One of the benefits of working the spring meetings is getting to watch the press at work (work which is really a lot of waiting around for things to happen).
But occasionally, everybody rushes off to earn their paychecks. And the ones who rush fastest are the still photographers. When they move, you know something is happening.
At Bob Zoellick’s kick-off press conference on Thursday, about 15 still photographers lurked in the bottom of the IMF building, their lenses gleaming in the dim light. It appears to be a macho business, capturing the perfect image of that prolific species, the DC policy maker.
A minute before Zoellick arrives, a staffer gives a heads up. A brief hush and then the photographers pick up their cameras and their foot long lenses (big enough to photograph a lion far across the watering hole) and rush to get the best angle. All 15 of them want to stand in the same spot, of course, and so they jostle and nudge and, when Zoellick sits down, retreat back to their lair just below the dais.
Then comes the talk, and most of the photographers tune right out. They’re waiting for movement—anything even remotely resembling action—so if Zoellick raises his hand off the table, or makes the most minimal gesture, they leap into gear. And the whirr of their lenses is just about loud enough to drown out the talking. What they don’t want is just “a head”—press corps lingo for just another dude in a navy blue suit. They want something, anything, that makes this picture of a guy in a navy blue suit different from last week’s.
The global financial crisis may be easing, but it is far from over, according to the World Bank’s chief economist. The World Bank is holding its annual meetings in Istanbul, Turkey, and those meetings prompted an assessment of the global economy from Justin Lin.
Lin is the World Bank’s chief economist, and he says the situation may be improving, but the financial crisis of 2008-2009 “has left a scar”. He warns that it will be years before developing economies bounce back.
Lin, meeting with other leading economists at the Council of Chief Economists Roundtable in Turkey, reminded them that the world needs to be ready for the challenge of fixing the damage left by the crisis.
For example, Lin says, the residue from the financial crisis will be apparent for years, with unemployment high and consumption low. He says that India will bounce back with an 8 percent growth rate, but the country was roaring along at 10 percent before the crisis. Ethiopia, he says, will come back at 7 to five percent, and but it was showing what he called “high” rates of growth of 11 percent before last fall.
But that is the whole point, and the South-South exchange has been so popular that the program is expanding.
The idea behind South-South is to get developing countries to share their knowledge and ideas about projects. The projects range from water power in Tajikistan, to keeping boys out of trouble in the Caribbean, to harnessing Indian expertise to train eight African countries how to offer IT services.
South-South has only been in existence for one year, but the World Bank Group’s Ngozi Okonjo Iweala says it has already funded 35 grants — and, she says, there’s “a great deal of excitement” surrounding the program.
South-South relies on peer relationships, and Okonjo Iweala says it is clear that the group that makes up the World Bank’s initiative have much to share with each other.
But it matters far more when you are one of the World Bank’s 40 member countries with populations under 1.5 million. These developing small states gathered together at the Bank’s annual meetings in Istanbul at the annual Small States Forum to show that, when they all agree, small can be powerful.
The World Bank’s small states, ranging from Suriname in South America, to Swaziland in Africa, to Vanuatu in the Pacific, met in a standing-room-only venue packed with attendees. The topic on the table was remittances, the huge cash flows sent home by economic migrants working in other countries.
Almost $4.5 billion in remittances poured into small states last year, dwarfing all financial aid packages. In some countries, remittances are greater than one-fifth of GDP. Of the world’s seven most remittance-dependent countries, four are small states: Tonga and Samoa in the Pacific, Lesotho in Africa and Guyana in South America. Overall, on average, remittances matter substantially more for small states than for their large larger developing counterparts. And the worry is that remittances are drying up in the face of the global financial crunch—with a projected decline of 9 percent this year, according to the presentation by the World Bank’s Chief Economist, Justin Lin.
Cape Verde’s Minister of Finance, Cristina Duarte, says remittances are a huge issue for her country, and one she eagerly discussed with her fellow small state colleagues. "We concentrated a lot on analyzing and discussing the role of remittances—how can we manage better remittances, which are an important capitals inflow for our country." The bottom-line according to Duarte: no single country can survive on its own.
In Istanbul, World Bank economists taking a hard look at how the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are weathering the financial crisis are finding some good news. The World Bank and the IMF are holding their annual meetings in Turkey, and a status update on the MENA region shows some resilience.
Shamshad Akhtar, the World Bank’s new vice president for the region, said at a press conference today that MENA’s economy grew by almost 6.2 percent in 2008. But Akhtar says the region has been shaken by what she calls the “Triple-F phenomena”—food, fuel and the financial crisis. She says the food crisis has hit the region hardest, in part because of a growing population and a heavy dependence on imported food. But, she says, despite slowing growth, down to 2.2 percent, the region is faring better than many others.
Akhtar told reporters: “The key message we retain from all this is: the MENA region has weathered the triple crisis well so far.” But there is an “immediate danger of rising unemployment and resurgence of poverty.”
Size does matter.
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