Capital, Credit and Commerce: Global Development Finance and India’s Role in the New Economic Order

Sustainable economic transformation requires capital that can absorb uncertainty, remain committed over long horizons and direct investment towards infrastructure, innovation, industrial upgrading and social inclusion. Yet institutional capital is often discussed as though public development financiers, sovereign investors, charitable endowments and delegated fund structures were interchangeable pools of patient money. This critical narrative review compares development finance corporations and state investment banks, sovereign wealth funds, endowment funds and fund-of-funds as distinct institutional forms. Literature published from 1990 to 2 June 2026 was identified through accessible scholarly indexes, bibliographic metadata services, institutional repositories and citation searching, and was appraised for conceptual relevance, empirical design, governance treatment and evidence of financial, developmental or environmental additionality. The synthesis shows that transformational capacity depends less on nominal asset size than on the alignment of mandate, liability structure, governance, instruments and accountability. Development finance institutions possess the clearest mandate for countercyclical and market-shaping intervention but are exposed to political allocation and weak exit discipline. Sovereign wealth funds combine scale and long horizons, although stabilisation, savings and development mandates create different tolerances for domestic concentration and illiquidity. Endowments offer perpetual capital and stakeholder-linked missions, but scale advantages, payout behaviour and indirect impact channels limit their generalisability as engines of structural transformation. Fund-of-funds can crowd in specialist managers and build financing ecosystems, while adding fee layers, delegation problems and difficult additionality tests. Across all four forms, environmental, social and governance integration is not equivalent to real-economy impact; stronger evidence supports engagement, catalytic co-investment and institution-building than passive portfolio screening. The review proposes a mission-liability-governance-additionality framework and argues for complementary institutional architectures rather than reliance on a single vehicle. Durable transformation requires transparent mandates, independent professional decision-making, risk-sharing calibrated to public value, and measurement that distinguishes mobilisation from displacement and portfolio alignment from attributable outcomes.