World Bank Blogs

Soot is Soot, No Matter the Circumstance!

Curt Carnemark/World Bank

Last week, the Telegraph newspaper in the United Kingdom reported that snow in the Himalayas was melting because of religious activity on the Indian subcontinent. The report, based on research by American and Indian scientists, found that burning of wood for cremations and incense sticks for religious ceremonies and marriages leads to emissions of black carbon and other compounds. This, in turn, accelerates the melting of ice and snow-covered surfaces.

There is a growing body of research looking at how black carbon is accelerating snow and glacial melting. A scientific paper published in India early this year associated forest fires and other biomass burning to the accelerated melting of one of the Himalayan glaciers. Scientists have even implicated black carbon emission from increased industrial activity in Europe for the retreat of glaciers in the Alps in the mid-19^th century.

World Bank published latest commodity prices: October 2013

In October of 2013, energy prices decreased by 2.5%, while the non-energy commodities were slightly up by 0.3%. Food prices were flat (up 0.1%), beverages increased by 0.7%, raw materials edged up by 0.3%, while fertilizers declined 3.8%. Metals moved up by 1.1%, while precious metals decreased 2.5%.

To access recent and long-term historical prices and other commodity-related information, please click here.

Prospects Daily: Yen at three-week high, European Commission: EU Growth to Gather Speed, South Africa’s Purchasing Managers’ Index rises

Financial Markets… Global stock markets edged slightly lower on Tuesday, with the MSCI’s benchmark world stock index easing just 0.1%, as uncertainty over the next policy moves by the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve damped market sentiment. Asian markets were mixed, having swung between gains and losses, while Europe’s Stoxx 600 index dropped 0.4% from yesterday’s 5-year high in afternoon trading. Developing-country’s benchmark MSCI index fell 0.6%, led by sharp declines in Indian and South African shares. Furthermore, U.S.

Getting to The 'So Whats': How Can Donors Use Political Economy Analysis to Sort Out Bad Governance?

Close but no cigar. Just been reading an ODI paper from a few months ago, Making sense of the politics of delivery: our findings so far, by Marta Foresti, Tam O’Neil and Leni Wild. It’s part of the ODI’s excellent stream of work on governance and accountability (see my review of David Booth and Diana Cammack’s book) and repays close study.

The starting point is the widespread disillusionment in DFID and elsewhere with ‘political economy analysis’ (PEA), memorably summed up by Alex Duncan’s definition of a political economist as ‘someone who comes and explains why your programme hasn’t worked’:

‘There is no doubt that PEA has helped answer some of these questions [why stuff doesn’t work]. Yet many would say that researchers have not found a middle ground between generality and specificity. On the one hand, the use of catch-all concepts, such as political will or unspecified incentives, fail to provide enough analytical purchase on which to hang entry points for reform. On the other, if we view every context and problem as sui generis, experience cannot be used to construct theories of change that include learning across programmes and contexts.’

Is the New York Times Ethicist a Better Economist than…..The Economist?

The Sunday before last I woke up to a couple of articles in the New York Times Magazine and The Economist. In the first article, the New York Times ethicist was asked a question about Halloween candy: Are dentists who purchase candy from kids (thus protecting their teeth) and donate it to poor families engaging in “thoughtless, unethical and unprofessional” behavior? The Economist article summarized research on cash transfers to the poor, concluding that “Giving money to poor people works surprisingly well. But it cannot deal with the deeper causes of poverty”. In both articles, the fundamental question is how we measure and judge improvements in welfare based on what people consume. But while the ethicist takes the question head on, The Economist does not even get the question right.

To see this, recall that in welfare economics there are two rationales for government interventions to make people better off. First, governments fix market failures. If the market does not produce efficient outcomes, the government can use taxes and subsidies to make things better. Externalities are classic examples. I don’t worry that my pollution makes others worse off and therefore “over pollute”. But the government can tax that pollution to the point where I behave “as if” I care about others.

Second, governments redistribute income by giving cash to the poor. If, in society’s judgment, an alternate distribution of consumption is better, government could achieve that distribution by redistributing “endowments” or cash from one party to another.

Seeing the Human Face of the Global Financial Crisis

The collapse of a US investment bank in the fall of 2008 turned a severe credit crunch into the worst financial crisis since the great depression, providing a blunt reminder that mismanagement of risks does not go unpunished. What is more, mismanaged risks do not respect boundaries in a tightly interconnected world, damaging anything they touch on their path, hurting especially the poor and vulnerable. While financial systems can contribute to economic development by providing people with useful tools for risk management, such as credit, savings, and insurance, they can create severe crises with devastating social and economic effects when they fail to manage the risks they retain.

Innovation and Insurance: Protection Against the Costs of Natural Disaster

Natural disasters – such as tsunamis, earthquakes, cyclones and floods – are costly to society, in terms of both human destruction and financial losses. Governments ultimately bear the full cost of the havoc wreaked by natural disasters, which can create an enormous strain on limited government budgets, especially in developing countries. This is even before we begin to contemplate the development impact and how the poorest of the poor are disproportionately affected.

Just last week, the world saw the widespread damage that the St. Jude storm inflicted across Europe, and we witnessed its effect on hundreds of thousands of people. Most advanced economies, however, have sufficient capacity to be able to absorb the financial losses inlicted by natural disasters. Higher-income countries enjoy (relatively) efficient public revenue systems and developed domestic insurance markets.

By contrast, developing countries do not have the same degree of access to financial and insurance markets. They face limited revenue streams, limited fiscal flexibility, and limited access to immediate liquidity in the wake of an event. This is particularly so for Small Island Developing States (SIDS), such as the Pacific island nations.

Moving Past the Commodity Supercycle: Are We There Yet?

Some analysts are predicting that the commodity price boom of the new millennium is something that has played itself out. Except for shale gas and its downward pressure on U.S. natural gas prices, however, natural resource-based commodity prices have remained high by historical records in the last few years, despite the feebleness of the recent global economic recovery.

Quote of the Week: Bill Gates

“I certainly love the IT thing. But when we want to improve lives, you’ve got to deal with more basic things, like child survival, child nutrition. As a priority? It’s a joke. Take this malaria vaccine, [this] weird thing that I’m thinking of. Hmm, which is more important, connectivity or malaria vaccine? If you think connectivity is the key thing, that’s great. I don’t.”

- Bill Gates, an American business magnate, investor, programmer, inventor and philanthropist. He is the founder and current Chairman of Microsoft.

A pigeon's eye view of open government

Ope Government Partnership sign I took my first bird flight over London on Friday courtesy of Pigeon Sim, an app developed at University College of London that simulates flying over the city, drawing on real time environmental data, such as air pollution levels. This was one of many attention grabbing displays within the Festival of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) Annual Summit. The conference provided a similarly dizzying overview of the terrain of open government.

Pages

You are here

RESOURCES FOR