Coming Together: How a New Global Partnership on Development Cooperation was Forged at the Busan High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness

Adapting development cooperation to the new aid ecosystem requires an understanding of how new players and new circumstances are changing aid effectiveness. Over 2,500 participants came to Busan to discuss new directions in development cooperation. The forum concluded with a broadly endorsed outcome document that emphasised the newly important role of south-south cooperation, the implications of the greater willingness of the private sector to invest in a range of developing countries, new approaches towards fragile and post-conflict states and the formation of a new global partnership for effective development cooperation. Several DAC donors made last-gasp efforts to meet commitments made at Accra, especially on transparency, where the US and Canada joined the common standards developed by the International Aid transparency Initiative. The attendance of major political figures, including President Kagame of Rwanda, Secretary Clinton, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, OECD Secretary General José Ángel Gurría, Queen Rania and President Lee Myung-bak of Korea, helped shift the discussion from technical considerations of aid effectiveness to political issues with improving development effectiveness

Is a Growing Middle Class Good for the Poor? Social Policy in a Time of Globalization

We examine the effect of the rise and evolution of the middle class on extreme poverty, using the World Bank's international poverty line of $1.90 per person per day in 2011 purchasing power parity (PPP)- adjusted terms. Like the definition of poverty, the definition of the middle class used here is also set in absolute terms, comprising households where per capita income or consumption lies between$11 and $110 per person per day in 2011 PPP terms—referred to as a "global," as opposed to national, definition of the middle class (Kharas, 2017). We argue that middle-class expansion initially is pro-poor given the incentives of the emerging middle class and the working poor to cooperate on matters of social policy. As citizens join the ranks of the middle class, they lobby for programs that provide them income stability and protections against shocks (social insurance). By allying with the working poor who seek social assistance (income transfers), middle-class constituents increase their bargaining power relative to elites who seek labor flexibility and lower taxes in a competitive global economy. Over time, however, as the middle class prospers and acquires greater political influence, the balance of programs shifts increasingly toward social insurance and away from social assistance. In this way, the middle class begins to capture an increasing proportion of the benefits of social spending, leaving less for welfare services targeted exclusively at the poorest. One implication of this is that the emerging middle class has never been truly progressive, because progressivity ultimately comes at its own expense

An Analysis of Russia's 1998 Meltdown: Fundamentals and Market Signals

Russia, macroeconomics, 1998, market signals

What do we know about poverty in North Korea?

Reliable quantitative information on the North Korean economy is extremely scarce. In particular, reliable income per capita and poverty figures for the country are not available. In this contribution, we provide for the first time estimates of absolute poverty rates in North Korean subnational regions based on the combination of innovative remote-sensednight-time light intensity data (monthly information for built areas) with estimated income distributions. Our results, which are robust to the use of different methods to approximatethe income distribution in the country, indicate that the share of persons living in extreme poverty in North Korea may be larger than previously thought. We estimate a poverty rate for the country of around 60% in 2018 and a high volatility in the dynamics of income at the national level in North Korea for the period 2012–2018. Income per capita estimates tend to decline significantly from 2012 to 2015 and present a recovery since 2016. The subnational estimates of income and poverty reveal a change in relative dynamics since the second half of the 2012–2018 period. The first part of the period is dominated by divergent dynamics inincome across regions, while the second half reveals convergence in regional income

LDC savings rates and debt crises

Conventional wisdom holds that LDC debt problems reflect, in part, the switch of foreign financing towards commercial loans. With no adequate supervision over the use of these funds, international finance may not have improved the capacity to repay external debt. This paper tests two aspects of this proposition. First, have commercial loans been directed more towards consumption and less to investment than official loans? We find no evidence to suggest this has been true. Second, does an increase in the marginal propensity to invest out of foreign loans improve creditworthiness? Again, we find no supporting evidence. We do find, however, that raising the marginal rate of domestic saving out of income does improve creditworthiness. This provides justification for policy conditionality associated with foreign borrowing that goes beyond concern with the uses of individual loans.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/27256/1/0000265.pd

Will the Sustainable Development Goals be fulfilled? Assessing present and future global poverty

Monitoring progress towards the fulfillment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires the assessment of potential future trends in poverty. This paper presents an econometric tool that provides a methodological framework to carry out projections of poverty rates worldwide and aims at assessing absolute poverty changes at the global level under different scenarios. The model combines country-specific historical estimates of the distribution of income, using Beta–Lorenz curves, with projections of population changes by age and education attainment level, as well as GDP projections to provide the first set of internally consistent poverty projections for all countries of the world. Making use of demographic and economic projections developed in the context of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, we create poverty paths by country up to the year 2030. The differences implied by different global scenarios span worldwide poverty rates ranging from 4.5% (around 375 million persons) to almost 6% (over 500 million persons) by the end of our projection period. The largest differences in poverty headcount and poverty rates across scenarios appear for Sub-Saharan Africa, where the projections for the most optimistic scenario imply over 300 million individuals living in extreme poverty in 2030. The results of the comparison of poverty scenarios point towards the difficulty of fulfilling the first goal of the SDGs unless further development policy efforts are enacted