April 2007

In a speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Barack Obama pledged to double US aid by 2012, if elected President.

For the last twenty years, U.S. foreign aid funding has done little more than keep pace with inflation.  Doubling our foreign assistance spending by 2012 will help meet the challenge laid out by Tony Blair at the 2005 G-8 conference at Gleneagles, and it will help push the rest of the developed world to invest in security and opportunity.  As we have seen recently with large increases in funding for our AIDS programs, we have the capacity to make sure this funding makes a real difference.

John Edwards also made his Global Poverty Proposal recently.

Hillary?

(Via Owen, Steve Radelet also writes about it at the CGD)

We have blogged about migrant remittances in the past, from an economic point of view.

The New York Times magazine (for members) includes this week an excellent article on remittances that looks at the personal stories behind migration and at its costs and benefits. Jason DeParle's article focuses on the Philippines, a country with 10 percent of its population living abroad and where remittances make up 14 percent of its GDP.

With about one Filipino worker in seven abroad at any given time, migration is to the Philippines what cars once were to Detroit: its civil religion. A million Overseas Filipino Workers — O.F.W.’s — left last year, enough to fill six 747s a day. Nearly half the country’s 10-to-12-year-olds say they have thought about whether to go. Television novellas plumb the migrants’ loneliness. Politicians court their votes. Real estate salesmen bury them in condominium brochures. Drive by the Central Bank during the holiday season, and you will find a high-rise graph of the year’s remittances strung up in Christmas lights.

 

Across the archipelago, stories of rags to riches compete with stories of rags to rags. New malls define the landscape; so do left-behind kids. Gain and loss are so thoroughly joined that the logo of the migrant welfare agency shows the sun doing battle with the rain. Local idiom stresses the uncertainty of the migrant’s lot. An O.F.W. does not say he is off to make his fortune. He says, “I am going to try my luck.

World Development Indicators (WDI) 2007 is out.

WDI is the World Bank's premier annual compilation of data about development. The 2007 WDI includes more than 900 indicators in over 80 tables organized in 6 sections: World View, People, Environment, Economy, States and Markets, and Global Links. 

According to the data, 1 billion people, or 18.4 percent of the population, lived under extreme poverty (less than $1 a day) in 2004. Nothing to celebrate about that figure, except the fact that it has been decreasing, from 1.25 billion in 1990. The rate of people living on $2 a day has been falling too, but 2.6 billion people (almost half of the population in the developing world) were still living below that level in 2004.

Developing countries have averaged a 3.9 percent annual growth in GDP per capita a year since 2000, which contributed to rapidly falling poverty rates in all developing regions over the past few years. Another key factor in the reduction of worldwide poverty rates has been China's massive poverty reduction between 1990 and 2004. 

The report finds that, in the past decade, poverty reduction was not always or everywhere commensurate with income growth. In some countries and regions, inequality worsened, as poor people did not reap the fruits of economic expansion, because of a lack of job opportunities, limited education or bad health.

Read the full press release

Access the WDI 2007 website

The International Monetary Fund's latest World Economic Outlook is out.

The World Economic Outlook (WEO) presents the IMF staff's analysis and projections of economic developments at the global level, in major country groups (classified by region, stage of development, etc.), and in many individual countries. It focuses on major economic policy issues as well as on the analysis of economic developments and prospects.

The ECA and the African Development Bank are organizing the 2007 African Economic Conference on the theme “Opportunities and Challenges of Development for Africa in the Global Arena”, which will take place in Addis Ababa on 15-17 November. The program committee invites submission of abstracts (or papers) by interested participants on any economic issues of relevance to African economies.

Deadline to submit abstracts is April 30.

Full announcement and contact information.

According to UNECA's latest edition of the Economic Report on Africa (ERA 2007), African economies are forecast to grow by an average of 5.8% in 2007.

From the press release:

The report, titled “Accelerating Africa's Development through Diversification,” notes that African economies continued to sustain the growth momentum of previous years, recording an overall real GDP growth rate of 5.7% in 2006. 28 countries recorded higher economic growth rates in 2006 than 2005.

 

According to the report, Africa's recent growth performance was underpinned by improvements in macroeconomic management in many countries as well as strong global demand for key African export commodities, resulting in high export prices, especially for crude oil, metals and minerals.

 

Factors that are likely to hinder growth in the future include lack of diversification of production and exports as well as instability and vulnerability to shocks, and the increasing spread of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which undermines labour supply and labour productivity. In addition, inefficient public infrastructure and unreliable energy supply at the national level as well as poor integration of transportation and energy networks at the regional level will continue to undermine the productivity and international competitiveness of African economies.

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