middle east

BBC: Social Minded Business trying to Grow in Egypt

Find out more about the social enterprise movement in Egypt. This timely piece from BBC that features some exciting social enterprises ranging from roof-top gardening to paper made from recycled agriculture waste.

Development Marketplace partners, Iman Bibars from Ashoka and Magdi Amin from the International Finance Corporation (a co-sponsor of the upcoming Egypt DM) highlight important barriers blocking the movement's growth and hindering its ability to keep pace with demand for improved goods and services to the poor.

Social minded business trying to grow in Egypt

Media (R)evolutions: 43 Million Arab Users on Facebook

New developments and curiosities from a changing global media landscape: People, Spaces, Deliberation brings trends and events to your attention that illustrate that tomorrow's media environment will look very different from today's, and will have little resemblance to yesterday's.

Food Prices Are Soaring: 5 Questions for Economist José Cuesta

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Photo Credit: Arne Hoel/World Bank

The numbers are jarring: Global prices for key food staples such as corn and soybean were at an all-time high in July 2012, with corn rising 25 percent and soybeans 17 percent in a single month.

Globally, food prices jumped 7 percent between April and July. In some countries, people now pay more than twice as much for sorghum [1] as they did a year earlier, the latest issue of the World Bank’s Food Price Watch shows.

This is expected to hit certain regions with high food imports, such as the Middle East and much of Africa, especially hard.

We’re looking at a significant price shock, but does that mean we’re headed for a food crisis similar to the one we experienced in 2008? World Bank economist José Cuesta, the author of the quarterly Food Price Watch report, gives his perspective on the situation.

Remittances after the Crisis: 5 Questions for Economist Dilip Ratha

More Effective Aid: Don’t Just Develop Capacity – Unleash It

The authors of this post, Tom Grubisich and Jennifer Lentfer, will be co-moderating the session “Winds of Change: Will They Bring a New Paradigm to Development Assistance?” at the Civil Society Forum of the World Bank/International Monetary Fund Spring Meetings. Here is the full schedule of sessions with the Civil Society Forum. The session will be held on Friday, April 15, at 2 p.m. in the C1 Level of the Main Complex of the World Bank (room 100). A livestream of the roundtable will be available and you can also follow the discussion that day on Twitter via #windsofchange.

The Arab awakening in North Africa and the Middle East is shaking up what has been a slow-moving effort to reform the effectiveness of development aid. The awakening and aid reform share common goals – affirming human rights, social justice and transparency. As events in the Middle East continue to fundamentally reshape society, we must ask: How can development assistance also be reshaped to put more power in the hands of the people?

The Arab Spring, History, and Political Economy

People in Maghreb and Mashreq countries, long used to being muzzled by their authoritarian regimes, are rising up to make their voices heard. This movement — if one can call it that — started first in Tunisia with the self-immolation of an unemployed street vendor. This desperate act by Mohamed Bouazizi, a poor 26 year-old university graduate without a steady job to support his family, brought out into the open the seething resentment of ordinary Tunisians at the 23 year rule of President Ben Ali.

Can the Diaspora contribute to the creation of jobs in the Middle East and North Africa?

Recent attention has shifted from analyzing the impact of skilled migration on sending country labor markets to a broader agenda that also considers the channels by which diasporas promotes trade, investment, innovation and technological acquisition. Several developed and developing countries are increasing their ties with their Diasporas to take advantage of these transfers beyond remittances. It will be important to assess what could be the potential of strengthening the linkages with their Diasporas for countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Can these countries tap into their Diasporas as a source and facilitator of innovation, research, technology transfer, trade, investment and skills development?

Nolland and Pack (2007) have analyzed whether Arab-communities in North America and Europe can play a similar role as countries in Asia (China, India, South Korea and Taiwan, China) in revitalizing the Middle East. The authors also indicated that “given the limited extent of manufacturing activity in the Middle East and the lack of equivalents to the Indian Institutes of Technology, it would make difficult to benefit from this option.”

How Risky, Really, Is the Arab World for Investors?

Recent events surrounding the Dubai World debt standstill raise broader questions about the political risks of investing in the Arab World. The good news is that growth and FDI have risen markedly in recent years; yet, risks undoubtedly remain. I researched the issue in depth for a new Perspectives from the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) that highlights the diversity of risks within the Arab World.

The Arab World, like other developing regions, provides both potential risks and rewards for international investors. The most important message from the Perspectives piece, though, is that risks vary significantly by country, by sector, and by project. As a result, it’s crucial not to take a one-size-fits-all approach to investing in the region.

Case in point: The Arab World is perceived as being prone to war and civil disturbance. Yet available data from the Berne Union shows no claims for war and civil disturbance in Arab countries. Here we see a considerable gap between perceptions and reality.

New evidence reaffirms that migration is costly but still worthwhile for Bangladeshis

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) presented their Final Report on The Bangladesh Household Remittance Survey 2009 in a workshop held in Dhaka on May 12, 2010. This survey collected data from a nationally representative sample of 10,926 migrant households. The findings of the survey confirm most of what we know about migration and remittance based on smaller surveys and anecdotal evidence. In particular, the findings are in line with the ones from the World Bank Survey (2007), which was smaller in scope.

I summarize below what appears to me as some emerging stylized facts about the profile of Bangladeshi migrants and their remittance behavior.

Migrants tend to be young (32 years old on average) married males who have at least completed primary education (over 75 percent). They go to the Middle-East (nearly 73 percent) and Asia (22) with the help of relatives (55 percent) and intermediaries (45 percent) after obtaining a low skilled or semi skilled job contract (79 percent) for which they had to wait for about 6 months.

MENA: Economists finding some good news

In Istanbul, World Bank economists taking a hard look at how the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are weathering the financial crisis are finding some good news. The World Bank and the IMF are holding their annual meetings in Turkey, and a status update on the MENA region shows some resilience.

Shamshad Akhtar, the World Bank’s new vice president for the region, said at a press conference today that MENA’s economy grew by almost 6.2 percent in 2008. But Akhtar says the region has been shaken by what she calls the “Triple-F phenomena”—food, fuel and the financial crisis. She says the food crisis has hit the region hardest, in part because of a growing population and a heavy dependence on imported food. But, she says, despite slowing growth, down to 2.2 percent, the region is faring better than many others.

Akhtar told reporters: “The key message we retain from all this is: the MENA region has weathered the triple crisis well so far.” But there is an “immediate danger of rising unemployment and resurgence of poverty.”

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