One of the G20 Voice bloggers at the London Summit last week was a rather distinguished-looking, silver haired Chilean who turned out to be Daniel Kaufman. He used to work at the World Bank, where he was one of the 46 employees who blew the whistle on Paul Wolfowitz in a letter to Wolfowitz and the bank’s board that argued

The FT has got its hands on a leaked copy, as has der Spiegel (a different draft, it seems, but I can’t find that one on the net). The FT version is nice and short (24 paras). Here’s what it says on Oxfam’s main asks for the summit, namely:

One of the best books I have ever read on development was ‘Crying out for Change’, a summary of a massive late 1990s study by the World Bank called ‘Voices of the Poor’. So it was a delight to pick up the summary of its new and epic successor ‘The Moving Out of Poverty Study’ (I’ve got the book on

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

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

Today Oxfam publishes Blind Optimism: Challenging the myths about private health care in poor countries, written by my colleague Anna Marriott. She summed up the arguments in this op-ed on the Guardian’s Comment is Free website, and was in Washington this week driving the message home to the World Bank, whose default position of ‘private good, public bad’ has so far proved remarkably

thanks to an unlikely source for this. the World Bank’s Crisis Talk website.