August 2008

A few days ago, The New York Times published a story on a new online approach to selecting and funding investigative journalism pieces.  A nonprofit called Spot Us calls it “community funded reporting.”  The concept is really quite simple.  It has two main components: 1) ask people for story ideas, and 2) ask them to provide funds to defray the costs of producing the story.  In cyberspeak, the two components are called “crowdsourcing” and “crowdfunding”, respectively.

Despite the current economic climate, a recent Standard & Poor's research report found that remittance securitization and securitization of other future flow receivables in emerging markets are performing well, bucking the trend in global credit markets.

In a 2005 paper by Suhas Ketkar and Dilip Ratha, the authors found the securitization of future remittances and trade, tourism, credit card and other future receivables (together called "Diversified Payment Rights" or DPRs) are a useful tool that can help developing countries maintain access to international capital markets especially in times of crisis.

Dilip’s research as well as the World Bank’s 2006 Global Economic Prospects report, emphasizes that one of the reasons for the robust performance of this asset class is the "countercyclical" nature of remittances.

The S&P report backs this up by stating, "Some of these, such as worker remittances, also offer the benefit of countercyclical performance: that is, their flows often increase when domestic economies weaken...Investors often value worker remittances for their countercyclical nature: that is, workers typically send more money home during periods of economic crisis in their native countries."

The international community has endorsed the Millenium Development Goal of reducing the poverty rate in the developing world by 50% over the 25 years, 1990-2015.  While the target is arbitrary, it is nonetheless important to have a stretch goal like this to challenge us all to make the world a better place.  To measure progress, naturally we need pretty good estimates of global poverty.  The World Bank is the leading bean counter in this exercise.  It just today released new estimates of global poverty that have the potential to illuminate the progress, but also the potential to confuse a lot of people.  The research department of the World Bank has changed its global poverty line from $1 per day to $1.25 per day and has found about 468 million more poor people than it had previously estimated.  About 135 million of these newly found poor are in China.  How does one make sense of these new numbers?  Here are some pointers:

As a first-time blogger on this site, I will focus on bringing experiences and reflections on how communication plays a key role in initiatives related to governance, a role even more fundamental than that played in other kinds of development programs. Before digging more into this, I would like to illustrate and hopefully clarify one term that, due to its broad and multifaceted connotation, is used too frequently in an ambiguous manner: communication. Most dictionaries and basic textbooks define communication basically as the act of sending messages or, more specifically as a sender transmitting messages through channels to one or more receivers.

The Olympics closing ceremony. Photo courtesy of rich115 under a Creative Commons license.

The closing ceremony for the Beijing Olympics was as impressive as the opening.  In between, China put on an amazingly well-organized set of games.  China also won the greatest number of gold medals and came in second behind the USA in total medal count.  This splashy performance definitely caught the attention of people in the West and set off a lot of speculation in the press about what it all means.  Robert Samuelson discusses in a recent column the Beijing Olympics as a metaphor for China overtaking the U.S. as the world's biggest economy.

What struck me most during the last week of events and at the closing ceremony is that we really are living in a new, multi-polar era without one single dominant country.  I was fortunate to see Guo Jingjing win her springboard diving gold; Russia-USA men’s volleyball semifinal; Argentina-Nigeria soccer gold medal game; Jamaican runners dominate the sprints; Ethiopian and Kenyan runners dominate the long distances; and American runners sweep a couple of middle distance events. And while the Americans and Chinese can be justifiably proud of their medal totals, don’t forget that the member states of the EU won vastly more medals and gold medals than either of those countries.  (My informal count as of mid-day Friday was that EU states had won 234 medals including 74 gold.)

The short answer appears to be no, but let’s start at the beginning…as anyone who has been following the financial markets now knows, the mortgage market in the U.S. is in serious disarray and the prospects for recovery are not positive.  Some observers are calling it the worst housing crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Housing prices have been in a freefall over the past year, set off by the losses in the sub-prime mortgage market.  House prices have dropped by over 14% on average and substantially more in many major metropolitan areas, and delinquency rates are on the rise across the board – all of the key indicators (pdf) are flashing red. 

The Olympics have moved into week 2 with track and field replacing swimming as marquee events and the national stadium (better known as the Bird’s Nest) supplanting the Water Cube as the place to see and to be seen.  With two competition sessions per day scheduled at the Bird’s Nest, which holds 91,000 spectators, the crowds at the Olympic Green have gotten much bigger and the atmosphere livelier.  Families are spending the day on the Green, arriving several hours before competitions and wandering around and/or visiting the numerous sponsor pavilions.

I had been worried that the bigger crowds would lead to long waits in security lines, as I had experienced some delays getting to the Water Cube early in week 1.  However, I should have realized that the Chinese authorities are among the most experienced in the world in managing large crowds.  Indeed, by Saturday morning – the first day of competition at the Bird’s Nest -- 50 or so additional security lanes had been set up and spectators were being moved smoothly through the check points. 

A cool aspect of week 2 is seeing many of the athletes wandering around on the Olympic Green (and elsewhere around town).  During week 1, most of the athletes are either competing or in training, so they don’t get out as much (although Kobe and Lebron somehow managed to show for events all over the city; particularly for Michael Phelps’ swimming events).  By week 2, however, the swimmers, rowers, weight lifters, archers, shooters, fencers, and many other athletes have finished their competitions and are free to be out and about. 

The World Food Programme launched a video competition a few months ago to raise awareness about hunger, and a jury has selected five out of the 70 submissions received. Now it's your turn to weigh in and help declare a winner for the first HungerBytes contest.

This will be determined by which video gets more views. So check out the finalists and then spread the word around your favorite one across the web by sending it to content-sharing sites like Digg, Facebook, Del.icio.us, and many others --easy to do from the page above. The author/s of the piece that gets more views by World Food Day (October 16, with the deadline set at 5 pm GMT) will be sent with a friend to a WFP project in Africa, Asia, or Latin America to make a video.

In the early 1990s, I was on the Editorial Board of the leading newspaper of record in Lagos, Nigeria until I left for the UK. It was called The Guardian; and  it is still there. I had been in the Nigerian media for a while and to be invited to join the Editorial Board of The Guardian in those days was regarded as an achievement. So I was pretty happy with myself. I later found out, though, that I had been hired more for my writing skills than my wisdom. That humbled me, believe me. And I was not alone in making that discovery. Most of the leader writers were in the same boat; they were mostly idealistic but gifted intellectual types.