World Bank

Martin Ravallion is Director of the World Bank’s research department, the Development Research Group. These are the views of the author, and need not reflect those of the World Bank.

One of the perks of writing a blog is that I can scrounge review copies of development-related books. I’m sure they’re all fascinating and I really want to read them but alas, they don’t come with extra hours in the day attached. So I now have a growing pile by my desk that is in danger of becoming a health hazard (pet cat crushed under falling tomes etc). In post holiday clear-out mode, I am therefore going to assuage my guilt by giving them all a plug after a cursory skim.

Last week I wrote about Justin Lin’s intriguing suggestions for how developing countries can best pursue a low risk/high return form of industrial upgrading. Here Justin responds to some of the concerns and questions raised in that post:

Justin Lin, the World Bank’s chief economist, was in London last week and presented his new paper on ‘Growth Identification and

The WDR is published in the fall, but this year’s WDR director, Sarah Cliffe, gave a preview of its contents at Harvard recently.

Some critics of the World Bank have focused on the disproportionate amount of voting power that the United States and Western European countries have compared to the rest of the world. India, China and Brazil in particular have argued that the voting procedures of the World Bank members do not accurately represent the world economy. Yesterday, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) ended their annual spring meeting by announcing “historic” and unexpected changes.

IMF must help keep poor countries keep up spending

Washington, DC – Poor countries are being forced to cut back on their economic crisis-response spending too soon, iread more

Today the World Bank announced a new initiative to offer free access to “more than 2,000 financial, business, health, economic and human development statistics”.
The data– which had previously only been made available to paying subscribers– is compiled at data.worldbank.org/. There’s a wealth of information here, available in English, Spanish, French, and Arabic.
World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick explains:

Responding to the World Development Indicators report released today by the World Bank which shows that sub-Saharan Africa is off-target, overall, on all Millennium Development Goals
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The World Bank just issued a press release announcing their intentions to waive Haiti’s remaining debt to it– approximately $38 million– for 5 years, with a note that they are at the same time “working to find a way forward to cancel the remaining debt.”
We’ll have more on this soon.