03. Journals
2,963 items available
Permanent URI for this collection
These are journal articles published in World Bank journals as well as externally by World Bank authors.
Sub-collections of this Collection
Items in this collection
1 - 10 of 68
-
Publication
Can Global De-Carbonization Inhibit Developing Country Industrialization?
(Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2012-06-01)Most economic analyses of climate change have focused on the aggregate impact on countries of mitigation actions. We depart first in disaggregating the impact by sector, focusing particularly on manufacturing output and exports. Second, we decompose the impact of a modest agreement on emissions reductions—17 percent relative to 2005 levels by 2020 for industrial countries and 17 percent relative to business-as-usual for developing countries—into three components: the change in the price of carbon due to each country's emission cuts per se; the further change in this price due to emissions tradability; and the changes due to any international transfers (private and public). Manufacturing output and exports in low carbon intensity countries such as Brazil are less affected. In contrast, in high carbon intensity countries, such as China and India, even a modest agreement depresses manufacturing output by 3–3.5 percent and manufacturing exports by 5.5–7 percent. The increase in the carbon price induced by emissions tradability hurts manufacturing output most while the real exchange rate effects of transfers hurt exports most. -
Publication
The Contours and Possibilities of Open Development
( 2011-09)Is the idea of open development another vague, endlessly elastic term capturing what is merely a passing mood, a fad? The goal of this issue of Development Outreach is to strike a resounding No. We will define open development in a clear and robust manner; and we will show that, rather than being a passing fancy, the idea of open development actually captures an emerging paradigm shift in how development is being done. We are also going to show that this new paradigm will endure. Before we define what open development is, however, we need to understand what the vanishing development paradigm has been. -
Publication
Enabling Open Government
( 2011-09)Globally, increasingly vigilant and vocal civil society groups—important actors in the new multilateralism—are demanding that companies publish what they pay in revenues, aid agencies publish what they fund, and governments publish what they spend. These initiatives reflect a renewed and heightened focus on openness, transparency, and citizen participation in the discourse and practice of governance. This idea of open government stresses information sharing and participation, rather than discretion and secrecy, as foundations of good and effective governance. -
Publication
12 Country Comparisons on Research, Technology, and More
( 2011-09)12 Country Comparisons on Research, Technology and More -
Publication
New Media : Challenging the Establishment
( 2011-09)Individual citizens can effect social change through mediated action. There has been a paradigmatic shift in how social networks coalesce online for collective action. The Internet, and especially the creation of open and accessible social media networks, has facilitated and significantly accelerated the generation and mass awareness of social categories, such as people with grievances about government corruption. It has also provided the means to create and share an abundance of content—images, videos, and stories— that feed the narratives around which networks for action coalesce. -
Publication
New Structural Economics : A Framework for Rethinking Development
(World Bank, 2011-08-01)As strategies for achieving sustainable growth in developing countries are re-examined in light of the financial crisis, it is critical to take into account structural change and its corollary, industrial upgrading. Economic literature has devoted a great deal of attention to the analysis of technological innovation, but not enough to these equally important issues. The new structural economics outlined in this paper suggests a framework to complement previous approaches in the search for sustainable growth strategies. It takes the following into consideration. First, an economy's structure of factor endowments evolves from one level of development to another. Therefore, the optimal industrial structure of a given economy will be different at different levels of development. Each industrial structure requires corresponding infrastructure (both “hard” and “soft”) to facilitate its operations and transactions. Second, each level of economic development is a point along the continuum from a low-income agrarian economy to a high-income industrialized economy, not a dichotomy of two economic development levels (“poor” versus “rich” or “developing” versus “industrialized”). Industrial upgrading and infrastructure improvement targets in developing countries should not necessarily draw from those that exist in high-income countries. Third, at each given level of development, the market is the basic mechanism for effective resource allocation. However, economic development as a dynamic process requires industrial upgrading and corresponding improvements in “hard” and “soft” infrastructure at each level. Such upgrading entails large externalities to firms' transaction costs and returns to capital investment. Thus, in addition to an effective market mechanism, the government should play an active role in facilitating industrial upgrading and infrastructure improvements." -
Publication
A Comparative Perspective on Poverty Reduction in Brazil, China, and India
(World Bank, 2011-07-02)Brazil, China, and India have seen falling poverty in their reform periods, but to varying degrees and for different reasons. History left China with favorable initial conditions for rapid poverty reduction through market-led economic growth; at the outset of the reform process there were many distortions to be removed and a relatively low inequality of access to the opportunities so created, though inequality has risen markedly since. By concentrating such opportunities in the hands of the better off, prior inequalities in various dimensions handicapped poverty reduction in both Brazil and India. Brazil's recent success in complementing market-oriented reforms with progressive social policies has helped it achieve a higher proportionate rate of poverty reduction than India, although Brazil has been less successful in terms of economic growth. In the wake of its steep rise in inequality, China might learn from Brazil's success with such policies. India needs to do more to assure that poor people are able to participate in both the country's growth process and its social policies; here there are lessons from both China and Brazil. All three countries have learned how important macroeconomic stability is to poverty reduction. -
Publication
Are The Poverty Effects of Trade Policies Invisible?
(World Bank, 2011-05-31)Beginning with the WTO's Doha Development Agenda and establishment of the Millennium Development Goal of reducing poverty by 50 percent by 2015, poverty impacts of trade reforms have become central to the global development agenda. This has been particularly true of agricultural trade reforms due to the importance of grains in the diets of the poor, presence of relatively higher protection in agriculture, as well as heavy concentration of global poverty in rural areas where agriculture is the main source of income. Yet some in this debate have argued that, given the extreme volatility in agricultural commodity markets, the additional price and therefore poverty impacts due to trade liberalization might well be indiscernible. This paper formally tests the “invisibility hypothesis” using the method of stochastic simulation in a trade-poverty modeling framework. The hypothesis test is based on the comparison of two samples of price and poverty distributions. The first originates solely from the inherent variability in global staple grains markets, while the second combines the effects of inherent market variability with those of trade reform in these same markets. Results, at the national and stratum level indicate that the short-run poverty impacts of full trade liberalization in staple grains trade worldwide, are distinguishable in only four of the fifteen countries, suggesting that impacts of more modest agricultural trade reforms are indeed likely to be invisible in short run. Countries that show statistically significant short run impacts are the ones characterized by high staple grains tariffs and/or a moderate degree of grain markets variability. Within each country, results are heterogeneous. In two thirds of the sample countries, agriculturally self-employed poor experience statistically significant poverty impacts from trade liberalization. However, this figure is under a third for all the other strata. -
Publication
Cities on the Prowl
( 2011-04)Cities in the modern world are beginning to share some features with the city-states of millennia past. Now, as then, cities are important, even critical, to economic development. Unlike the walled cities that harbored flourishing trade in medieval Europe, today, cities by the thousands all around the world are looking outward in search not of silk and spices, but rather sources of finance, global talent, and most of all, good ideas. But the search for knowledge isn't always easy. -
Publication
Development with a Human Face
( 2011-04)Archbishop Njongonkulu NdunGabonne is Head of African Monitor, a pan-African nonprofit or Gabonnization that monitors development funding, delivery, and impact and helps bring African voices to the development agenda.