The World Bank - Working for a world free of poverty
This blog is maintained by the Growth and Crisis Program of the World Bank Institute. (WBIGC)
We bring you timely news, resources, tools, ideas and commentaries on issues related to the global economic crisis and growth.
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The protests that swept through the Middle East and North Africa over the past six months have shown us what people will do to have their voices heard. Starting with the desperate act of a simple fruit vendor in Tunisia, the unrest in the region has demonstrated that people are willing to fight—and die—for their economic, political, and civil freedom.
South Asia has been one of the world’s success stories in terms of rapid economic growth. With India leading the way, South Asia’s poverty rate has fallen from 60 percent in 1981 to 40 percent in 2005. However, during the same period, the number of poor people—those living on less than $1.25 per day—actually increased from 549 million to 595 million over the same period. What’s more, social indicators such as gender parity, secondary education enrollment, and health have not improved in line with growth.
The last 20 years have seen a growing engagement between development and human rights practitioners. But are we still mainly talking past each other? Or has there been valuable mutual learning with development results on the ground?
Strong opinions abound on the issue of migration both in sending and receiving countries. But beyond the political discourse, labor migration is now central to the debate on international development and poverty reduction. Does the migration of workers have a positive development impact? What the evidence shows is that differences in productivity and wages across the world are so large that worker migration offers huge rewards to those who move into higher-paying locations. The development problem, however, is that migrant working programs in high-income countries tend to benefit skilled workers, while the poor and unskilled are left with virtually no point of entry into international labor markets.
This is the third in a series of blogs where we take a look at the issues and the countries that will be at the forefront of the development agenda, not now, not next year, but over the next 2 to 5 years—thus, “after tomorrow”1.
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The current recovery in advanced economies is now exhibiting several signs of fragility. Their medium term growth prospects also look difficult. In this environment two questions arise: Will developing economies experience a renewed downward “recoupling” as a result of a low-growth scenario in advanced economies? Or, on the contrary, could developing countries “switchover” to become locomotives in the global economy, providing a countervailing force against an otherwise slowing-down train? As discussed in 
The global financial and economic crisis of 2008 has brought an urgency to focus on shorter-term policy issues related to managing bubbles, analyzing current development paradigms, and drawing out policy lessons for future action, particularly lessons learned during the past two years. At the same, longer-term development challenges also must be addressed to avoid the mistakes of 1970s and 1980s when managing stabilization issues dominated economic policy making and development economics was pushed aside for a while. For example, with the exception of East Asian countries and more recently India, why are African, Eastern European and Central Asian, and other South Asian countries unable to sustain high growth rates for more than five to seven years? What are the policy implications of demographic changes and climate change? There is a need for policy discussion on frontier topics such as rethinking globalization in trade, finance, and labor; new economic geography; green growth; and inclusive, balanced, and sustainable growth.
