Submitted by Shanta on Wed, 07/01/2009 - 10:17.  A friend sent this photograph, with the following caption: “Don't let the recession take the flame out of your romantic lives! There's always sunshine in Africa! Resourcefulness at its best.... Anything to keep the wheels turning!”
The picture and caption reminded me of the song “Girl, your marginal benefits…” which could be viewed as a painless way to learn microeconomics, or a quirky love song.
Submitted by Shanta on Tue, 06/30/2009 - 15:02.  Last Friday, the World Bank released its Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA) of low-income countries. While the assessments are mainly used to determine the allocation of concessional IDA resources to poor countries, they can also provide a useful picture of the evolution of policies and institutions in Africa, as a recent note by my colleagues Delfin Go and Vijdan Korman shows. They find that:
 So far the dialogue between the main political parties has failed to produce an agreement on the way forward for a return to a democratic Government. For the time being, the economy continues to deteriorate but has shown some resilience due to two factors;
(i) Fiscal Policy: The strict fiscal policy pursued by the authorities has helped stabilize key financial indicators (interest rates, inflation, and the exchange rate)
Submitted by Shanta on Tue, 06/09/2009 - 09:08.
While my blog posts seemed to elicit a fair number of comments, I had been wondering how many of them, if any, were coming from my World Bank colleagues. Last Friday, I got to find out. Our Internal Communications department ran a story on the Bank’s intranet with the headline “The effects of the global recession on Africa will be permanent, says Africa Chief Economist.” The story then linked to my blog post, “Why aid to Africa must increase”. My first reaction to some of the comments was “Ouch!”
Submitted by Shanta on Mon, 06/08/2009 - 09:04. My good friend and predecessor John Page gave a provocative seminar with the title of this post the other day. His main point, echoed in this year’s UNIDO Industrialization Report, was that Africa’s industrial sector was declining, and some type of collective action (he called it “policies for industrialization” rather than the maligned phrase “industrial policy”) is needed so that the continent could resume industrial growth.
Submitted by Shanta on Mon, 05/25/2009 - 15:15.
Dans les pays riches, lorsque le taux de croissance économique diminue de 3 ou 4 points, les individus perdent leur emploi et, probablement, leur maison, mais ils les retrouvent lorsque la reprise économique intervient. Dans les pays pauvres d’Afrique, les enfants sont retirés de l’école — et sont privés de la possibilité de devenir plus tard des adultes productifs. Dans certains cas, les enfants meurent avant d’avoir eu la chance d’aller à l’école. Si l’effondrement actuel de la croissance s’apparente à ceux qu’a connus l’Afrique par le passé, 700 000 enfants africains supplémentaires mourront probablement avant leur premier anniversaire.
Submitted by Shanta on Mon, 05/25/2009 - 15:14.  In rich countries, when economic growth declines by three or four percentage points, people lose their jobs and possibly their houses, but they regain them when the economy rebounds. In poor African countries, children get pulled out of school—and miss out on becoming productive adults. In some cases, children die before they have a chance to go to school. If the current growth collapse is typical of the ones Africa has experienced in the past, an additional 700,000 African children may die before their first birthday.
Submitted by Shanta on Thu, 05/14/2009 - 11:43. I flinched when, at a recent BBC World Debate Zeinab Badawi asked Bob Zoellick why, when there are so many economists at the World Bank, they couldn’t do anything about protecting developing countries from the impact of the global crisis. Were we asleep at the wheel? Montek Ahluwalia gave us temporary respite by pointing out that the economists in the industrialized countries didn’t see the global recession coming even in their own countries, much less that it would spread to poorer countries.
But this begs the question of why economists didn’t forecast the global financial and economic crisis. Recently there have been two thoughtful pieces addressing this question.
Dambisa Moyo' book "Dead Aid" is gaining influence among African leaders (I wanted to point to President Kagame's thoughtful commentary in the FT). I would like to add the following comments. Volumes of aid to Africa per se are not the issue; instead the issue is the quality of political leadership and the effectiveness with which aid is put to in Africa to support the continent's development.
Aid, by itself, is not a bad thing and, if utilized properly, can help resource constrained economies make wise investments to move from a low to a higher base of performance. Post-war Western Europe and Japan reconstructed into a modern economy through massive aid provided through the Marshall Plan, and many developing economies in East Asia (China, Korea, etc) and South Asia (e.g., India) have taken off because of large injections of
Submitted by Shanta on Tue, 05/05/2009 - 09:04. Lors d’une mission en Europe, j’ai assisté à un séminaire à l’Institut Français des Relations Internationales IFRI. J’ai parlé des quatre canaux de transmission de la crise en Afrique, et la réponse de la Banque Mondiale. Le débat qui a suivi mon discours était très riche et intéressant. Les questions étaient diverses—sur la relation entre la croissance et la pauvreté, les solutions régionales et les états fragiles. Vous pouvez lire le compte rendu de la conférence ici.
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