March 24, 2009
It’s been bugging me for months that we are still talking about a ‘food price crisis’ even though world commodity prices, including food, have come down a long way since their peak in mid 2008. Should we still be talking about 150m people being pushed below the poverty line by high food prices? Won’t they have reemerged from poverty as
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IMF finally calls it – the world economy will shrink in 2009, and developing countries are hit harder than we thought
March 20, 2009
Every revision of global growth predictions has been heading towards zero, and now the IMF, in its report to the G20 finance ministers’ meeting last weekend, has taken the next step. It predicts the world economy will shrink in 2009, (by minus 0.5-1%) for the first time in 60 years. It’s pretty safe to assume that this won’t be the
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Want to reduce inequality? Look at Latin America!
March 19, 2009
I was at DFID again this week (I should be on a retainer) , presenting a paper on the impact of the global crisis on Latin America (it should be on the Oxfam website by the middle of next week). One interesting glass-half-full v glass-half-empty discussion was over income inequality: I said the region was doing well in reducing the gulf between
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Is the UN missing in action on the global crisis?
March 17, 2009
Last week I attended two events that focussed on the crisis and its impact on development: a big DFID conference in preparation for its forthcoming white paper, and an NGO presentation to the UN ‘Commission of Experts’ on reforming the international financial system, which is chaired by Joe Stiglitz. Discussions at both events brought home just limited a role the
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How badly is the crisis hitting the poorest countries? Here’s what the IMF thinks
March 12, 2009
The IMF has a new paper out summarizing the impact of the global crisis on 78 ‘low income countries’ (LICs) – the world’s poorest, many of them in Sub-Saharan Africa. Its findings include:
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Building a Low Carbon Economy: How much will it cost? Where do we start?
March 10, 2009
Leaders like Obama and (increasingly) Gordon Brown seem to be gravitating towards the ‘green new deal’ argument that massive international spending in response to the financial crisis must also shift economies onto a ‘low carbon recovery’ path. Looking at the science, there’s little argument – we have to massively reduce the carbon intensity of production if we are to keep
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I’ll see your trillion and raise you another one: how big a bailout does the developing world need?
March 5, 2009
Talk of mere billions is for wimps these days. I’ve just read two proposals for ‘big numbers’ on bailouts to help developing countries get through the global economic crisis, one from the World Bank’s chief economist, Justin Lin, and the other from Washington thinktank CGD’s Nancy Birdsall. Nancy’s paper, entitled ‘How to Unlock the $1 Trillion’, reckons ‘as much as
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Which big developing country economies are most likely to crash?
March 3, 2009
This week’s Economist has a go at identifying the dominos before they fall. It says ‘The drought of foreign capital is beginning to wreck many economies in central and eastern Europe. Currencies, shares and bonds are tumbling, and some economists fear that one or more of these countries could default on its foreign debts. Emerging-market crises have a nasty habit
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Another 100m in poverty; 700,000 dead children in Africa: the latest World Bank predictions on the crisis
February 18, 2009
Chilling new numbers from the World Bank on the human impact of the global economic crisis. New estimates for 2009 suggest that lower economic growth rates will trap 46 million more people on less than $1.25 a day than was expected prior to the crisis. An extra 53 million will stay trapped on less than $2 a day. This is
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What is Gordon Brown thinking on the G20 summit?
February 9, 2009
I joined a roomful of suits today for an hour with the PM. The venue was Lancaster House, the pink marble and gilt architectural cheesecake that will be the venue for the G20 summit on 2 April. Perhaps there’s guilt as well as gilt – Lancaster House previously hosted talks that led to the independence of Zimbabwe, Ghana and Kenya,
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Is The Economist going socialist?
February 4, 2009
The back half of The Economist (business, finance and economics) is having an excellent crisis. If you’re willing to filter out the gratuitous (and increasingly defensive) neoclassical riffs, there is some really excellent analysis in there and even some (perhaps inadvertent) progressive thinking. This week’s edition includes a three page briefing on the Asian economies and a handy summary of the
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Protectionism – good or bad? It depends……
February 3, 2009
I wrote this for the ‘Development and the Crisis‘ website I plugged recently, but thought I’d recycle it here: It’s official. Protectionism is the Great Satan. Gordon Brown decries it in Davos; William Easterly crows over what he sees as Dani Rodrik’s conversion to the cause. All countries must eschew protectionism or risk a disastrous return to the trade wars that triggered
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