April 2009

Thomas Schelling, one of the fathers of game theory, would be proud. There are now websites that allow people to place bets with themselves over whether they will achieve certain weight loss goals:

Kate Borden, 32, from Lancashire, signed up to one of the diet-betting sites, stickK.com, last November. She wanted to lose a stone in six months. “I just find it tough to motivate myself,” she says. “The only other time I had lost weight was when I had a bet with friends one New Year's Eve. The thought that it was almost a competition with myself and that someone else was the judge did it for me.”

Schelling recognized that people have multiple competing interests - the trick is figuring out how to lock in the choices of your "better self." Betting with yourself might just do the trick. The question is, can we think of any better uses than helping someone get to the gym?

A reader's comment to the blog post What a Difference an 'S' makes:

I echo John Gastil's delight with this article.  As someone who is passionate about the impact that communication and strategic communications can have on advancing development and someone who spends a lot of time "educating" and "persuading" development experts to include communication(s) in their program planning, I found this very useful, indeed.  I loudly echo your last paragraph and the last line in your next-to-last paragraph.  Paolo, thank you for this thought piece.  I hope others will comment.

Wende DuFlon

Columbia University’s Earth Institute has created a site grouping four different blogs from its researchers and staff: State of the Planet, Climate and Energy, Water, and Millennium Villages.

Its Director, Jeffrey Sachs, is blogging there occasionally among many others. Worth visiting.

Some studies such as Carter and Shaw (2006) show that the share of women among the self-employed is disproportionately small, that they run smaller businesses, that they are less likely to rely on venture capital and that their firms have lower debt-equity ratios. These differences in financing patterns could be due to two sorts of factors. First, bankers’ decisions about loan applications may differ across men and women whose businesses are similar in terms of solvency and creditworthiness (supply-side discrimination, associated with the work of economist Gary Becker). Second, male and female entrepreneurs may differ in terms of risk attitude, education, personal wealth, experience, etc., known as statistical discrimination. The challenge is to find out which of these (or both) factors hold.

A recent study by Muravyev et al. (forthcoming) attempts to do precisely this. The study is based on firm level data from the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS, 2005), conducted in Europe and Central Asia by the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys and EBRD.

Close to 30 government officials from seven Asian countries* recently participated in CommGAP’s workshop on communication and governance reform.  Entitled People, Politics, and Change, the workshop was held in Manila, Philippines from April 20 to 23.  The participant pool included a few high level officials, both cabinet ministers and national parliamentarians.  Also in the group were governance specialists from the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID), and the World Bank’s newly established regional governance hub in Bangkok.  Observers included representatives from the Asian Institute of Management and the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication. 

I wanted to follow up on Mohammad Amin’s excellent post on the enforcement of laws. One of the papers mentioned in the post is Safavian and Sharma (2007), which finds that laws protecting the rights of creditors are more effective when they can be enforced by efficient courts.

What does it mean to be an inefficient court? Kaplan and Sadka (2008) study this question using data gathered from a labor court in Mexico. In particular, they study cases in which a judge has decided that a worker is entitled to compensation from the firm, typically because the worker was fired without cause.

I came across a small, but interesting online effort to raise donations for an organization that works to improve child literacy in Laos. Called Library for Laos, the effort aims to raise $5,000 by May 1– just five days after it started. The money raised is intended to go to Big Brother Mouse, a neat, Laos-based project that publishes, teaches and distributes books to children in a country they say desperately needs it.

It's a nice concept for a good cause, but what sticks out to me are the coordinators' clear attempts to use social media to spread the word about their effort. On their website, they bank on the ease of PayPal for donating money and the viral nature of social media: "How many people follow you on Twitter? How many friends do you have on Facebook? Let's see how valuable they are!" It's early to tell if they're succeeding. After the first day, they had apparently raised $500 dollars.

Either way, the endeavor highlights how social sites like Facebook, which permeates everyday life for many of us, can serve the world's poor. For example, you have the option to join various "causes" on Facebook. And on Twitter, information can spread like wildfire through retweets (rebroadcasting content to your own set of followers). What do you think? Would you ask your online friends and/or followers to donate money to a good cause?

(Found via: Escape the Cube). Image credit: rustystewart at Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Bogd Khan Uul Strictly Protected Area (SPA) (41,651 ha) is located on the edge of Mongolia's capital city, Ulaanbaatar, and dominates the views to the south. It is the oldest continuously protected area in Mongolia and possibly the world, being first established in 1778. Its establishment preceded by almost 100 years that of Yellowstone National Park in the United States. There is evidence the area held informal protective status as early as the 12th century. Bogd Khan Uul holds significant historical and cultural importance (pdf) for the people of Mongolia. In 1995, Bogd Khan Uul was formally designated a 'Strictly Protected Area' in accordance with current Mongolian law. Bogd Khan Uul was further recognized for its ecological importance when it was awarded UNESCO Biosphere Reserve status in 1997.

So, if one were going to undertake a conservation project focusing on forests in the central part of Mongolia, one would reckon on including it, right? Wrong.

Interaction between trade and climate change regimes has received much attention lately. While I can think of a number of “climate-positive” reasons for exploring synergies between the two regimes and for aligning policies that could stimulate production, trade, and investment in cleaner technology options, much of focus instead has been on using trade measures as weapons in the global climate negotiations.  This stems mainly from competitiveness concerns in countries that are now racing to reduce GHG emissions to meet Kyoto 2012 targets and beyond and in the US primarily to allay domestic fears of a tightening climate regime. These concerns have led to proposals for tariff or border tax adjustments to offset any adverse impact of capping CO2 emissions. This also has roots in the fear of leakage of carbon-intensive industries such as steel and chemicals to non-implementing countries.

China could very possibly be setting a record this year with the largest number of unemployed recent college graduates in the history of the world. A recent article in International Higher Education reports that in 2009 "close to 2 million graduates may not find jobs." The article goes on: "in a job fair held by Donghua University, more than 30,000 graduates competed for 1,700 positions provided by foreign firms." In 1999 the Chinese government embarked on an ambitious expansion of its higher education system - just in time for a huge number of students to graduate into the current depressed job market.

The 2009 Spring Meetings have now come to a close. We hope that you enjoyed getting a quick look at some of the events and announcements coming out of this year's Meetings, and that this blog was a useful way to get quick snippets of information and insight from this past weekend's proceedings.

This blog will stay live in its current state (as will the Spanish version) until the next round of World Bank meetings, most probably the Annual Meetings taking place this fall. Until then, feel free to go through the archives, or click through the daily highlights (in the sidebar to your right) to get targeted information about some of the big events and announcements that took place.

I also encourage you to visit our Videos section on the blog, where you'll be able to find all the short interviews we did with some of the people attending the Spring Meetings, asking them about the Bank's role in the current financial crisis. Feel free to embed those videos on your own sites if you find them interesting — and if you can, let us know when you do!

I'll sign off now, but if you have any questions or feedback about the blog and why we decided to pilot it for this set of Meetings, feel free to use the contact form or leave us a comment. Thanks!