Bankers are people too! via PSD Blog - The World Bank Group
Want to network in Ulaanbaatar? Get on stage!
Where might you find a bank president, an ambassador, an attorney, a journalist, a café owner, and other assorted characters in a single place? On stage, of course! The UB Players, an expat theater group, just put on Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. It was a great show, and to my surprise, I recognized about half the cast.
One of the advantages of living in a place like Ulaanbaatar is the mix of people you meet in day-to-day life. You bump into them everywhere. I last saw Sergeant Trotter, played by the President of TDB Bank, Randolph Koppa, at a workshop on housing finance. TDB has a trade finance guarantee with IFC and hosts the Mongolian SME Toolkit, an online business planning tool for small businesses. I didn’t expect to see... The private sector vs. poverty via PSD Blog - The World Bank Group
China, meet World of Warcraft via PSD Blog - The World Bank Group
Walmart in exchange for Harvard via PSD Blog - World Bank Group
The U.S. gets Walmart, and in return, China gets...Harvard. At least that's part of the story told by a graph in a recent publication from Campus France (Hat tip: University World News). China is by far the largest importer of educational services in the world, at least by student numbers. The U.S. absorbs nearly a quarter of China's mobile students. For more visuals on student exchange, check out International Student Mobility.
... Education, Thai-style via PSD Blog - World Bank Group
Trading without Doha via PSD Blog - World Bank Group
China jigsaw puzzle via PSD Blog - World Bank Group
Can Islamic Finance go micro? via PSD Blog - World Bank Group
With more than half-a-trillion dollars in assets and an annual growth rate that has outpaced conventional banks’ by nearly 50 percent, the Islamic finance industry is already making waves among investment fund managers. And this not only applies to the Muslim world: The Banker magazine recently named the United Kingdom to its list of the top 15 countries managing Sharia-compliant assets.
The new CGAP Publication Islamic Microfinance: An Emerging Market Niche argues that the Islamic finance industry, with its unprecedented popularity and growth, may be well-placed to address a critical need in microfinance: reaching the some 72 percent of people in Muslim-majority countries who do not use formal financial services.Much of that gap owes to unmet demand for products that comply with... Doing Business 2009 - Five years of reforms via PSD Blog - World Bank Group
Doing Business 2009 is here! The sixth in the World Bank Group's annual series on business regulations, DB 2009 allows us to take a look at five years of reforms since DB 2004. But before I get to that, let me hit the highlights of DB 2009:
This year's top reformer is...drum roll please...Azerbaijan! Azerbaijan improved on 7 out of 10 of the indicators tracked by DB and moved up 64 slots in the overall rankings.
Two regions - Eastern Europe and Central Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa - accounted for 7 of the top 10 reformers: Azerbaijan, Albania, Kyrgyz Republic, Belarus, Senegal, Burkina Faso, and Botswana. The other top 10 were Columbia, Egypt, and Dominican Republic.
Once again, Singapore tops the rankings, followed by New Zealand, the United States, and Hong Kong, China. ... Supply and demand of property rights via PSD Blog - World Bank Group
Economic detectives track down corruption via PSD Blog - World Bank Group
Just how far has the international development community come in its attitudes toward corruption? Here are classic lines from Samuel Huntington's 1968 opus Political Order in Changing Societies:In terms of economic growth, the only thing worse than a society with a rigid, overcentralized, dishonest bureaucracy is one with a rigid, overcentralized, honest bureaucracy. A society which is relatively uncorrupt...may find a certain amount of corruption a welcome lubricant easing the path to modernization.Nowadays, the work of organizations like Transparency International has made such attitudes seem heretical. Yet even the best efforts of organizations like Transparency International have yet to put a huge dent in corruption around the world, despite achievements such as passage of the OECD's... In China, a rising tide lifts all boats via PSD Blog - World Bank Group
At least that's the new finding from PREM in a paper on Rising Income Inequality in China. Coauthors Xubei Luo and Nong Zhu do a lot of number crunching using the China Economic, Population, Nutrition and Health Survey and find that while inequality has risen rapidly in China, strong growth has meant that all income groups have seen pretty substantial economic gains. Figure 1 provides a pretty clear picture of the rise in inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient:
As the authors explain in the introduction:...widening income inequality in China is not the result of stagnant income growth in certain segments of society or regions - all sub-national areas, including lagging inland rural areas, and the entire population, including the less affluent, has experienced gains in... Creating creative capitalism via PSD Blog - World Bank Group
A great time to gamble? via PSD Blog - World Bank Group
Pollution in Beijing after the Olympics via PSD Blog - World Bank Group
Universities and development via PSD Blog - World Bank Group
Every year around this time, the Shanghai Jiao Tong University makes waves with its Academic Ranking of World Universities. As always, North America dominates in the short list of top 100 universities, with the Ivy League universities occupying most of the top slots. And as always, aggrieved parties produce howls of pain along with numerous complaints about methodological flaws - see a few examples here and here.
While there are certainly flaws, part of the problem lies in the inherent impossibility of ranking universities. These institutions devote themselves to many different tasks, while the Jiao Tong rankings examine only one task - research. (For an excellent discussion of the debate around rankings, see this commentary from Alex Usher of the Educational Policy Institute.) Jiao... The internationalization of business R&D via PSD Blog - World Bank Group
The OECD has recently come out with a new publication, this time on The Internationalisation of Business R&D. A lot of OECD publications provoke a half yawn from me, but this one is worth a look. Here's the main thrust:...non-OECD countries have attracted an increasing amount of R&D investment in recent years. Surveys indicate that China and India, among others, are now considered very attractive locations for future investment both because of their large and rapidly growing markets and their large pools of qualified workers and their relatively low, though rising, labour costs. However, they also indicate important drawbacks, such as inadequate enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR). While these may not deter companies from investing, they may affect the type of... Rising food prices and child labor via PSD Blog - World Bank Group
Who benefits from the brain drain? via PSD Blog - World Bank Group
There is considerable debate about whether the mobility of highly skilled labor constitutes a brain drain or a brain circulation. A publication of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada makes it clear that to the extent there is a brain drain, then Canada is a large beneficiary (Hat tip: GlobalHigherEd). Between 2001 and 2006, more than 3,000 Chinese PhD holders emigrated to Canada. Another 1,200 Indian PhD holders emigrated to Canada in that same time period. I have to wonder how many yuan and rupees the Chinese and Indian governments spent on educating these individuals before they took their skills elsewhere? ... The Global Schoolhouse via PSD Blog - World Bank Group
Is it possible to buy oneself a place at the forefront of the knowledge economy? That is the question that Singapore???s Global Schoolhouse policy aims to answer. According to a recent article in International Higher Education, Singapore is perhaps the most ???single-minded??? of any country in its pursuit of achieving a knowledge-driven economy. Their strategy has been to attract foreign universities such as MIT, Johns Hopkins, and INSEAD to set up shop on the island. The government provides tax concessions and state of the art facilities in the hope of creating synergy between these institutions, leading researchers, and local companies. Singapore managed to do it before???after the Second World War, the government invited in foreign companies and capital, in contrast to many other... China vs. India - a battle of the brains via PSD Blog - World Bank Group
In this brave new world of knowledge-driven economies, it is a battle of the brains. And in perhaps the biggest battle of them all???China versus India???a winner is emerging. If you guessed India, I???m sorry, you get the consolation prize. China is far outstripping India in the race to expand tertiary enrollment. Data collected by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics indicate that in 2006, China achieved a gross enrollment ratio of 22 percent, compared to only 12 percent in India. Granted, raw numbers don???t take into account variations in the quality of education. Nevertheless, India is clearly a laggard at 12 percent???and perhaps even less than that, according to data from the Program for Research on Private Higher Education. What could explain India???s poor marks? One part of the...
Building competitive trade logistics via PSD Blog - World Bank Group
Global trade could increase by trillions of dollars if transactions costs (including speed) are reduced to OECD levels. But what???s the most effective ways to achieve such reductions?
A group of high-level policy makers, academics, and World Bank Group staff met in Washington last week to strategize as part of a conference Organized by the FIAS' Trade Logistics Advisory Program. Presenters discussed case studies from twelve developing and industrialized economies and state-of???the-art approaches to building efficient trade logistics services. Some governments are making progress in simplifying their trade-related regulatory procedures. Pakistan, for example, managed to reduce the number of trade transactions from 26 clearance steps, 34 signatures, and 64 verifications to one... Aids in Asia: alarming numbers via PSD Blog - World Bank Group
A new United Nations report, Redefining Aids in Asia: Crafting an Effective Response, was just release and makes an astonishing prediction: 500,000 each year people could die in Asia due to Aids-related illnesses by 2020.
The report released Wednesday also contends that the number of infected people could potentially double to 10 million by 2020 if prevention work is not undertaken. The cost of such an increase in infected people would be great in all levels, including economic cost, since Aids is one of the major causes of death among working-age adults in Asia. According to the chairman of the Commission on AIDS in Asia, Dr Chakravarthi Rangarajan, the cost could be up to $2 billion annually until 2020.... Calm waters for offshore outsourcing via PSD Blog - World Bank Group
2006 – the year of Chinese IPOs via PSD Blog - World Bank Group
Our privatization database – listing transactions of at least $1 million from 2000 to 2006 - has been updated again. In 2006, 48 developing countries carried out 249 privatizations for a total value of $105 billion – a figure comparable to the record year 1997.
The graph below depicts the value of privatization transactions in developing countries between 1990 and 2006. The figure excludes the IPOs of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and the Bank of China, which combined accounted for $35 billion - one-third of all proceeds in 2006:
Russia and Turkey followed China into the second and third place, while Poland bucked the general trend toward privatization that year.
Our interactive map has the full picture.... Doing Business in China via PSD Blog - World Bank Group
Outsourcing too expensive via PSD Blog - World Bank Group
A new study by the Boston Consulting Group finds that outsourcing to China and India did little or nothing to save costs for many of the original equipment manufacturers (OMG).
About two-thirds of the manufacturers in the survey reported unit costs in China equal to or higher then those in their home countries. The authors point to diseconomies of scale and higher quality costs, which can outweigh savings on labor, as main causes.... An Acehnese Biker Chick via PSD Blog - World Bank Group
When most people think about Sabang, they think about diving. For good reason – the diving spots here are among the best in the world. But there’s more to Sabang than diving, as I discovered by chance. It also has biker chicks.
After yet another fabulous weekend of diving, I took the minibus to Balohan, where the ferry port is. But for the first time ever, I could not get a ticket. Normally you can get on the boat by slipping some cash to the crew. But this time it was impossible. When the boat pulled away from the dock, there were people literally hanging off the railings. Definitely a game for younger people than myself.
Luckily, my Indonesian is now good enough to get me through situations like this. I found a little hotel nearby for only 60,000 Rp, leaving just enough for the... Unusual champions of global sustainability via PSD Blog - World Bank Group
It is often assumed that the greatest potential for improving business environmental practice in developing countries lies with foreign multinationals and not with the countries' own businesses.
These case studies reject this common assumption and point to the crucial role of developing-country firms as they serve the world's most populous and fastest growing markets Says Simone Pulver the guest editor of "Greening Development: The Role of the Developing-Country Private Sector" published in the "Studies in Comparative International Development" [subscription required]. The recent issue is based on case studies of selected firms in China, India and Latin America....