Outreach materials

newsletters, brochures.

World Bank Research E-Newsletter [October 2007]

World Development Report (WDR) 2008: Agriculture for Development, calls for placing the sector at the center of the development agenda if the goals of halving extreme poverty and hunger by 2015 are to be realized. The last time a WDR on agriculture was published was in 1982, making this a landmark report that comes when many are calling for an African agricultural revolution. While 75 percent of the world’s poor live in rural areas in developing countries, only 4 percent of official development assistance goes to agriculture. In Sub-Saharan Africa, a region heavily reliant on agriculture for overall growth, public spending for farming is also only 4 percent of total government spending and the sector is still taxed at relatively high levels.

World Bank Research E-Newsletter [September-October 2007]

The global climate change agenda is increasingly in the news in the run up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali this December. In a timely brief, Craig Meisner and Uwe Deichmann describe research that provides insights on the attitudes that countries are likely to display on international treaties regulating carbon emissions. The analysis classifies countries in terms of their vulnerability along two dimensions. The first dimension is “source vulnerability”, which looks at access to fossil fuels and renewable energy, and the potential size of employment and income shocks following the introduction of some form of carbon tax. The second is “impact ulnerability”, or susceptibility to climate-related hazards and sea-level rise. The research uses composite measures drawn from a geo-referenced database of indicators related to global change and energy.

World Bank Research E-Newsletter [July-August 2007]

A new World Bank-APEC study, “Transparency & Trade Facilitation in the Asia Pacific: Estimating the Gains from Reform”, estimates that the potential intra-regional gains in APEC from improved transparency (the way in which trade reform measures are designed and administered) are substantial—approximately $148 billion, which is 7.5 percent of 2004 trade. Action to improve transparency could be undertaken in many forms, including within the current Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation framework or future talks on a Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific. While reform must continue to focus on traditional measures such as tariffs, transparency is also critical, say authors Helbe, Shepherd and Wilson.

World Bank Research E-Newsletter [May-June 2007]

Edited by Caglar Ozden and Maurice Schiff, this new research book confirms that migration reduces extreme poverty in developing countries—by as much as 35 percent in migrant households in Mexico. Further, new findings show that migration from parts of South Asia boosts girls’ education and healthcare back home. For example, migration in Pakistan increases girls’ school enrolment by as much as 54 percent compared with just 7 percent for boys. Also, migrants command higher wages on return to their home country than workers with no international exposure.

World Bank Research E-Newsletter [April 2007]

Global poverty rates continued to fall in the first four years of the 21st century, according to new international poverty line estimates by Chen and Ravallion that are based on data from over 500 household surveys spanning a hundred countries. The proportion of people living on less than $1 a day fell to 18.1 percent in 2004, leaving an estimated 969 million people living in extreme poverty. The research shows that while poverty as a share of total population has been declining along both the $1- and $2-a-day poverty lines, the actual headcount of poor people under $2 a day has been on the rise through most of the period, with not much progress in reducing their numbers in the developing world outside of China, even under $1 a day.