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What drives local food prices? Is it world prices? Weather? Seasonality?...
The question has been asked often in the context of the post-2005 commodity price boom. In a recently published working paper, What drives local food prices? Evidence from the Tanzanian maize market,...
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Despite low commodity prices, growth prospects in low-income countries remain...
Large agricultural sectors, remittances, and public investment have cushioned the impact of sharply weaker terms of trade in commodity-exporting low-income countries (LICs). Growth in LICs was flat in...
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The shadow over commodity exporting low-income countries (LICs)
Low-income countries facing a hangover as the commodity cycle turns Until recently, confidence and expectations for low income countries (LICs) were soaring – with good reason. After all, for most of...
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Can a picture from space help to measure poverty in a Guatemalan village?
John Grunsfeld, former NASA Chief Scientist and veteran of five Space Shuttle flights, had several chances to look down at Earth, and noticed how poverty can be recognized from far away. Unlike richer...
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The impact of low oil prices in Sub-Saharan Africa
Growth picked up in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2014, after moderating in 2013, but remained weaker than during the pre-crisis years. It softened around the turn of the year owing to headwinds from the...
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Would you lose weight if we paid you?
If you were given a small reward every time you worked out, would you be more inclined to stick to a permanent exercise regimen? How much would that incentive have to be? Would regular exercise be...
View ArticleRemittances go beyond helping families to funding small businesses
Migrant remittances overtook FDI last year as the largest foreign capital inflow into developing countries. Over US$435b was sent back home in 2014, and the total is expected to exceed $460b by the end...
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Financial incentives in health: the magic bullet we were hoping for?
After years of bad news from developing countries about high rates of health worker absenteeism, and low rates of delivery of key health interventions, along came what seemed like a magic bullet:...
View ArticleEmerging, frontier economies should brace for possible turmoil associated...
The U.S. Federal Reserve has been letting the world know for a while that it will soon embark in an interest rate tightening cycle, after years of leaving policy rates near zero to stimulate growth...
View ArticleWhich firms have benefitted from the boom in capital market activity?
How many and which firms from developed and emerging countries have issued debt and equity during the big expansion in capital markets that started in the 1990s? How much have issuing firms grown...
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Measuring poverty in a rapidly changing world
The World Bank Group has set itself the target of bringing down the number of people living in extreme poverty to less than 3 percent of the world population by 2030. And over the coming days, the...
View ArticleThe road not shared: Turning to the arts to help increase pedestrian safety
The Creative Wealth of Nationsis a series of blogs related to Patrick Kabanda's forthcoming book on the performing arts in development. It was a scene I still can’t forget. A few years ago on a busy...
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Investing in women and the next generation: The case for expanding childcare...
Women’s participation in Turkey’s labor force is comparatively low. Why is that, especially when Turkey has acted to increase women’s skills and education? One reason is that more needs to be done to...
View ArticleDevelopment in the digital age
I have spoken only once before at the UN. I was then just a professor and was invited to speak on my research on labor market regulation. I was told it would be a distinguished audience. However, as I...
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Increasingly, inequality within, not across countries, is rising
During the second-half of the last century countries were placed in one of two mutually exclusive camps: north or south, east or west, advanced or emerging, developed or developing. Simple though this...
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The international poverty line has just been raised to $1.90 a day, but...
World Bank researchers have been trying to assess the extent of extreme poverty across the world since 1979 and more systematically since the World Development Report 1990, which introduced the...
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From population bomb to development opportunity: New perspectives on...
A generation ago, the World Development Report 1984 focused on development challenges posed by demographic change, reflecting the world’s concerns about run-away population growth. Global population...
View ArticleWhy are Indian firms five times less productive than American ones? One...
How important is land as a factor of production in India? In a recent paper (The misallocation of land and other factors of production in India,"Policy Research Working Paper Series 7221), we focused...
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Poverty is falling faster among Africa’s female headed households
A sizeable number of households in Africa today have female heads. Based on the latest Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), 26% of all households Africa-wide are headed by women. Although there are...
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The three major challenges to ending extreme poverty
As the latest Global Monitoring Report (GMR) finds, the global poverty rate is expected to fall into the single digits for the first time in 2015 at 9.6 percent. While this is good news, when we look...
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