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    MIGA Annual Report 2014 : Insuring Investments, Ensuring Opportunities
    (Washington, DC: World Bank Group, 2014) Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency
    In 2014, the World Bank Group adopted a joint strategy for dealing with impediments to ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. One of the strategy’s key elements underscores the essential role private sector investment can play working alongside public sector support to bear down on the most challenging development issues client countries face, such as job creation, infrastructure deficits, and climate change. MIGA’s role has become increasingly valuable in delivering results to achieve these twin goals as demonstrated by the increased demand for our political risk insurance and credit enhancement products that facilitate the expansion of private investment into emerging markets. In fiscal year 2014, MIGA issued a record $3.2 billion in new guarantees while our gross exposure reached $12.4 billion. MIGA’s added value stems from our ability to mobilize private sector investment in environments that are often beyond the risk tolerance of commercial sources of capital. This past fiscal year, MIGA worked with various stakeholders to develop our own strategy that aligns our objectives with the World Bank Group’s twin goals and underscores our aspiration to achieve significant development impact beyond what we can do alone. To achieve this, MIGA will need to be financially sustainable by prudently managing our risks, covering operating costs, and creating financial latitude by growing the Agency’s capital base.
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    MIGA Annual Report 2013 : Insuring Investments, Ensuring Opportunities
    (Washington, DC: World Bank Group, 2013-10-11) Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency
    In fiscal year 2013, Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) issued 2.8 billion dollars in investment guarantees for projects in our developing member countries. At 1.5 billion dollars, representing more than half of new business, the bulk of MIGA's guarantees issued support investments in Sub-Saharan Africa. Sixty-nine percent of new business volume this year was in complex projects in infrastructure and extractive industries, a strategic priority for the Agency. This year, 82 percent of MIGA's new volume fell into one or more of strategic priority areas: investments in the world's poorest countries, "South-South" investments, investments in conflict-affected countries, and investments in complex projects. MIGA also established the conflict-affected and fragile economies facility to further deepen support to this priority area.
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    The World Bank Annual Report 2012: Volume 1. Main Report
    (Washington, DC, 2012-10-05) World Bank
    The 2012 annual report of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Development Association (IDA) contains messages from both outgoing President Robert B. Zoellick and incoming President Dr. Jim Yong Kim. The Board of Directors statement highlights the Bank's achievements in 2012. The report showcases the Corporate Scorecard, presented in four tiers, providing information on the Bank's overall performance and results. Tier I provides the global development context. Tier II includes aggregate data collected through the standardized sector indicators. Tier III shows the overall success of Bank activities in achieving their development goals, as well as the Bank's operations effectiveness. Tier IV presents the Bank's organizational effectiveness and modernization. The report also discusses the financial commitments and resources, an operational summary, and World Bank lending by theme and sector for 2007-2012. Additional information on activities and outcomes is available in the annexes.
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    Two Dragon Heads : Contrasting Development Paths for Beijing and Shanghai
    (World Bank, 2010) Yusuf, Shahid ; Nabeshima, Kaoru
    In broad terms, the sources of economic growth are well understood, but relatively few countries have succeeded in effectively harnessing this knowledge for policy purposes so as to sustain high rates of growth over an extended period of time. Among the ones that have done so, China stands out. Its gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate, which averaged almost 10 percent between 1978 and 2008, is unmatched. Even more remarkable is the performance of China's three leading industrial regions: the Bohai region, the Pearl River Delta, and the Yangtze River (Changjiang) delta area. These regions have averaged growth rates well above 11 percent since 1985. Shanghai is the urban axis of the Yangtze River Delta's thriving economy; Beijing is the hinge of the Bohai region. Their performance and that of a handful of other urban regions will determine China's economic fortunes and innovativeness in the coming decades. The balance of this volume is divided into five chapters. Chapter two encapsulates the sources of China's growth and the current and future role of urban regions in China. The case for the continuing substantial presence of manufacturing industry for growth and innovation in the two urban centers is made in chapter three. Chapter four briefly examines the economic transformation of four global cities and distills stylized trends that can inform future development in Beijing and Shanghai. Chapter five describes the industrial structure of the two cities, identifies promising industrial areas, and analyzes the resource base that would underpin growth fueled by innovation. Finally, chapter six suggests how strategy could be reoriented on the basis of the lessons delineated in chapter four and the economic capabilities presented in chapter five.
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    World Development Report 2009: Reshaping Economic Geography
    (World Bank, 2009) World Bank
    Places do well when they promote transformations along the dimensions of economic geography: higher densities as cities grow; shorter distances as workers and businesses migrate closer to density; and fewer divisions as nations lower their economic borders and enter world markets to take advantage of scale and trade in specialized products. World Development Report 2009 concludes that the transformations along these three dimensions density, distance, and division are essential for development and should be encouraged. The conclusion is controversial. Slum-dwellers now number a billion, but the rush to cities continues. A billion people live in lagging areas of developing nations, remote from globalizations many benefits. And poverty and high mortality persist among the world’s bottom billion, trapped without access to global markets, even as others grow more prosperous and live ever longer lives. Concern for these three intersecting billions often comes with the prescription that growth must be spatially balanced. This report has a different message: economic growth will be unbalanced. To try to spread it out is to discourage it to fight prosperity, not poverty. But development can still be inclusive, even for people who start their lives distant from dense economic activity. For growth to be rapid and shared, governments must promote economic integration, the pivotal concept, as this report argues, in the policy debates on urbanization, territorial development, and regional integration. Instead, all three debates overemphasize place-based interventions. Reshaping Economic Geography reframes these debates to include all the instruments of integration spatially blind institutions, spatially connective infrastructure, and spatially targeted interventions. By calibrating the blend of these instruments, today’s developers can reshape their economic geography. If they do this well, their growth will still be unbalanced, but their development will be inclusive.
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    World Development Report 1990: Poverty
    (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) World Bank
    This report is the thirteenth in the annual series addressing major development issues. This report is about the poor. It is thus about the fundamental issue in economic development : the eradication of poverty from the world. The report defines poverty in broad terms, to include literacy, nutrition, and health, as well as income. The evidence suggests that rapid and politically sustainable progress on poverty has been achieved by pursuing a strategy with two equally important elements. The first is to promote the efficient use of the poor's most abundant asset : labor. It calls for policies that harness market incentives, social and political institutions, infrastructure and technology. The second element is the provision of basic social services to the poor (e.g. primary health care, family planning, nutrition, and primary education). The report concludes that eliminating poverty altogether is not a realistic goal for the 1990s, but that reducing it greatly is entirely possible. Using plausible assumptions about the global economic environment, and with some policy improvements, the report projects a fall of one third in the number of people in poverty by the year 2000.