In response to a comment on my previous post on this topic, the table below the jump shows how the incidence and burden of crime, security and bribery (as points of comparison) vary by selected firm characteristics. (Differences that are significant at the 5% level are marked with an asterisk.)
Who's the newest aid critic in town? This time it's not another white guy from Oxford (or New York University).
With perfect timing, as Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web predicted in his highly popular TED talk that open data is the web's future, the World Bank last week released its new API. From the developer's blog:
If you really want to stimulate the economy, give out gift cards, or so says Virginia Postrel in the May edition of the Atlantic. And make sure to put a short deadline on it. Otherwise, consumers tend to be "hyperopic" - they put off enjoyment too long and let the card expire. Money quote:
I saw Muhammad Yunus speak a few years ago, and the thing that struck me most in his speech was his insistence on the power of microfinance to help increase the opportunities available to women. That's why the findings from a recent evaluation of microfinance in Sri Lanka in which female enterprises gained little from access to finance were troubling.
A handful of studies that address this question have answered in the affirmative. In theoretical work, Alesina and Zeira (2006) and Blanchard and Philippon (2006) argue that rigid labor laws may encourage firms to substitute labor with computers. One implication is that we should find greater computer usage in countries or regions that have more rigid labor laws (other implications discussed below).
Editor's Note: Oleg Petrov coordinates the e-Development Thematic Group, a knowledge sharing initiative and community of practice hosted by the Global ICT Department of the World Bank Group.
Participants from the length of the agribusiness value chain are gathered at the Bank this week for the World Bank Institute’s new Executive Program on Inclusive Agribusiness: Fighting Poverty, Hunger and Malnutrition. Chris Delgado and John Lamb from the Bank’s Agriculture and Rural Development team set the scene on Tuesday morning by laying out the scale and complexity of the challenge facing the food sector. It was not a pretty picture.
Peter Schiff, the now well-known author of Crash Proof, visited the IFC earlier this week to talk about the future of the dollar as the reserve currency. Schiff has gotten famous by correctly predicting the financial crisis well before we found ourselves in our present predicament.
Trying to find a document through the World Bank search engine (either externally or internally)? Good luck! You might want to pencil in an afternoon...
