March 2009

The closing date for submission of proposals for the SAR Development Marketplace on Nutrition has been EXTENDED UNTIL APRIL 14, 2009!
 
Note that proposals must be submitted online. For more information about the competition, visit the SAR DM on the web at http://www.worldbank.org/nutritiondm2009.

Mr. Robert Zoellick, The World Bank President, is delivering a Reuters NewsMaker speech tommorrow, Tuesday at 10 a.m. in London. The event will be streamed live from the World Bank's homepage, where also a transcript will also be posted.

As part of the event, Mr. Zoellick will take questions from online readers. To participate, you can submit a question on Reuters' website.

On the trip back to the base of PT Weda Bay Nickel after our two days in the Aketajawe-Lolobata National Park, we flew over the operating nickel mine at Tanjung Buli owned by publicly listed PT Aneka Tambang, but which has been operated since the opening in 2001 by a subcontractor.

What we saw seemed to be oil discharges just offshore, notable soil erosion in the coastal zone below the mine site, streams of mud coursing down the slopes, all with no apparent mitigation structures in place (see below for a short video). Such high levels of runoff have apparently been noticed before (see version translated to English by Google). When we were back in the North Maluku provincial capital of Ternate, we met with the Head of the Provincial Environment Impact Assessment Agency (BAPEDALDA) and showed him this short film. He and his staff were very concerned and explained that they had more than 100 mines in the province to attend to and felt that having this film available on the internet might make their work easier.

How much additional foreign aid will it take to prevent the global financial crisis from becoming an economic, social, political and human crisis in Africa?

As my co-authors and I tried to point out in an earlier study of the additional aid needed to reach the Millennium Development Goals, this is not the most important question. Much more important are: (i) what developing country governments can do, and (ii) how the additional resources will be spent. Nevertheless, as world leaders gather for the G-20 summit outside London, the magnitude of additional resources to the world’s poorest continent will be discussed.

From Raj Nallari and Indira Iyer's lecture notes.

Urbanization and Poverty

Currently an estimated one third of all urban residents are poor, which represents one quarter of the world’s total poor. Many of these are in small cities and towns where the incidence of poverty tends to be higher than in big cities. With continued urbanization, however, the numbers of the urban poor are predicted to rise and poverty will increasingly be more an urban phenomenon.

The incidence of urban poverty, or the share of poor as a proportion of the urban population, is highest for South Asia (35 percent) and Sub Saharan Africa (40 percent) as shown in the table below. Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and ECA have the greatest proportion of urban poor relative to the total poor, as a result of the high urbanization rates in these regions. The urban poor account for 66 percent and 50 percent of the total poor in these two regions. Overall, MENA has the lowest incidence and share of urban poverty. Urban poverty incidence is notably lower in East Asia and the Pacific (EAP), Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA) and Middle East and North Africa (MENA) than the other regions reflecting initial conditions.

Urban Poverty Estimates 2002

(using $1.08/day and $2.15/day poverty lines in 1993 PPP values)

Source: Ravallion, Chen and Sangraula. 2007.

Note: The headcount index represents the proportion of the urban population below the poverty line. The urban share of the poor represents the proportion of the urban poor of the total poor.

Early next week, days before the G-20 summit, head over to the World Bank homepage for the live video stream of a speech by the Bank's president, Robert Zoellick, to be broadcast on Tuesday at 10 a.m. in London (5 a.m. in Washington, D.C.). If you can't make it for the speech, it will be posted to worldbank.org.

During the Reuters-hosted event, Zoellick will answer questions submitted by readers. You can participate by submitting your questions for Zoellick directly through the comments section of Reuters' The Great Debate blog or by using the #askwb tag on Twitter. It looks like there is already plenty of interest – with more than 130 comments posted as I write.

The global 2009 Development Marketplace competition is now open! This year the DM aims to find and support innovative approaches and technologies that help us to prepare for and respond to the immediate and potential impacts of climate change. We have already begun accepting applications. For more details visit our website at www.developmentmarketplace.org. The submission period closes May 18, 2009.

This is a great opportunity to find support for your idea in Climate Adaptation. For the first time, we have also opened a special window for Indigenous Peoples – to promote Indigenous Peoples communities’ and organizations’ development of innovative ways to conserve agriculture, land, water and soil management practices. Apply now and spread the word!

With the buzz from this year's influential TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference (9-13 February) now starting to fade, I thought it might be interesting to re-visit some of the highlights from past conferences on topics related to ICT and education.  While presentations at the conference cover a wide variety of topics, some 'TEDtalks' provide quite illuminating, and sometimes quite provocative, glimpses and insights into how technology *might* be used in various innovative ways to enhance education in the future.  I am regularly amazed at the number of times that people in ministries of education all around the world ask me about something they first learned about through TED. While we were, yet again, not in attendance this year, the conference organizers have done the wonderful (and laudable!) job of making available the 'TEDtalks' through the TED web site for free.

“Effectiveness in aid is also effectiveness in governance”, said Mark Nelson, senior operations officer at the World Bank Institute (WBI) during a recent panel discussion on the progress-to-date of the Accra Agenda for Action (AAA).  The AAA reflects an international multisectoral agreement on how the delivery of development assistance might be improved “so that it can make the greatest difference in the lives of poor people around the world.” 

Transmission of crisis from home mortgages to US credit freeze and global oil-price hike

By early-2007, it became clear as housing prices began to decline, losses on sub-primate mortgages originated in 2003-2006 were rising more rapidly than the assumptions used and risk-model predictions.  The deterioration in borrowing quality and other shortcomings mentioned yesterday gave little comfort to investors.  The losses were hard to estimate, especially in an environment of house-price busts, and given that the sub-prime MBS had been re-packaged into complex CDOs and CDO-conduits were financed by commercial paper and various notes.

The bursting of the housing bubbles in the United States (as reflected in a surge in defaults and foreclosures since mid-2006 in US, resulted in a plunge in the prices of mortgage-backed securities — assets whose value ultimately comes from mortgage payments.  These financial losses have left many financial institutions with too little capital — too few assets compared with their debt (US financial firms lost over $1 trillion by Dec 2008). This problem is especially severe because households, corporations, and government took on so much debt during the bubble years (that debt cumulated to over 400% of US GDP in U.S. and about 450% of UK GDP).

Because financial institutions have too little capital relative to their debt, they haven’t been able or willing to provide the credit the economy needs. (US and European banks have been raising capital of about $400 billion from oil-producing countries and China but there is still a large gap as banks continue to write-down bad loans).

When I think about the biggest frustrations that typically come with living in, or simply visiting, a big city, bad traffic probably tops my list. For me, few things are more maddening than being stuck in a slowly moving (or worse, stand-still) line of cars. This is why it's not too surprising that bicycle-sharing programs have become quite popular here in Washington, D.C., and in several North American and European cities.

Now in Asia, these programs, which provide people with free or affordable access to bikes, are apparently starting to take off in popularity. The Springwise entrepreneurial blog points us to ambitious new bike-sharing organizations in the Taiwanese cities of Taipei and Kaohsiung City, as well as similar programs in Changwon, Korea and Hangzhou, China.

Cities and communities love and often support bike-sharing programs because they help reduce traffic congestion, noise and pollution. And the rentals are usually cheap, giving another option for transportation to more people. I suppose bicycle congestion still has a potential of being an annoyance, but at least they don't smell of exhaust and can't honk at you.

Image credit: mywayaround at Flickr under a Creative Commons license.