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Building Capacity through Rethinking Development

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This blog is maintained by the Growth and Crisis (GC ) Program of the World Bank Institute.

We bring you timely news, resources, tools, ideas and commentaries on issues related to the global economic crisis and growth.

Poverty Reduction

Brazil Fights Hunger & Illiteracy

Submitted by Ihssane on Fri, 11/13/2009 - 18:57

(Thanks and credits for sharing this information go to the Brazilian Secretariat of Social Communication - SECOM)

 

Social development and progress continue to stay strong in Brazil:

 

With one of the world’s largest populations, Brazil’s government has invested heavily in programs to eliminate poverty and hunger and improve access to services and opportunities in low-income communities. These efforts and their success to date earned Brazil’s President Lula UNESCO’s prestigious Félix Houphouët-Boigny Peace Prize in July, and Brazil’s Minister of Social Development the World Future Council’s Future Policy Award just a few weeks ago.

 

Detailed information can be found below.

Grab Your (Online, Pre-Press) Version of the World Development Report 2010 Now

Submitted by Ihssane on Mon, 09/21/2009 - 16:31


An advance version of the World Development Report 2010: Development and Climate is now available online. With a focus on climate change and its negative impacts on vulnerable populations, this year's Report also covers innovation and technology diffusion, land and water management, and other important factors for accelerating development.

This version is not final and may be subject to further changes. The final WDR 2010 will be out in October.

Decoupling, Reverse Coupling and All That Jazz

Submitted by Otaviano on Tue, 09/01/2009 - 10:17

(By Otaviano Canuto)

In PREM Note 141 released last week, Milan Brahmbhatt and Luiz Pereira da Silva point to several structural differences between the global economy today and in the 1930s that tend to differentiate the current crisis from the Great Depression. The larger weight of faster-growing developing countries in the current world economy is among those differences, one that bodes well for recovery prospects.[1]

As can be seen in Chart 1, there has long been a close correlation between economic cycles in developed and developing economies. More recently, since the early 2000s, this has been combined with systematically higher growth rates in developing relative to developed economies. As the authors remark, “there has been no decoupling in the cyclical component of developing country growth”, while “there has arguably been a decoupling in underlying trend rates of growth” (p.2). A similar pattern remains even if China and India are taken out of the picture.

Chart 1

              Source: PREM Note 141(p.3)