April 2009

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.

I recently revisited the Social Science Research Council's (SSRC) Web Anthology on Remittances and Development, and was pleasantly surprised to find an excellent collection of research articles on this rather fast-growing topic. The articles are presented in a convenient format, organized under some broad themes such as concepts, methods, measures, determinants, uses, and impacts of remittances.

One area where more articles exist and can be added are those on remittance systems (by this I mean retail payment systems) and how they can be leveraged for accessing finance/capital at the household or institutional level. There could also be more articles on regulations - especially on anti-money-laundering/countering financing of terrorism - that affect remittance transactions.

The seminar mentioned here went off very well. You can watch the video here. The main messages were:

(i) Economic policy should strive for flexibility, as the future is uncertain. Emmanuel Tumusiime-Mutabile said this was why he had allowed the Ugandan shilling to depreciate, although the deputy governor of the central bank of Sudan questioned whether an exchange rate depreciation would lead to inflation, and there was an interesting exchange on whether the alternative, holding the exchange rate fixed during a difficult period, wouldn’t be even worse.

(ii) Ishac Diwan suggested that we should design policy to take advantage of the downturn (for instance, the agriculture and manufacturing sectors, which are normally lagging in primary-exporting countries, could receive a boost now); while Ali Mansoor said we should prepare for the rebound in the global economy by, for example, improving infrastructure to be able to export more primary commodities when prices are high. Given that the world is likely to face even more volatility in the future, this two-part advice is sound.

(iii) Consolate Rusagara and Lamine Zeine both made a strong case for continuing to work on the basics during the crisis—improved financial regulation, including bank supervision and human development.

A while ago we wrote about the World Bank's Geo, a very useful Google map to browse WB's projects, news, statistics and public information centers by country.

The online directory AiDA (Accessible Information on Development Activities), has now put together a similar Google map with information about development activities. By clicking on a country we can see a summary of the development activities taking place there, classified according to Sector, Agency and Donor. 

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.

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!

There is a global debate going on concerning why the global financial crisis erupted. The technical debate is what it is; so far there is far more heat than light. But in addition to the technical debate is a debate about how certain underlying assumptions about human nature entertained by economists and even famous central bankers have turned out to be incorrect. It turns out that human beings - as consumers, investors, bankers, stock traders - have not behaved in precisely the ways "rigorous" economic theories predicted that they would. Even Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, showed his surprise at human nature at a congressional hearing late last year: "I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms."

At a recent press conference, three African finance chiefs chastised international credit rating agencies for failing to forecast the global financial crisis and challenged international financial institutions to do a better job of monitoring the global economy and of holding rich and developing countries accountable in the same way.

The Ministers from Zambia, Cote d’Ivoire and Tanzania spoke about the crisis and its effect on Africa. Mustafa Mkulo, Tanzania’s Minister for Finance and Economic Affairs, said:

"This crisis has come when African governments have taken broad based measures to reform their economies, followed by significant achievements. It is now threatening to wipe out our gains of the past ten years and disrupt all our plans for further progress."

More information:

• Press Release: African Ministers Outline Impact of Crisis on their Countries
• Website: The Financial Crisis in Africa
• Blog: Africa Can End Poverty

The Spring Meetings 2009 finished earlier today with the final Development Committee press conference, held by Development Committee Chair, Minister Agustín Carstens, World Bank President Robert Zoellick, and IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Speaking on behalf of the Development Committee, Carstens in his opening remarks stressed that "All members of the Development Committee recognized that this is the critical time for developing countries. Impacts from the financial crisis are hitting them hard...The financial crisis is turning into a human and development calamity. Many people have already been driven into absolute poverty."

"In this sense, the Development Committee called on countries to translate their commitments into concerted action and additional resources.  We welcome member countries' commitments to a substantial increase in resources for the IMF and we urged all donors to accelerate delivery of commitments to increase aid, and to also consider going beyond existing commitments. We welcome the leadership of the Bank Group and IMF in helping developing countries respond to the crisis,” he said.

• See Development Committee Communique for more info.

In his remarks, Zoellick stressed that “there is a widespread recognition that the world faces an unprecedented economic crisis, poor people could suffer the most, and that we must continue to act in real time to prevent a human catastrophe.”    

“Before this crisis, the Millennium Development Goals on overcoming poverty by 2015 already looked like a stretch. Our latest research shows that most of these eight globally agreed goals are unlikely to be met.”
 
“No one knows how long this crisis will last. We also do not know the pace of the recovery. The Bank’s finances have been prudently run and we are therefore currently in a strong position to help our partner countries,” Zoellick said.

• See the Bank’s Financial Crisis webpage to learn more about the Bank’s initiatives to help poor countries deal with the crisis.

Three African ministers shared their experience with Bank officials on Thursday when they met to discuss ways to develop capacity in post-conflict countries.

 “We are here to listen—tell us how we can better assist you. And please, be frank,” said Obiageli Ezekwesili, World Bank Africa Region Vice President.

Ezekwesili asked the ministers from Liberia, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to discuss capacity development efforts in their countries, and to identify what has and has not worked, and how donors can provide more effective support for human development, infrastructure, and public sector reforms.

Several common themes emerged from the ministers’ interventions, including:

• Donors prioritizing support for primary and secondary education, and not higher education
• Donors pressing a “one size fits all” approach on countries, trying to replicate programs that were successful elsewhere
• The failure by expatriate advisors in civil service posts to transfer their knowledge and skills to local counterparts
• Tension among returning members of the Diaspora and local populations that stayed behind, partly around incentive structures for civil service
• An urgent need to deliver skills-training and create job opportunities for young ex-combatants
   

Augustine Ngafaun, Minister of Finance for Liberia, outlined the enormity of the challenges facing his country, which has “75 percent of the educational facilities destroyed” combined with a “massive brain drain” as a result of professionals fleeing during Liberia’s recent conflict.

“We have very few doctors, teachers and hardly any engineers,” said Ngafaun, Liberia's Minister of Finance.

He also noted that, despite the importance of the mining sector for Liberia’s growth, there are not even five geologists in the entire country.

Rwanda’s Finance Minister James Musoni noted that even though the reconstruction challenges were daunting, his country has made significant progress since the 1994 genocide. He said it is crucial for the donor community to understand the context in which each country operates, as in some cases the political leadership may not be ready.

Ezekwesili stressed the need to build confidence in all sectors, pointing out that “development solutions work only to the extent that the capacities of the nation-state, the private sector, and civil society are strong.”

“The lack of capacity is magnified by the stress of the post conflict environment,” Ezekwesili said. 

Story: Improving Capacity Building in Post-conflict and Fragile Settings—African Ministers Share their Experience