Publication: Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics 2003 : The New Reform Agenda
Loading...
Published
2003
ISSN
1020-4407
Date
2013-08-16
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
The Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics seeks to expand the flow of ideas among development policy researchers, academics, and practitioners from around the world. It is a premier forum for World Bank and other experts to exchange ideas, challenge one another's findings, and expand theoretical and practical knowledge of development. Each year the topics selected for the conference represent new matters of concern or areas that will benefit from a review of what we know and from the identification of what still needs to be explored and expanded. This year's conference, held at the World Bank on April 29-30, 2002, addressed four themes: trade and poverty, Africa's future in terms of industrial and/or agricultural development, education and empowerment, and investment climate and productivity, with Andrew Berg and Anne Krueger, Paul Collier, Simeon Djankov, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-De-Silanes, and Andrei Schleifer, Ravi Kanbur, Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, L. Alan Winters, and Adrian Wood. World Bank President James D. wolfensohn, Chief Economist Nicholas Stern, and John B. Taylor also addressed the conference.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Pleskovic, Boris; Stern, Nicholas. Pleskovic, Boris; Stern, Nicholas, editors. 2003. Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics 2003 : The New Reform Agenda. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/15129 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Has India’s Economic Growth Become More Pro-Poor in the Wake of Economic Reforms?(2009-10-01)The extent to which India's poor have benefited from the country s economic growth has long been debated. This paper revisits the issues using a new series of consumption-based poverty measures spanning 50 years, and including a 15-year period after economic reforms began in earnest in the early 1990s. Growth has tended to reduce poverty, including in the post-reform period. There is no robust evidence that the responsiveness of poverty to growth has increased, or decreased, since the reforms began, although there are signs of rising inequality. The impact of growth is higher for poverty measures that reflect distribution below the poverty line, and it is higher using growth rates calculated from household surveys than national accounts. The urban-rural pattern of growth matters to the pace of poverty reduction. However, in marked contrast to the pre-reform period, the post-reform process of urban economic growth has brought significant gains to the rural poor as well as the urban poor.Publication Africa's Pulse, April 2013 : An Analysis of Issues Shaping Africa's Economic Future(Washington, DC, 2013-04)This Africa's pulse newsletter includes the following headings: Sub-Saharan African countries continue to grow at a steady pace; the region's decade-long economic expansion appears sustainable; and for newly resource-rich countries, strong governance will be key to harnessing resource wealth for developmentPublication Reaching the Rural Poor : A Renewed Strategy for Rural Development(Washington, DC, 2003-08)"From Vision to Action", the Bank's previous rural development strategy launched in 1997, had a decisive influence on global thinking - but disappointing results on the ground. In 2001, lending for agricultural projects was the lowest in the Bank's history. The new strategy is results oriented: "Reaching the Rural Poor" stresses practice, implementation, monitoring, and empowerment of the people it is designed to help. This strategy responds to changes in: the global environment; in client countries; and, in the Bank, starting with the development of regional action plans, and extensive consultations at the regional level. It also reflects, and reinforces the Bank's commitment to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals to increase rural incomes, and broaden opportunities for rural people. The key features of this strategy are to: focus on the rural poor; foster broad-based economic growth; address rural areas comprehensively; forge alliances of all stakeholders; and, address the impact of global developments on client countries. In this capacity, support for better agricultural, and trade policies, should be achieved through increased advocacy for trade liberalization, by mainstreaming agricultural trade liberalization, and trade-capacity development in the Bank's country assistance, and operations; and, by facilitating capacity building through technical assistance in the areas of standards, and sanitary and phytosanitary regulations.Publication Rethinking Development(2000-02-16)James D. Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank Group, discussed his vision for development, addressing these topics: poverty and the development agenda; rethinking the approach; the global trading system and the development agenda; and the partnership imperative. He concludes that the Bank must work to realize an ambitious vision if we are to go forward together into a new century in which the long pent up aspirations of the poor of the earth are to have the chance for fulfillment that they deserve.Publication Learning from Developing Country Experience : Growth and Economic Thought Before and After the 2008–09 Crisis(2011-08-01)The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it documents the changing global landscape before and after the crisis, emphasizing the shift towards multipolarity. In particular, it emphasizes the ascent of developing countries in the global economy before, during, and after the crisis. Second, it explores what these global economic changes and the recent crisis imply for shifts in the direction of research in development economics. The paper places a particular emphasis on the lessons that developed countries can learn from the developing world.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Digital Progress and Trends Report 2023(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-03-05)Digitalization is the transformational opportunity of our time. The digital sector has become a powerhouse of innovation, economic growth, and job creation. Value added in the IT services sector grew at 8 percent annually during 2000–22, nearly twice as fast as the global economy. Employment growth in IT services reached 7 percent annually, six times higher than total employment growth. The diffusion and adoption of digital technologies are just as critical as their invention. Digital uptake has accelerated since the COVID-19 pandemic, with 1.5 billion new internet users added from 2018 to 2022. The share of firms investing in digital solutions around the world has more than doubled from 2020 to 2022. Low-income countries, vulnerable populations, and small firms, however, have been falling behind, while transformative digital innovations such as artificial intelligence (AI) have been accelerating in higher-income countries. Although more than 90 percent of the population in high-income countries was online in 2022, only one in four people in low-income countries used the internet, and the speed of their connection was typically only a small fraction of that in wealthier countries. As businesses in technologically advanced countries integrate generative AI into their products and services, less than half of the businesses in many low- and middle-income countries have an internet connection. The growing digital divide is exacerbating the poverty and productivity gaps between richer and poorer economies. The Digital Progress and Trends Report series will track global digitalization progress and highlight policy trends, debates, and implications for low- and middle-income countries. The series adds to the global efforts to study the progress and trends of digitalization in two main ways: · By compiling, curating, and analyzing data from diverse sources to present a comprehensive picture of digitalization in low- and middle-income countries, including in-depth analyses on understudied topics. · By developing insights on policy opportunities, challenges, and debates and reflecting the perspectives of various stakeholders and the World Bank’s operational experiences. This report, the first in the series, aims to inform evidence-based policy making and motivate action among internal and external audiences and stakeholders. The report will bring global attention to high-performing countries that have valuable experience to share as well as to areas where efforts will need to be redoubled.Publication Empowerment in Practice : From Analysis to Implementation(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2006)This book represents an effort to present an easily accessible framework to readers, especially those for whom empowerment remains a puzzling development concern, conceptually and in application. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 explains how the empowerment framework can be used for understanding, measuring, monitoring, and operationalizing empowerment policy and practice. Part 2 presents summaries of each of the five country studies, using them to discuss how the empowerment framework can be applied in very different country and sector contexts and what lessons can be learned from these test cases. While this book can offer only a limited empirical basis for the positive association between empowerment and development outcomes, it does add to the body of work supporting the existence of such a relationship. Perhaps more importantly, it also provides a framework for future research to test the association and to prioritize practical interventions seeking to empower individuals and groups.Publication Global Economic Prospects, January 2025(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-16)Global growth is expected to hold steady at 2.7 percent in 2025-26. However, the global economy appears to be settling at a low growth rate that will be insufficient to foster sustained economic development—with the possibility of further headwinds from heightened policy uncertainty and adverse trade policy shifts, geopolitical tensions, persistent inflation, and climate-related natural disasters. Against this backdrop, emerging market and developing economies are set to enter the second quarter of the twenty-first century with per capita incomes on a trajectory that implies substantially slower catch-up toward advanced-economy living standards than they previously experienced. Without course corrections, most low-income countries are unlikely to graduate to middle-income status by the middle of the century. Policy action at both global and national levels is needed to foster a more favorable external environment, enhance macroeconomic stability, reduce structural constraints, address the effects of climate change, and thus accelerate long-term growth and development.Publication Environmental, Social, and Governance Investing(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-03-01)This primer responds to central banks’ growing demand for knowledge on social, governance, and environmental considerations (ESG) in the investment process. This area has gained traction in the last two decades. More recently, central banks’ interest in ESG has increased, but much of the information available is aimed at investors with different investment objectives and broadly diversified portfolios. The authors fill that information gap by reviewing the definitions of ESG and the main ESG investment approaches, including their applicability to asset classes. The authors then examine how foreign reserve managers can apply ESG investing in their reserve management operations. The authors find limited scope for implementing ESG strategies in reserve management, given that most central banks still invest primarily in sovereign bonds of major economies. Yet, the authors also identify opportunities and critical considerations for central banks interested in implementing ESG investing in their reserve management operations.Publication Moving Out of Poverty : Volume 1. Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Mobility(Washington, DC: World Bank and Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)This volume brings together multidisciplinary perspectives on poor people's mobility, a dynamic approach that hopefully will add to the reader's understanding of how and why people move into and out of poverty. The chapters draw on the latest longitudinal micro data to present a moving picture of poverty that is rather different from what one can see in single snapshots, the staple of traditional poverty analysis. The book is also important because the contributors' distinct disciplinary perspectives demonstrate clearly why it is critical to draw on diverse information to improve the reader's understanding about how to reduce poverty. The economic findings reinforce what has been known for some time: fast economic growth underpins poverty reduction, but the speed of declines in poverty is greatly affected by social and political factors. The economic panels also show that the people mired in chronic poverty around the world are actually fewer in number than the people moving in and out of poverty. Static studies do not capture this dynamic quality of poverty and vulnerability. Of particular interest are the chapters clarifying interactions between the local social, political, and economic factors that underlie persistent poverty, vulnerability, and inequality. They point to the need to draw from different disciplines as we turn to the task of reaching the bottom poor trapped in poverty and those churning in and out of poverty.