapes the volume, composition, and effectiveness of climate finance in settings where state capacity remains limited. It also intends to clarify the conditions under which digital reform can expand absorptive capacity and support more credible and equitable access to climate resources for developing countries. The expected contribution is to inform donors and policymakers on how institutional reforms can strengthen climate finance outcomes in the global south.