June 2008

Talking to some of the students, many of which are preparing for the college entrance examination.

As I toured earthquake-devastated parts of Sichuan last week, what struck me most was the continuation of ordinary life in extraordinary circumstances. 

Beichuan middle school was the site of one of the great tragedies of the earthquake.  The old building of the school collapsed completely and the new building pancaked, crushing the lower level.  About half of the 2,000+ students and teachers died.  Beichuan county seat has been completely abandoned.  The middle school has temporarily been relocated some miles away, on the campus of a training ground for a big appliance manufacturer.   The facility had some good classrooms to begin with, and new temporary ones were added quickly.  The students are living in tents on the grounds.

The students we talked to were remarkably composed.  One high school senior explained that she had been on the second floor of the new building, which collapsed onto the first floor, allowing her to escape.  The boy next to her said he remembered nothing because he was knocked unconscious and then pulled from the rubble.  He had only recently been released from hospital. 

As usual on Fridays, from  Raj Nallari and Breda Griffith's lecture notes.

Gender Inequality and the Labor Market

Specialization in work is thought to account for why gender inequality exists in the labor market. Tradition and custom dictate different jobs and/or types of work for men and women. In the industrialized world, certain professions, such as the nursing profession, are dominated by one sex, e.g. women (Anker, 1998). According to "Global Employment Trends, 2007", the sex segregationof occupations is changing, but slowly. Females are still overrepresented in the caring profession and in home-based workers. Changing these trends will rely on further and increased investment in women’s education and training. Furthermore, even when women migrate, they tend to be overrepresented among these stereotypical female occupations. The UNFPA in its study of global population estimate that there are 95 million female migrants, accounting for half of all migrants and contributing hugely to remittances. Migration for women takes place across all age groups and income groups. As migrants and women, they oftentimes face significant challenges in their chosen host country, especially if race, class and religion factors come into play. Oftentimes they lack the opportunities to migrate legally and safely and oftentimes they are unaware of their rights. The figure below shows the trends in female migration for three sample years between 1995 and 2005.

Approaching the mountains from the Chengdu plain along the main road to Beichuan County, red banners with large white characters expressing support for the earthquake victims and thanks to the rescuers, are strung across the road, as if creating an arbor for all to pass through.  Driving up this road doesn’t feel safe, even now, six weeks after the quake.  The steep slopes of the mountains on both sides of our vehicle loom above us.  Huge boulders are scattered everywhere on the mountain sides, landslides are all around, and I cannot stop thinking about the description given by a group of tourists of the moment the quake struck: “the mountains exploded as if hit by a megaton bomb”. 

Leigu Township is utterly devastated.  None of our team have ever seen anything like it.   Most of the town is rubble and the buildings that remain will have to be brought down; everything will have to be built again.  The smell of decomposing trash is in the air as we walk through the eerie quiet of ruined streets.  Photos do not do justice to this experience because they cannot express what it feels like to have such devastation all around.  If this were a war zone, I could believe it, but to think that this happened through a force of nature, and all this damage occurred in 80 seconds, is almost beyond my imagination.

At the 700 year-old Er'wang Temple in the Dujiangyan World Heritage Site.

Six weeks and one day since the massive 8.0 earthquake hit Wenchuan County in Sichuan Province and I am participating in the first World Bank mission to the earthquake-affected area.  In the last six weeks the relief effort conducted by the Chinese government and citizens has been widely applauded.  Now the attention is turning to the future – damage assessments are under way and reconstruction planning has commenced.  The purpose of our mission this week is to better understand the impact of the earthquake and to see how the Bank could best provide assistance during the reconstruction period.
   
Today’s site visit took us to Dujiangyan, a city that I first visited almost exactly 12 years ago.  The city sits beside one of China’s greatest engineering achievements – the Dujiangyan Irrigation System – a massive water diversion project built in the 3rd Century BC on a scale that only the Chinese, ancient and modern, could conceive. 

 The Bottom Billion: Why the poorest countries are failing and what can be done about it? By Paul Collier. Oxford University Press, 2007
 
 The main thesis of the book is that globalization has been beneficial to a majority of the people in the developed and developing world, except for a large group of small countries in Africa, Caribbean ad Pacific countries, which comprise of a billion people (out of the total world population of about 6.5 billion). These billion people are being increasingly marginalized by globalization. For example, average per capita GDP growth of the economies of the bottom billion was 0.5% in 1970s, 0.4% in 1980s and negative 0.50% in 1990s. In comparison, per capita GDP growth in other developing countries increased from 2.5% in 1970s to 4% each in 1980s and 1990s. So there is big time divergence in income between the bottom billion and rest of the world population.
 

Tomorrow Tuesday June 24th, is the launching date of the 2008 Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI), together with the seventh issue of the "Governance Matters" research papers series.

I was delighted, yesterday to stumble across Ban Ki-Moon striding purposefully around in the bowels of the United Nations Head Quarters in New York. I was, at the time, bossing around a handful of Senior Public Information officials, ushering them back into a conference room to listen to my words of wisdom on strategic communications.  I nearly dragged him inside to say a few words, as I already knew he would loom large in today’s weblog, but he looked busy, so I let him be on his way.

I'm originally from a small village in India. There is no doubt that many of the people I knew growing up were able to survive because of the money their relatives sent back home to purchase the most basic staples. In development jargon, this money is known as remittances, but from my point of view, this money was a lifeline.

Remittances directly augment the income of those households that receive them. In addition to providing resources for the poor, they affect poverty and welfare through a whole host of indirect multiplier effects and also macroeconomic effects. The beauty of these flows is that they don't suffer from the governance problems that may be associated with official aid (i.e. the money goes from one wallet to another, sans most of the red tape in between).

On a larger scale, analysis across countries worldwide shows the significant poverty reduction effects of remittances: A 10 percent increase in per capita official remittances may lead to a 3.5 percent decline in the share of poor people.

Recent research shows that remittances have reduced the poverty headcount ratio (percent of population below the national poverty line) significantly in several low-income countries-by 11 percentage points in Uganda, 6 percentage points in Bangladesh, and 5 in Ghana. In Nepal, remittances may explain a quarter to a half of the 11 percentage-point reduction in the poverty headcount rate over the past decade (in the face of a difficult political and economic situation).

Just based on the simple figures I've referenced, does it not behoove us in the development community, especially policymakers and governments, to facilitate the investment and flow of money across borders?

The number of governance reform processes in which communication plays a role appears to be vast. Which of these are of vital importance?  How exactly can communication help? And what does research have to tell us? A new volume of edited work offers one set of answers to such questions.  Governance Reform Under Real World Conditions: Citizens, Stakeholders, and Voice is a project of the Communication for Governance & Accountability Program (CommGAP).

The World Bank released a couple of days ago a new interactive database on trade, the World Trade Indicators. It allows benchmarking and comparison among 210 countries and customs territories, and it includes multiple trade-related indicators. The data comes from the International Trade Centre (ITC), the World Trade Organization (WTO), the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), and the World Bank itself. Take a look at the intro page to find your way around all the options, or go straight to the sections dedicated to country rankings, country snapshots, country or overtime comparisons, or maps generated with your selected indicators.

In 2008, growth in China, the rest of East Asia and the Pacific, and other developing regions together will fall from 7.8 percent to a still-strong 6.5 percent while their high-income trading partners like the United States slow to between 1 and 2 percent and import less. This is the forecast of the Bank's Global Development Finance 2008, the annual review of global financial conditions facing developing countries.

The report highlights that it was domestic demand and non-US exports which drove growth in the Region in 2007, and alerts that steep declines in East Asian securities markets could pose risks. Take a look at the full outlook on the EAP Region and to the interactive data site, which is now also available in Chinese.