Person:
Cord, Louise
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Poverty,
Development economics,
Gender
Degrees
Departments
Global Practice on Poverty, The World Bank
Africa
Africa
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
March 15, 2023
Biography
Louise Cord is the Country Director for Senegal, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Guinea Bissau, and Mauritania, based in Dakar, Senegal. A US national, she joined the Bank in 1991 as a Young Professional in the Bank’s Young Professional Program. She has since held various positions in the Bank’s poverty reduction and sustainable development departments, working specifically on inclusive growth, poverty reduction and rural development. She has worked in Africa, Latin America, and Eastern and Central Europe. Prior to her appointment as Country Director, she was Practice Manager in the Poverty Global Practice responsible for Latin America and the Caribbean. She has published on rural poverty, pro-poor growth, and inclusive growth challenges and strategies in Latin America and the Caribbean. She holds a PhD in development economics from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
Publication Search Results
1 - 6 of 6
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Publication
Climate Change and Poverty : An Integrated Strategy for Adaptation
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-07)Developing countries are most exposed to the impact of climate change and within these countries, the poor face the brunt of the burden. Climate change is not a discrete problem that can be dealt with through isolated reforms: impacting economic growth, health, and institutional capacity, it represents a full-frontal challenge to development. This note traces the multi-dimensional impacts of climate change, particularly on the poor, and proposes a three pronged integrated response to promote adaptation and help poor households cope with related risks. -
Publication
Inequality Stagnation in Latin America in the Aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis
(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2014-12)Over the past decade (2003-12), Latin America has experienced strong income growth and a notable reduction in income inequality, with the region's Gini coefficient falling from 55.6 to 51.8. Previous studies have warned about the sustainability of such a decline, and this paper presents evidence of stagnation in the pace of reduction of income inequality in Latin America since 2010. This phenomenon of stagnation is robust to different measures of inequality and is largely attributable to the impact of the Global Financial Crisis on Mexico and Central America, where inequality rose after 2010 as labor income recovered. Moreover, this paper finds evidence that much of the continuation of inequality reduction after the crisis at the country level has been due to negative or zero income growth for households in the top of the income distribution, and lower growth of the incomes of the poorest households. The crisis also highlighted weaknesses in the region's labor markets and the heavy reliance on public transfers to redistribute, underscoring the vulnerability of the region's recent social gains to global economic conditions. -
Publication
Shared Prosperity and Poverty Eradication in Latin America and the Caribbean
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2015-04)Over the last decade Latin America and the Caribbean region has achieved important progress towards the World Bank Group's goals of eradicating extreme poverty and boosting income growth of the bottom 40 percent, propelled by remarkable economic growth and falling income inequality. Despite this impressive performance, social progress has not been uniform over this period, and certain countries, subregions and even socioeconomic groups participated less in the growth process. As of today, more than 75 million people still live in extreme poverty in the region (using $2.50/day/capita), half of them in Brazil and Mexico, and extreme poverty rates top 40 percent in Guatemala and reach nearly 60 percent in Haiti. This means that extreme poverty is still an important issue in both low- and middle-income countries in the region. As growth wanes and progress in reducing the still high levels of inequality in the region slows, it will be more important than ever for governments to focus policies on inclusive growth. The book includes an overview that highlights progress towards the goals of poverty eradication and shared prosperity between 2003 and 2012, unpacks recent gains at the household level using an income-based asset model, and examines some of the policy levers used to affect social outcomes in the region. It draws on 13 country studies, eight of which are featured in this volume: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. The other case studies include: Bolivia, Chile, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Honduras, which will be included in the web version of the book. -
Publication
Do Our Children Have a Chance? A Human Opportunity Report for Latin America and the Caribbean
(World Bank, 2012)This book reports on the status and evolution of human opportunity in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). It builds on the 2008 publication in several directions. First, it uses newly available data to expand the set of opportunities and personal circumstances under analysis. The data are representative of about 200 million children living in 19 countries over the last 15 years. Second, it compares human opportunity in LAC with that of developed countries, among them the United States and France, two very different models of social policy. This allows for illuminating exercises in benchmarking and extrapolation. Third, it looks at human opportunity within countries, across regions, states, and cities. This gives us a preliminary glimpse at the geographic dimension of equity, and at the role that different federal structures play. The overall message that emerges is one of cautious hope. LAC is making progress in opening the doors of development to all, but it still has a long way to go. At the current pace, it would take, on average, a generation for the region to achieve universal access to just the basic services that make for human opportunity. Seen from the viewpoint of equity, even our most successful nations lag far behind the developed world, and intracounty regional disparities are large and barely converging. Fortunately, there is much policy makers can do about it. -
Publication
Delivering on the Promise of Pro-Poor Growth : Insights and Lessons from Country Experiences
(Washington, DC: World Bank and Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)Delivering on the Promise of Pro-Poor Growth contributes to the debate on how to accelerate poverty reduction by providing insights from eight countries that have been relatively successful in delivering pro-poor growth: Bangladesh, Brazil, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Tunisia, Uganda, and Vietnam. It integrates growth analytics with the microanalysis of household data to determine how country policies and conditions interact to reduce poverty and to spread the benefits of growth across different income groups. This title is a useful resource for policy makers, donor agencies, academics, think tanks, and government officials seeking a practical framework to improve country level diagnostics of growth-poverty linkages. -
Publication
Social Sustainability in Development: Meeting the Challenges of the 21st Century
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-15)All development is about people: the transformative process to equip, link, and enable groups of people to drive change and create something new to benefit society. Development can promote societies where all people can thrive, but the change process can be complex, challenging, and socially contentious. Continued progress toward sustainable development is not guaranteed. The current overlapping crises of COVID-19, climate change, rising levels of conflict, and a global economic slowdown are inflaming long-standing challenges—exacerbating inequality and deep-rooted systemic inequities. Addressing these challenges will require social sustainability in addition to economic and environmental sustainability. Social Sustainability in Development: Meeting the Challenges of the 21st Century seeks to advance the concept of social sustainability and sharpen its analytical foundations. The book emphasizes social sustainability’s four key components: social cohesion, inclusion, resilience, and process legitimacy. It posits that •Social sustainability increases when more people feel part of the development process and believe that they and their descendants will benefit from it. •Communities and societies that are more socially sustainable are more willing and able to work together to overcome challenges, deliver public goods, and allocate scarce resources in ways perceived to be legitimate and fair so that all people may thrive over time. By identifying interventions that work to promote the components of social sustainability and highlighting the evidence of their links to key development outcomes, this book provides a foundation for using social sustainability to help address the many challenges of our time.