September 2008

Etant donné l’appréciation de l’Euro vis-à-vis du dollar, la question de la parité du Franc CFA (qui est fixé à l’Euro) doit être encore soulevée.  L’appréciation est comparable à celle des années 1985-1993 [voir graphique].  Pendant cette période, les économies des pays de la zone CFA ont connu une forte diminution de leur compétitivité, des exportations, et de croissance économique.  Dans la plupart des pays, la pauvreté a augmenté.   Il faut se rappeler que le

When asked about the East Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi reportedly said, “I wish we had their problems.”  I was reminded of this quip when thinking about the current financial crisis in the U.S. and its possible impact on Africa.  In the U.S., there is a constant fear that turmoil in financial markets will spill over to the real sector—in terms of slow growth and unemployment. 

A recent paper by Hamid Davoodi shows that, in Swaziland, the problem is a lack of real-financial sector linkages.  Most financial sector indicators—private sector lending, money supply and bank deposits as a percentage of GDP—are going down, not up.  One reason may be that about 60 percent of land is owned by tribal chiefs and held in public trust.  Since no one has ownership rights, no one can use land as collateral, and so borrowing and lending are limited.

This Friday we finish this section on "Gender and the Labor Market" with a brief summary of what we have seen in previous weeks.  Next Friday we will start "Gender Budgeting". As usual, from Raj Nallari and Breda Griffith's lecture notes.

Conclusion

During the last few weeks we have examined gender inequalities in the labor market. First a number of reasons were considered for why gender inequality exists especially in the labor market.  Issues regarding specialization and segmentation, women’s reproductive role and wage gaps were noted.  We went on to exam the progress being made in the world of work by women by focusing on the indicators of labor market performance – the labor force participation ratio, the unemployment rate, wage rates, and skills. We concluded by examining two measures of labor market performance – employment by sector and the status of employment. Data disaggregated by gender on the latter indicator has only recently been made publicly available.  

Twenty-two project winners collected their crystal awards and grant checks in the 2008 Global Development Marketplace: Sustainable Agriculture for Development competition this morning.

Subhas Managuli made it to the finalists' circle, buthis Best Practices Foundation proposal to improve livestock health for 2,000 small farmers in 20 villages in India didn't make the final cut that produced the 22 winners who were announced Friday morning.

"The idea is good, and I'll try to pitch it to other agencies," Managuli said as the closing ceremony wound up in the Atrium.  "I'm not going to give up. Absolutely."

I was in Vienna last week to attend an impressive event called the Public-Private Partnership on Remittances, organized by my colleagues Massimo Cirasino and Peer Stein. Amid the technocratic, technical, and tactical treatise on payment systems, a high point for me was the launch of Remittance Prices Worldwide, a new World Bank remittance price database.

For the first time there is one database, painstakingly gathered and meticulously organized with the lay user in mind, dedicated to the cost of sending remittances in over 120 important remittance corridors. Transparency is expected to help educate consumers and generate competition among remittance service providers. Indeed a few stats are eye openers: it costs less than $8 to send $200 from Spain to Brazil (less than 4%). By contrast, sending the same amount from Germany to China can cost nearly $50 (or 25%)!

Leaders have been talking about reducing remittance costs since 2004, if not earlier. Yet, until now, there were no real indicators of how costs are falling. Mexico began putting out remittance cost data from about 13 US cities to several Mexican cities, and we saw a 56% decline in remittance costs between 1999 and 2004. The hope is that the new database will have a similar cost reduction effect. That would reduce the drain on poor migrants' incomes and increase their ability to send more help home.

Three DM2008 jurors who are past grant winners are sharing their well-learned lessons with the hundred finalists.

Take 2006 winner Florence Cassassuce (in photo at right), who brought her water-purifying UV-light bucket to 900 villagers on the rural outskirts of La Paz in Baja California, Mexcio. Cassassuce, implementing her project with the advice of World Bank Senior Environmental Specialist Ricardo Hernandez Murillo, installed 3,500 buckets toward the goal of 6,00, ahead of schedule. But the original buckets didn't always work well, especially in the field, and improvements had to be made with better, and faster, plastic-injection manufacturing.

As the recently named Director of the Agriculture and Rural Development Department -- one of DM2008's funders --Juergen Voegele is leading a vigorous effort to re-energize and broaden the World Bank's commitment to agricultural development. During his peripatetic rounds of the competition, Voegele sat down for this mini-interview:

Q. What are your impressions of what you see on the floor of the exhibition?

A $199,050 project that would produce sustainable charcoal from bamboo and benefit 250 women entrepreneurs in Mozambique is the winner of the Peer Choice Award by the 100 DM2008 finalists.

Oscar Chemerinski, Director of the Agribusiness Department at the International Finance Corp. -- the commercial development arm of the World Bank Group -- gave this mini-interview at DM2008:

Q. What's your reaction to what you see on the floor among the booths of the hundred finalists?