How are emerging market entrepreneurs leveraging technology and changing development paradigms? Why are the rewards of funding innovative new ventures in emerging economies worth the risks, and what makes these investments succeed? How can investors, policy makers, and the private sector in general help find and groom transformative high-growth enterprises?
Governments and private sector actions can drive down remittance prices for migrants (Credit: DFID-UK, Flickr Creative Commons)
An estimated 215 million people – 3 percent of the world’s population – have emigrated far from home in order to earn enough to support their families. They include workers from Bangladesh who go to Saudi Arabia to work in the construction trade, Afghans who go to Iran to work in the oilfields, and workers from Burkina Faso who go to Cote d’Ivoire to work on the cocoa or coffee harvests.
Toiling far from their loved ones is not their only burden. When migrants send their money home, they are often charged exorbitant fees, which can account for a large portion of the small sums being sent - sometimes upwards of 20 percent – and can inflict a punishing burden on poor migrants.
Liberia's new AML/CFT law is a step towards good governance in a country looking to the future (Credit: Kenneth Harper, Flickr Creative Commons)
On May 2nd, the President of Liberia signed into law a long anticipated bill to counter money laundering and terrorism financing (AML/CFT). The new Act, which included amendments to various other laws, will provide more effective legislative tools with which to fight corruption, money laundering and other financial crimes. The new Act will provide the legal basis to establish a Financial Intelligence Unit as the central coordinating agency in these efforts, provide better tools for authorities to seize and freeze the proceeds of crime, and improve cooperation in information- sharing and investigations. It will also require financial institutions and other entities often used to launder proceeds of crime, to identify and report suspicious transactions to authorities.
Can Islamic Microfinance give more people access to the financial services they need to grow their business? (Credit: DFID, Flickr Creative Commons)
Research has shown that financial sector development and the efficiency of financial systems are closely linked to economic growth. Ensuring the provision of financial services to the poor can also address the challenge of poverty alleviation and directly target financing towards economically and socially underprivileged groups. Appropriate financial services, such as savings services, investment, insurance, and payment and money transfer facilities, enable the poor to acquire capital to engage in productive ventures, manage risks, increase their income and savings, and escape poverty.
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Thailand is a clear leader in corporate governance among Asian and emerging economies. But the recently launched 2013 Corporate Governance Report on Standards and Codes (ROSC) finds key challenges remain.
L’autre jour, la direction nous a demandé de faire preuve d’une « ambition immodérée » dans le domaine des pôles de croissance. J’ai réfléchi aux implications que cela pourrait avoir dans notre travail en Afrique, au vu notamment des conclusions du dernier Rapport sur la compétitivité. À mon sens, cette ambition doit s’exprimer dans trois grandes directions : i) développer la capacité d’action qui débouche sur des résultats ; ii) faire en sorte que tous les acteurs bénéficient des retombées de la croissance ; et iii) mobiliser un maximum de ressources financières, qu’elles soient privées, publiques ou d’origine caritative.
Growth poles can help create jobs for Africa's one billion citizens (Credit: World Bank)
We were asked the other day by our senior management to be outrageously aspirational when we engage with growth poles. I have been reflecting on what this means for our work on this topic in Africa, especially in light of the findings of the Africa Competitiveness Report. I think we need to be aspirational in three broad directions: (i) developing the capacity to get things done in Africa, (ii) ensuring all stakeholders benefit from growth, and (iii) mobilizing as much capital as we can, whether it be private, philanthropic or public.
Ensuring that the world economy and its citizens have sufficient infrastructure—from transport systems to electricity grids and water pipelines—is an increasingly pressing issue. It’s also a subject matter surrounded by misconceptions. Five are worth noting:
1) Lack of investment is not always to blame.
The first is a common assumption that when infrastructure is too inadequate, congested, or old, the culprit is always a lack of investment. The truth is more complex. Globally on average, infrastructure stock --which includes transport (road, rail, ports and airports), power, water and telecommunications--accounts for about 70 percent of a country’s GDP. Brazil, whose infrastructure stock is less than 20 percent of GDP, under-spends chronically compared with its economic size and growth. It seems no coincidence that the country’s airports are 122nd out of 142 in the World Economic Forum’s rankings. Other under-investors include the United Kingdom, Canada, India, and the United States. But other countries over-invest for the size of their economies. China, Poland, Italy, South Africa, and Japan are among them. Japan’s stock of infrastructure is equivalent to nearly 180 percent of its GDP. Over the past 18 years, growth would have “justified” investment of around 3 percent of GDP, but Japan spent 5 percent.
Boosting research and innovation in Croatia can strengthen the economy ( Credit: Jisc, Flickr Creative Commons)
An injection of much-needed investment funds awaits Croatia when it joins the European Union on July 1: An amount equivalent to about 4 percent of the country’s GDP will become available to Croatia through the EU Cohesion Policy when it becomes the EU’s 28th member nation. The funds offer Croatia a unique opportunity for financing strategic investments, aiming to restore the country’s growth prospects and generate better employment opportunities.
Experience shows, however, that seizing this opportunity is not easy: New member countries of the EU have often allocated those funds to projects with low economic and social returns, or have simply failed to effectively deploy these funds.
Wherever individuals are excluded from formal financial services the source of the problem is usually a lack of information. Without reliable information about a borrower’s identity or credit history, lenders will compensate for their inability to evaluate risk by raising collateral requirements, charging higher interest rates, or by refusing to lend to certain borrower groups altogether. This leads to financial exclusion, even among otherwise creditworthy borrowers. Technologies that reduce asymmetric information between borrowers and lenders are therefore some of the most powerful tools to reduce financial exclusion. In recent years, much progress has been made to improve credit reporting institutions around the world. But in many countries the challenge is much more basic: much of the world’s population lacks even the most basic identity proof. To address this problem, many countries have experimented with innovative solutions for improved personal identification.
