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world development report

Tracking withdrawals from the ‘Knowledge Bank’

Adam Wagstaff's picture

As I reported in my last post, Jim Kim’s arrival as World Bank President has reinvigorated the debate about the idea of the World Bank being a ‘knowledge bank’. In the post, I argued that the knowledge produced by the Bank – whether gleaned from its lending operations, or from its research and other analytic work – is a global public good, and that we should therefore assess the success of the institution in its knowledge work not in terms of how specific ‘client’ governments value the outputs of its knowledge work but rather in terms of how people around the world use and value them.

Gender Equality and the 2012 World Development Report

Justin Yifu Lin's picture
Photo: istockphoto.com

Equality between men and women matters for development, which is why the 2012 World Development Report  (WDR) will focus on this vital topic. Since the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day is March 8, we thought it an auspicious day to launch the WDR 2012 website.

Gender was chosen as the focus for next year’s WDR in part because gender equality can lead to better development outcomes and because, as Amartya Sen  asserted, development is a process of expanding freedoms equally for all individuals. This view assumes that gender equality is a core goal in and of itself and that people’s welfare shouldn’t be determined by their birthplace or whether or not they were born male or female. 

The 2012 WDR will analyze the wide swath of literature on gender and development and it will highlight the impressive progress in gender indicators on many fronts. However, it will also reveal that in many domains—whether in the realms of power and decision making or maternal health – outcomes for women have improved very slowly or not at all.

Whither the development agency’s flagship report?

Adam Wagstaff's picture

The Economist carried a couple of stories recently about how two hitherto major institutions in my home country (newspapers and pubs) have been forced to adapt in the face of changes in public preferences. Many didn’t—as a result newspaper circulation and pub numbers have both fallen dramatically. The newspapers and pubs that did survive operate very different business models from the newspapers and pubs in existence even 10 years ago.

Some data I’ve assembled make me wonder whether—like the newspaper and pub—the development-agency flagship might not also be an institution in need of reform.

The flagship

Most big development and international agencies have a flagship. The World Bank launched its World Development Report in 1978. The IMF’s World Economic Outlook started two years later. The UNDP launched its Human Development Report in 1990, and WHO followed with its World Health Report five years later. Several other UN agencies have annual or periodic flagship reports too.