February 2008

Speaking of successful cities (see my previous post), the Cities Alliance is collaborating with the World Bank and the Government of Norway to launch an international essay competition for young people (18-25) which asks, “What can you do to shape the city of your dreams?”  Yes, there are cash prizes and finalists get to travel to Cape Town, South Africa this June, all expenses paid by the World Bank.  Submissions are entirely internet-based, and the deadline for submission is March 23, 2008.  What do you have to lose?

A new paper titled, Attitudes to equality: the "socialist legacy" revisited, analyzes whether residents of post-socialist countries have "a preference for greater income equality, other things being equal, owing to the legacy of socialism." Surprisingly or not, the authors find little evidence that supports this claim.

The authors compared the preferences of former Soviet Union countries to those of other Eastern Europe and other groups of developed and developing countries. They found that as a group, there is a significant lower preference toward moving to greater income equality!

New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was at the World Bank’s Washington, DC headquarters last Thursday to speak on elements of the Big Apple’s success in attracting “the free, global movement of labor, capital and ideas.”  Bloomberg noted that New York has joined more than 700 other American cities in pledging to meet Kyoto protocol standards for carbon reduction – in sharp contrast to the current U.S. policy.  The Bank offset the carbon footprint of Mayor Bloomberg’s trip to Washington by purchasing one ton of CO2 through the Scolel Té Project in Chiapas, Mexico.  The Carbon Catalog, an independent directory of offset providers and projects around the world like Scolel Té, lists 17 carbon offset projects in East Asia, including the Inner Mongolian Wind Power Project in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia, China, the Salido Kecil Mini Hydropower Plant in West Sumatra, Indonesia, and the Biogas from Sewage Water Project in Chumphon, Thailand. 

In a few weeks the Arab League will meet. The 2002 Arab Peace Initiative will again be placed on its agenda with the hope to push for the quest of a two-state solution. Many people are hoping for an end to this conflict that has brought hardship and pain to people on both sides.  There are many envoys trying to mediate. There is no lack of plans and initiatives on how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be settled; rather detailed ideas exist.

Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs), government owned investment vehicles typically funded by foreign exchange surpluses or natural resource revenues seem to be in the news about everyday.  Their massive size, rapid growth, and high-profile investments in the U.S. and elsewhere in 2007, has generated this attention.  Some of the SWF investments have been viewed as market stabilizing, for instance the substantial equity investments in large U.S. financial institutions that recently got into financial trouble after the sub-prime mortgage crisis.  However, there is great suspicion from many quarters of the SWFs as being politically motivated and the SWFs currently at the center of the storm are in Asia.   

Concerns on SWFs:  Much debate is now taking place, both in academic and political circles. Politicians and financial officials from the U.S., United Kingdom, France, Germany and others have called for more intensive scrutiny of SWF investments.  This call has come due to three reasons:  (i) SWF investments could potentially be used to exert economic influence and to acquire strategic assets; (ii) a perceived lack of transparency of SWF operations; and (iii) seemingly opaque corporate governance structures.   These concerns have been amplified during this moment in financial history when the economies of the investee countries are increasingly vulnerable. 

According to the Bank's recently published Migration and Remittances Factbook, the Top 10 remittance recipients in East Asia & Pacific in 2007 were: China ($25.7 bn), Philippines ($17.0 bn), Indonesia ($6.0 bn), Vietnam ($5.0 bn), Thailand ($1.7 bn), Malaysia ($1.7 bn), Cambodia ($0.3 bn), Mongolia ($0.2 bn), Fiji ($0.2 bn), Myanmar ($0.1 bn).

What follows is a discussion of two of the many challenges that often bedevil efforts to bring out pro-poor social and political change and an approach that is a way of dealing with them. You know the deal: well-meaning technocrats try to introduce a bit of governance reform...by stealth. Then it runs into trouble- usually due to vigorous attacks by vested interests likely to lose out if the reform succeeds - yet the potential beneficiaries are not organized, do not even know that they might benefit from the reform. And so the reformers are defeated.  Or the reform, if it has already been introduced, is reversed or stalls. The problem is that many technical specialists are uncomfortable with the public sphere and all it entails: people, the media, controversy and debate, 'noise'. But unsupported reforms tend to become orphans and street urchins.

A recently published children's book titled, One Hen: How One Small Loan Made a Big Difference, tells the tale of a young Ghanaian boy, who with the help of a small loan is able to dramatically improve his living conditions with his widowed mother. Kojo, the protagonist boy, buys one hen after receiving a loan from his mother and then sells eggs to his community. After saving and soundly investing he is able to expand his operations and eventually can afford to attend college.

Kojo’s story is based on the life of Kwabena Darko, who created in 1994 Sinapi Aba Trust, which engages in microfinancing in Ghana. The only hope is that if Cinderella doesn't spark development ideas, perhaps Kojo will. 

 From  Raj Nallari and Breda Griffith's lecture notes.

Gender Statistics

All the efforts discussed last week come under the umbrella of gender statistics.  Gender statistics is a relatively new area of study relating to traditional areas of statistics as well as the statistical system as a whole.  Gender statistics refer to the situation of men and women in all policy areas and facilitate a study of gender inequalities and gender issues that goes beyond statistics disaggregated by sex. It also includes gender-specific publications and gender mainstreaming. The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) notes the following reasons for why we need gender statistics.

For the past few weeks, the Philippine media have been intensely focused on a controversy regarding a foreign loan meant to fund the creation of the National Broadband Network (NBN), a project envisioned to seamlessly link all government offices across the archipelago via the Internet. Whistleblower Jun Lozada alleged in a senate committee hearing that a former high level official was poised to receive $130 million in kickbacks, a claim that has been repeatedly denied.

That is the title of one of the International Poverty Centre's past One Pagers, now available in Spanish and Portuguese.

In this paper the author, Terry McKinley, discusses the differences between income poverty and human poverty and warns against trying to merge the two.

 In the New York Times Paul Krugman, writing about the US, asserts that Poverty is Poison.