Do you remember The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier’s 2007 book which became a classic? If you do, you will certainly like his latest work, The Plundered Planet. He came to launch…
Financial institutions must become a central part in efforts against theft to ensure there are no financial safe havens for stolen funds. They could begin by taking voluntary initiatives to show they are serious in ensuring that “corrupt money stays out of my bank!”
On Monday, the world marked International Women’s Day. As a husband and father of strong, wonderful women, I am always very much aware of the occasion. But as the Vice…
The U.S. recession could hurt the South, particularly in oil and apparel exports, and Latin America and the Caribbean. But South-South trade is partly picking up the slack. Middle-income countries…
Joe Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate and former World Bank Chief Economist, is out again making headlines. This time because of his new book Freefall - America, Free Markets and the Sinking of the…
Recent events have rekindled interest in the role of primary commodities in development. Was the boom in commodity prices from around 2003 through 2008 just a cyclical event, or…
As my World Bank colleague Milan Brahmbhatt and I observed in a recent note, primary commodity exports remain crucial for most developing countries. When one takes a simple average across…
November marks the eighth anniversary of the Doha Development Agenda– the first multilateral trade negotiation under the auspices of the World Trade Organization. But what started as a real…
Once upon a (not long ago) time, there was a widely established set of blueprints for regimes of monetary and exchange rate policies expected to fit a full range…
In Times of Crisis, Women Can Be Agents of Change Gender Equality as Smart Economics Newsletter | October 2009 Gender Equality as Smart Economics sat down with OtavianoCanuto shortly after…
Picture a Latin American country sitting on US$350 billion of international reserves, while running current account deficit, fiscal deficit and paying an interest bill on public debt that hovers…
In PREM Note 141 released last week, Milan Brahmbhatt and Luiz Pereira da Silva point to several structural differences between the global economy today and in the 1930s that tend to…
Aggressive and innovative monetary and financial sector policy actions in developed economies have pulled the global financial system back from the brink of an abyss. But impaired assets are…
Like the rest of the world, the economic slowdown has not been favorable in Latin America. In general, exports are falling, unemployment is rising and the economic predictions are grim. Regional experts point to Honduras and Brazil as representing two different responses to the economic downturn
Squeezes of trade finance have been among the factors responsible for the recent collapse of trade. Those squeezes should be seen in the context of an overall “introspection” of…