POVERTY: Brazil: World Bank loaning Brazil $6B to support social programs, especially poverty eradication

Associated Press, June 1 2011

BRASILIA, Brazil — The head of the World Bank says the institution is loaning Brazil up to $6 billion over the next year to support social programs.
Robert Zoellick, president of the Bank, says Wednesday the money will go toward Brazilian government programs to promote education, infrastructure risk management and most importantly toward poverty.
Brazil President Dilma Rousseff has made eradicating extreme poverty in Brazil the cornerstone of her social programs. Details on her poverty program are expected to be released Thursday.
Brazil’s government says 16 million people live in extreme poverty in the nation, surviving on $45 a month.
Zoellick says the World Bank promise of loans up to $6 billion is double what the Bank has provided to Brazil on average in the past.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/world-bank-loaning-brazil-6b-to-support-social-programs-especially-poverty-eradication/2011/06/01/AGJd8hGH_story.html

POVERTY: Brazil launches drive to lift 16 mln from poverty

Writing by Stuart Grudgings; editing by Cynthia Osterman : Jun 1 2011
BRASILIA, June 2 (Reuters) - President Dilma Rousseff launched an ambitious plan on Thursday to eliminate dire poverty in Brazil within four years by lifting more than 16 million people from conditions of "misery."
The "Brazil Without Misery" program is the signature policy of the former leftist guerrilla's first term, her advisers said, fulfilling one of the key promises she made in her campaign for the presidency last year.
Poorer voters, millions of whom benefited from rapid economic growth and an expanded anti-poverty program under former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, are the main electoral base for Rousseff's center-left Workers' Party.
The announcement of the new program in the capital Brasilia was a welcome relief for Rousseff following weeks of negative media coverage over a scandal that has tainted her chief of staff and exposed differences with her main coalition ally, the PMDB party.
The success of the Bolsa Familia family stipend program under Lula, which helped lift about 20 million people into a thriving lower middle class, showed that cutting poverty was a crucial part of Brazil's economic success, Rousseff said at a ceremony in the capital.
"Brazil proved to the world that the best way to grow is distributing wealth," she said, flanked by her troubled chief of staff Antonio Palocci and Vice President Michel Temer of the PMDB in an apparent show of unity.
Despite the strides Brazil has made in recent years, with brisk growth rates that have pushed it up the ranks of the world's largest economies, it still faced a "crisis" of poverty that was more serious than any financial crisis, she said.
"We can't forget that the most permanent, challenging and harrowing crisis is having chronic poverty in this country."

MULTI-PRONGED APPROACH
The new program aims to raise 16.2 million people above the level of extreme poverty, defined as an income of less than 70 reais ($44) per month, through a multi-pronged approach of expanded financial aid, improved education, access to water and energy, as well as job training.
The Bolsa Familia program, which gives a monthly stipend to families based on their children's school attendance, will be expanded to another 800,000 families, officials said. The program, which has been praised by the World Bank and copied by other developing countries, already reaches more than a quarter of Brazil's 190 million population.
Officials say poor families will also be provided with education and job training under the program, noting that 40 percent of those in extreme poverty are under the age of 14.
Families will be able to claim Bolsa Familia payments for 5 children, up from 3 now, resulting in another 1.3 million children included in the program.
The new anti-poverty drive will also quadruple the number of poor rural farmers who benefit from government food purchases and payments of up to 2,400 reais every six months to improve their productivity.
A separate Bolsa Verde (Green Stipend) program will hand out 300 reais every three months to families who help to preserve forests where they live.
"It is the state arriving where the poverty is, not the poor having to seek help," said Tereza Campello, the social development minister.
"It's a challenge implementing the policies."
Officials did not say how much the new program would cost.
The Bolsa Familia program has been widely praised for its simplicity and cost-effectiveness. While critics say it creates dependency on state handouts, the program stands in stark contrast to previous attempts in Brazil to reduce hunger that were bogged down by food distribution problems and theft.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/02/brazil-poverty-idUSN0225114420110602

POVERTY: Obscene Salaries Dominate at Int’l Development Banks

May 25, 2011  Richard Pollock

Dominique Strauss-Kahn's lavish lifestyle is no anomaly: the U.S. taxpayer-funded IMF, World Bank, and others are handing out blood-boiling salaries and perks. [Update: Congress may probe IMF’s $250K golden parachute for DSK.]
Many of Washington’s 2,600 technocrats working at the International Monetary Fund do not regard Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s lavish lifestyle as an anomaly.
Privately they admire it, recognizing it as a description of their own standard of living. They call their many unseen perks “golden handshakes.” At the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, the African Development Bank, and at the IMF, you find extravagantly paid men and women who masquerade as anti-poverty fighters for the Third World. As one World Bank vice president said upon his resignation: “Poverty reduction is the last thing on most World Bank bureaucrats’ minds.”
These global institutions are supposed to act as non-profits, but big salaries and big perks rule as the norm. And you’re paying for them: as the largest single contributor, American taxpayers pick up the tab.
By now everyone knows about DSK’s extravagant $420,000 employment agreement that included an additional $73,000 for living expenses — a provision explained thusly by the IMF: “To enable you to maintain … a scale of living appropriate to your position.” Most of the non-profit development world remained silent when the Fund announced a $250,000 “golden parachute” severance for the indicted managing director.
A PJM survey found that a common annual compensation package for senior management at the anti-poverty banks exceeds $500,000 — tax-free. World Bank President Robert Zoellick currently receives $441,980 in base salary and $284,500 in other benefits. Strauss-Kahn’s deputy, John Lipsky, receives $384,000 in base salary plus “living allowances.”
Some may argue as the IMF did that global financial leaders — even from governmental organizations – should be highly compensated. But the IMF and World Bank payments for their executives are three times the annual salary for U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, and four times the salary of America’s Federal Reserve governors: Bernanke’s gross annual salary is set at $199,700; his governors receive $179,000.
The global banks’ stratospheric governmental salaries are not limited to chief executives. Ten of Zoellick’s deputies receive tax-free base pay of $321,00 to $347,000, plus enjoy an additional $210,000 in benefits. Even mid-level World Bank employees earn well into six digits: the average salary for a professional manager is $181,000, plus $97,000 in benefits. A senior adviser receives on average $238,000 plus $127,000 in benefits. A vice president receives $286,000 plus $153,000 in benefits.
The biggest hidden benefits are the off-the-book perks called “living allowances.” These perks can nearly double a stated salary. Of the 2,600 IMF and 10,000 World Bank full-time employees, all receive some form of supplemental living allowances in addition to their base pay. These include home leave grants, dependent allowances, travel perks, and education “grants” for their children to attend private schools. In addition, they offer generous pensions and health insurance policies.
According to a U.S. General Accounting Office study, the average cost for these additional perks added $197,300 per employee cost beyond their base pay in 1994 dollars.
The public was awed by Strauss-Kahn’s ability to secure 24-hour standby first class travel, but he has a lot of company at the IMF. In fiscal year 2010 the IMF chalked up $169 million alone in airline fees. If every single employee traveled, that would be $61,000 in travel costs per employee. By 2013 the IMF estimates their air travel budget will escalate to $191 million.
As the United States is the single biggest contributor to the IMF and the World Bank, these salaries and benefits are paid for by the U.S. taxpayers. In 2009, when the IMF increased its lending capacity to $750 billion, the U.S. increased its contributions by $100 billion. In the final U.S. fiscal year budget, while there was a 2% across the board cut in federal spending, international expenditures to the banks rose 4%.
Congress has been passive. Although the U.S. executive directors to the Bank and the IMF are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, the Senate has not insisted on bringing salaries in line with U.S. norms.
U.S. Senator Mike Johanns (R-NB), the ranking Republican member on a Senate subcommittee overseeing international finance, said U.S. policymakers should at the very least review U.S. contributions to the IMF in light of the allegations surrounding Dominque Strauss-Kahn.
A 1977 U.S. law does mandate that the president “take all appropriate actions to keep the compensation for IMF employees at a level comparable to the compensation of both private business and the U.S. government in comparable positions.” The law has never been enforced.
Complaints about lavish payrolls have been present for a long time. In 1990 when Martin Irwin resigned as a vice president from the World Bank, he wrote a scathing paper titled “Banking on Poverty.” Prominent among the deficiencies he identified was that Bank employees were fixated on personal salaries, perks, and benefits, and little on the fate of the poverty-stricken:
The institution is plagued by massive overstaffing, bureaucratic gridlock, and staff preoccupation with further salary and benefit hikes. Public proclamations to the contrary, poverty reduction is the last thing on most World Bank bureaucrats’ minds.
1995 was the last year the GAO examined the IMF compensation structure. They concluded:
They exceed the pay rates in the public sector in all surveyed markets, as well as in the United Nations.
Last year, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee slammed all of the development banks, describing them as “international bureaucracies answerable to no one government or constituency.”
In 2007, blogger Sameer Dossani reminisced about growing up in a World Bank household — both parents worked for the World Bank:
As a child I heard snippets of conversation about West African travels and poverty around the world. I also picked up talk of “golden handshakes” and benefits such as my own private school education being subsidized by the Bank.

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-business-of-poverty-obscene-salaries-dominate-at-intl-development-banks/?singlepage=true

POVERTY: India: Playing with Poverty Statistics

May 17 2011
 Ranjani Iyer Mohanty is a writer and a business/academic editor. Her articles have been published in various international newspapers and magazines.


The poverty line for a given individual can be defined as the money the individual needs to achieve the minimum level of ‘welfare’ to not be deemed ‘poor,’ given its circumstances.”
This is how Martin Ravallion, director of the Development Research Group at the World Bank, defines the poverty line. In 2005, the World Bank revised the international poverty line up from $1 a day to $1.25 a day, but countries are allowed to set their own national poverty line. The Planning Commission has set India’s national line at 578 rupees a month, or the equivalent of 43 U.S. cents a day.
Even assuming only a charitable (to the government, that is) 30 days a month, that works out to less than 20 rupees a day. A half-litre packet of milk at Mother Dairy costs 10 rupees. One mango, those in season and heaped on carts by the side of the street, costs 10 rupees. And a cabbage …but no, your 20 rupees a day has already been spent. If you spend more than that, even on clothing or education or fuel, you cannot be termed as below the poverty line and therefore you are not eligible for BPL-related benefits and subsidies on food, shelter, and medical treatment. And note that the luxurious 20 rupees a day is for city dwellers; rural people have to spend less than 15 rupees a day in order to be below the poverty line.
The absurdity of such a low poverty line is astounding. Even the World Bank, which does not usually comment on national poverty lines, feels that India’s is too low and was hoping for a more realistic peg at $1.17 a day. Many concerned individuals have called India’s poverty line the “starvation line.” In fact, it is tending more toward the flat-line on a cardiac monitor.
The Multidimensional Poverty Index (developed by the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative) puts the number of poverty-stricken Indians at 645 million. A recent report by the Asian Development Bank says rising food prices will push a further 30 million Indians below the poverty line of $1.25 a day. According to the National Family Health Survey (2006) by the Government of India, the child malnutrition rate is 46%, which human rights lawyer Colin Gonzalves says translates into a horrific 2,500 child deaths every day.
Are the members of the Planning Commission living in India in 2011? Why this total disconnect with reality?
Now I know some will argue and say: “Hey, stop picking on the Government of India! Can’t you see they’re trying to do their best … for themselves, that is? So what if they spend money on seemingly unimportant things (like the Commonwealth Games, unnecessary signs, and personal security guards) and remain impassive while some of their colleagues are filling their Swiss bank accounts and lining their own pockets with our tax dollars? Besides, the state governments are at fault, too. And I earn way more than 578 rupees a month anyways – in fact, I spend almost that much on a cup of coffee whenever I stop in at 360 at the Oberoi. So what do I care about what or where the poverty line is or who’s under it? Let them eat cake.”

I think I’ve heard those famous last words somewhere else before.
But a second look at this whole issue got me doing a re-think: If we can have a floating exchange rate and a floating gold price, why not a floating national poverty line? It could actually be a big advantage in lowering our poverty rates.
While having the international poverty line at $1.25 a day may show India as having some 600 million people below it, simply moving the national poverty line to 43 cents a day reduces those below the poverty line to about 440 million. In fact, if the Planning Commission revises the poverty line to 20 cents a day, they can reduce poverty yet again. Of course, they could drop the national poverty line to 1 cent a day and thereby eradicate poverty in India altogether.
Learning from the wisdom of the government, I’ve decided to adopt similar measures for a more personal problem. I’ll be turning 50 next month … but that sounds rather old. So instead of accepting that reality and taking practical steps – like putting aside funds for later years or taking better care of my health – I’m going to pretend I’m living on Mars and then, using the Martian measurement of time to calculate my age, I can say I’m just a sprightly 26 years. Of course, I may die before I’m 40, but at least I can live and die under a happy illusion.
http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2011/05/17/india-journal-playing-with-poverty-statistics/

POVERTY: India’s Anti-Poverty Programs suffer widespread corruption

HEATHER TIMMONS : May 18, 2011
NEW DELHI — India spends more on programs for the poor than most developing countries, but it has failed to eradicate poverty because of widespread corruption and faulty government administration, the World Bank said Wednesday.
“India is not getting the ‘bang for the rupee’ that its significant expenditure would seem to warrant, and the needs of important population groups remain only party addressed,” John D. Blomquist, lead economist at the World Bank, wrote in a nearly 400-page study released Wednesday.
India spent 2 percent of its gross domestic product, or $28.6 billion last year, on social programs to alleviate and prevent poverty, the World Bank said, a higher percentage than any other country in Asia and about three times China’s spending.
The programs, central to the Congress party’s platform, include food distribution and health insurance initiatives that are supposed to reach hundreds of millions of households. The report was written at the “request of the government of India” and with full participation from various government bodies, the report said.
The World Bank on Wednesday recommended a radical overhaul of India’s social programs. “Marginal changes alone may not deliver the kind of safety net which a changing India needs for its poor and for its economy,” Mr. Blomquist wrote.
One of the primary problems, the World Bank said, was “leakages” — an often-used term in development circles that refers to government administrators and middle men stealing money, food and benefits. The bank said that 59 percent of the grain allotted for public distribution to the poor does not reach those households.
Instead of distributing food, the government might be better off giving out food stamps or cash transfers that can be easily traced through technology, the World Bank said.
India, the world’s the second-fastest growing major economy, after China, has had an economic boom in recent years that is transforming urban areas and creating a new class of extremely wealthy people. But social problems, including poverty, disease and illiteracy, remain widespread.
About 455 million Indian citizens live on less than $1.25 a day, the World Bank’s poverty line. A United Nations study released last year found more people living below the poverty threshold in eight states in India than in all of sub- Saharan Africa.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/19/world/asia/19india.html?_r=1

MALNUTRITION: Niger: World Bank to finance safety net for a million people

20/05/2011
The World Bank ’s Board approved today a new credit of US$70 million to implement a comprehensive social safety net system in Niger, where an estimated 60 percent of people lived below the poverty line in 2008 and over half the population lacks food security.
The funds will support about one million people over five years in a country hard hit by frequent drought and high food prices.
While Niger’s frequent food crises have so far been addressed mostly through short-term emergency assistance, the new safety net system will help poor and food-insecure people to access regular cash transfer and cash-for-work programs. It will focus on the five regions of Dosso, Maradi, Tahoua, Tillaberi and Zinder, where poverty is most concentrated and people are most vulnerable to food insecurity.
“An efficient safety net system is a solid investment for the future of Niger, where chronic malnutrition threatens the lives of hundreds of thousands of children during frequent mid-year famines,” said Ousmane Diagana, World Bank Country Director for Niger. “When vulnerable households can access a system that protects them from shocks, human development indicators such as nutritional status and school enrollment are very likely to improve over time and Niger’s economy stands to gain from higher productivity.”
In 2006, chronic malnutrition as measured by stunting (low height-for-age) was estimated at 50 percent among children under five years of age, making Niger the second-worst affected country in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Through a small but regular cash transfer of about US$20 (10,000 FCFA) per month for 24 months, 80,000 households, each consisting of seven to eight people on average, will benefit from an increase in income over a period of five years. Payments will be made to women through designated payment agencies, mostly microfinance institutions and mobile phone companies, and are expected to significantly improve food consumption among registered households.
As a soft condition, those receiving cash will be required to attend training and sensitization sessions aimed at improving household health, nutrition, and sanitation practices. This dimension will be developed with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and implemented by non-governmental organizations.
Through cash-for-work programs in areas affected by temporary acute food insecurity, about 15,000 people will receive approximately 60 days of temporary work annually, for a total of 60,000 people over five years. Non-governmental organizations will be hired to supervise participants during the agricultural off-season in activities such as soil conservation, rehabilitation of small infrastructure, and sanitation projects. Wages will be set at about US$2.2 per day—slightly below the market wage—to discourage participation of better-off households and reach those who need temporary income support through cash for work.
“This project has been designed in collaboration with the government on the basis of years of World Bank -supported analysis of Niger’s particular challenges,” said Carlo del Ninno, Senior Economist with the World Bank ’s Africa Region. “This analysis suggests that cash transfers to poor people for at least 18 months have a positive impact; and that essential family practices campaigns do improve overall family health and children’s nutritional status.”
The new financing is in the form of a credit from the International Development Association (IDA), the World Bank ’s fund for the poorest, under standard IDA terms.
http://finchannel.com/news_flash/World/87427_World_Bank_to_finance_safety_net_for_a_million_people_in_Niger/

POVERTY: The World Bank VS poverty: a game played by its own rules

05 May 2011

The top management of the World Bank, including its president Robert Zoellick, is seriously concerned about the threat of a global food crisis. The financier says that if there is a crisis it will be much more severe than all the preceding food crises ever seen.



Zoellick’s pessimistic expectations are based on the pace at which food prices are currently growing around the world. According to him, there has been a 38% price increase in the global food market, nearly reaching the critical level of 2008.
According to Robert Zoellick, such a situation may increase the poverty around the world. Masterforex-V Academy experts note that it is the World Bank (headed by Mr. Zoellick) that mainly influences the poverty levels of numerous countries by decreasing or increasing their ratings. Consequently, the World Bank and the IMF not only form their monetary and credit policies but also influence the international image of a country and its attractiveness for international investors.
 The WB can announce that the number of the poor in a certain country has dramatically increased and can offer the country’s government a loan, recommendations and instructions on how to make reforms. Ukraine may serve as an example: the WB experts directly influence the pension reform in Ukraine.
The WB can announce a decline in the amount of the poor as the result of its [WB] help. In this case that will be a signal for the country’s government to cooperate with the WB and the IMF. Tajikistan is a striking example: according to the WB, the poor people make up 47.2% of the entire population (it used to be 72%), implying that the poor are those who live on $2.5 a day.

What are Zoellick’s fears based upon?
1. The threat of another global crisis. According to Zoellick, the growing prices on food and crude oil as well as the instability in the Middle East well may lead to another global crisis. Such a statement was made after the meeting of the WB and the IMF in Washington. Any considerable shock is enough to start a crisis. However the major concern is the food price growth.
2. More people around the world find themselves living below the poverty line. According to the WB, since June 2010 the amount of such people has increased by 44M people, which means they cannot spend on food more than $1.25 a day.
3. Continuous price growth. If the prices on food around the world gain 10% more. The amount of those living below the poverty line will be increased by 10M people.
4. Food supply problem. Robert Zoellick says that the problem is urgent and needs to be solved as soon as
possible. Over 1 billion people are currently starving all around the world. Yet the amount grows by 68 people each minute.

What solutions are offered by the WB and IMF?
· First of all they say one shouldn’t trust the macroeconomic indicators of some specific countries. According to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director of the IMF, these days many countries are showing sound economic recovery, however it doesn’t mean that the living standards in those countries are improving. For example, Tunis and Egypt were showing economic recovery but the people didn’t feel that their living conditions were somehow changing for the better. It appears that some international financial institution will be determining a country’s living conditions with all the ensuing consequences. Especially notable is that the WB is going to initiate a series of reforms in the Middle East supposedly in order to not lose the young generation of the region.
· In order to do that the WB and the IMF are going to promote the creation of new jobs (in the Middle East and North Africa)
· Monetary policy. Both the institutions are going to directly participate in the development of the countries’ monetary policies.
· They are going to help the developing countries. The G20 Finance Ministers also promised to allocate $35B to help the counties of the Middle East and North Africa. In the short run the IMF and the WB may announce a decline in the poverty level in Egypt, Tunis, Yemen and even in the Eastern (rebellious) part of Libya.
So, the real and urgent problem of global poverty, which by the way has been partially caused by the IMF and the WB’s activity, is under the risk of turning into an efficient tool for political manipulation and speculation. At least it is difficult to believe in the IMF and the WB’s sincere desire to feed the hungry.

http://www.profi-forex.us/news/entry4000001393.html

POVERTY: World Bank: 1.5 billion people live in countries affected by repeated cycles of violence and conflict

 April 13, 2011 : Leni Wild


The World Bank’s latest World Development Report (WDR) presents some sobering realities for the relationship between conflict and underdevelopment in the world today. It estimates that 1.5 billion people live in countries affected by repeated cycles of violence and conflict, and that no low-income fragile country has yet to achieve a single Millennium Development Goal. Changing patterns of conflict and violence now characterise the lives of many in the poorest countries; while deaths from civil war have fallen to one-quarter of what they were in the 1980s, one in four people still live in conflict affected countries with very high levels of criminal and political violence.
The WDR offers important new perspectives for how to make progress in supporting transitions out of fragility:
The WDR stresses the importance of ‘getting the basics rights’ – that citizens’ security, justice and access to jobs should be key priorities for achieving greater stability.
The Report underpins this with a recognition that institutional transformation sits at the heart of successful transitions out of fragility. It stresses the role of legitimate institutions in providing the ‘immune system’ against external and internal shocks, something emphasised by recent reviews of the impact of the financial crisis. Helpfully, notions of legitimacy are linked to concepts of social cohesion and social capital, rather than narrow normative commitments to Western democratic models, and the report takes care to emphasise ‘best fit’ over ‘best practice’ models for institutional change.
Linking to institutional transformations, it emphasises the need for much longer timeframes for engagement in fragile states, and draws on an impressive historical analysis of transitions out of fragility for a wide range of countries.
The Report turns the spotlight back on the international community. It highlights the importance of addressing external stresses, such as the infiltration of organised crime and trafficking networks or spill-overs from neighbouring conflicts. And it explicitly recognises tensions between the need for smarter, longer-term engagement to address fragility, and international actors’ sensitivities to domestic criticism on the grounds of waste, corruption or a lack of results. This is termed the ‘dual accountabilities’ between countries’ own taxpayers and partner countries, and it is rightly identified as a key factor behind the lack of progress in changing the approaches of international actors in fragile contexts. Madeleine Bunting recently commented on these tensions in the UK context too.
While these dimensions provide important contributions to this debate, I would have liked to see more thinking about the operational implications of some of this analysis. Two key issues seem to stand out.
Firstly, the WDR helpfully nuances its discussion on legitimacy with reference to moving away from blueprints and towards ‘best fit’, but it skirts around the state-society relations that underpin legitimacy. Instead, it falls back on some of the language of good governance and conventional supply versus demand approaches to accountability. This misses the current state of thinking on these issues, which emphasises moving beyond supply/demand dichotomies and the need to work much more effectively with a range of formal and informal institutions (with the latter often key providers of security and justice in many fragile states). This is challenging for donors (bilateral and multilateral) and greater guidance is needed for how to proceed.
Secondly, the report makes a useful attempt to bring in a wider audience – diplomatic and security actors as well as emerging donors and the private sector all get a mention – but it does not substantively engage with what it would take to ensure greater coherence and cooperation within and across the international community. Reviews of Whole-of-Government approaches, for instance, highlight that greater cooperation requires significant political will and strong mechanisms for mediating between competing priorities. Lessons may be learnt from this for attempts to build deeper cooperation but the WDR is generally silent on how this might be substantively realised.
What the WDR makes clear is that this is not business as usual and that new approaches are needed to effectively engage with fragile states. While this is not new to a number of bilateral donors (including the UK, which is scaling up its commitments to these countries), it is interesting that the World Bank has gone so far in analysing some of the political dynamics, tensions and challenges that sit at the heart of addressing conflict and fragility.
The Report is effectively calling for major shifts in the type of things that are funded in fragile states, with a lot more emphasis on effective, legitimate police forces and justice systems. In many ways this goes well beyond the current mandate of the World Bank, and these are not areas where it has a strong track record. But the Report is clear that multilaterals should engage more in some areas that have traditionally been outside their span of action. While I applaud this shift towards taking politics more seriously, we should not underestimate the challenges it will pose for operational staff, both within the World Bank and beyond.
http://blogs.odi.org.uk/blogs/main/archive/2011/04/13/57800.aspx?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20110503

MALARIA: Sustain 'Fragile' Successes in Fight Against Malaria

29 April 2011
Robert B. Zoellick and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf: Robert B. Zoellick is President of the World Bank Group; Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is President of Liberia, and the incoming Chair of the African Leaders Malaria Alliance (ALMA), which comprises African Heads of State and Government working to end malaria-related deaths in Africa.


We have encouraging news out of Africa this week of World Malaria Day, as we take stock of the illnesses and deaths caused by this longtime scourge.
Eleven countries in Africa had slashed the number of confirmed malaria cases, malaria-related hospital admissions or deaths by more than 50 percent by end 2009. When 2010 data becomes available we expect it to show that even more countries have shown similar progress.
In a region that has borne a heavy malarial burden of death and debilitating illness, part of the good news stems from the fact that approximately three-quarters of the people at risk of contracting malaria were using insecticide-treated mosquito nets by the end of 2010. With a decisive push, the goal of protecting Africa’s population with bed-nets and effectively preventing the fevers and crushing headaches that are the dreaded symptoms of malaria appears within Africa’s reach.
Even as we mark what may be a turning point, we know that malaria is an ancient foe we can never underestimate. Although global deaths from malaria have fallen from nearly a million a year in 2000, the disease continues to exact a great toll, killing 781,000 people across the world in 2009. More than 90 percent of these deaths occurred in Africa, where the disease accounted for about one in six child deaths.
The collective success is substantial, but is also fragile and must be sustained. The consequences of losing the focus on malaria would be deadly. Mosquito bed-nets last about three years and a failure to replace the over 300 million nets blanketing Africa over the coming three years could lead to resurgent malaria illness and deaths.
Just this past year, Zambia faced a resurgence of malaria in a few provinces when mosquito nets were not replaced in time. Deaths and illness increased within months. Rapid action to address this increase has since been taken by the Zambian government, together with the World Bank, UN Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Stanbic Bank, the African Leaders Malaria Alliance (ALMA), and the UN Special Envoy’s Office.
While funding is important, it is really the partnerships that have been built with citizens, governments, and healthcare providers as well as the increasing reliance on and use of science, technology and the body of global knowledge on what works that can accelerate progress in this area.
For instance, beyond the wide distribution of mosquito nets, ending malaria deaths will require making sure that effective diagnosis and timely treatment become available to every patient. Health authorities need to keep better track of where malaria still exists and which drugs produce the best health outcomes. We want funding to be effective, not simply throwing money at the problem.
In the wake of the financial crisis, we face difficult choices with limited resources. In Liberia, the priority is to end deaths from malaria above many other pressing needs, for both health and economic reasons. As a result, Liberia is on track to protect its entire population by year’s end.
Liberia is not alone. Thirty-nine African countries have united against the disease under ALMA, chaired by Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete. We have determined that the only way we can overcome the disease is through working together. No country is an island when it comes to malaria; mosquitoes do not respect borders.
In mobilizing the money, the bed nets, and the treatment, and in strengthening supply chains for lifesaving medicines, our bedrock guiding principle must be stronger accountability. ALMA’s flagship accountability initiative is a simple tool, commonly employed in the private sector: a scorecard. Currently under development with our partners in the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, the scorecard will track progress, identify what is working, what is not, and highlight where intervention is required. We will further expand the use of new technology platforms, such as SMS and Twitter, to reach hundreds of millions of people to create positive pressure at all levels, and to encourage demand for transparency, accountability and results by citizens.
Africa’s partners, including the World Bank, are committed to ending deaths from malaria. Last year the Bank pledged US$200 million to anti-malaria efforts in Africa, largely to provide bed-nets to families in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Sierra Leone and Zambia. This helped to close emergency gaps. Consistent with the priorities of African countries, we expect new financing mobilized from the latest replenishment of the International Development Association, the Bank’s fund for the poorest countries, to be committed to the fight against malaria, including through our work on helping African countries build stronger health systems.
So, as we take inspiration this World Malaria Day from African countries that now have malaria in retreat, we also need to recommit to finish the job. Allowing hard-won gains to be reversed cannot be an option.
http://allafrica.com/stories/201104290828.html

POVERTY: What Does Adam Smith’s Linen Shirt Have to do with Global Poverty?

Martin Ravallion 2011-04-18

In his Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations Adam Smith pointed to the social-inclusion role of a linen shirt in 18th century Europe:


“A linen shirt … is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct.”







This passage has often been used to justify the view that poverty is not absolute but relative—that certain socially-specific expenditures are essential for social inclusion, on top of basic needs for nutrition and physical survival.

The way this idea is implemented in practice is to set a “relative poverty line” that is a constant proportion of average income for the country and date in question. That is how poverty is measured in most of Western Europe. By contrast, poverty measures in developing countries have almost invariably used absolute lines, which aim to have a fixed real value over time. The World Bank’s international “$1 a day” poverty lines also aim to be absolute lines across countries, using purchasing power parities from the International Comparison Program.
Yet much social science research in developing countries has confirmed the social roles of certain forms of consumption—just as Adam Smith had noted about a linen shirt in 18th century Europe. Anthropologists and economists have pointed out that festivals, celebrations and communal feasts are not just entertainment. They have an important social role in maintaining the networks that are crucial to coping with poverty and even escaping it. Household budget surveys have often revealed seemingly high expenditures on celebrations and festivals by very poor people. It is also known that clothing can serve an important social role. In many developing countries today one can see even very poor, and evidently undernourished, people with cell phones. And much research has also suggested that people in poor countries care about relative deprivation, as typically revealed through self-reported questions on happiness or satisfaction with life.
But such research findings do not imply that poverty lines should also be set at a constant proportion of the mean. This assumes (implicitly) that the cost of social inclusion needs are much lower for poor people—indeed, their cost goes to zero as incomes fall to zero. That is implied by a poverty line set at a constant proportion of average income. If we were to apply such an idea to poor countries—recognizing that poor people too have social inclusion needs—we would be saying that the cost of Adam Smith’s linen shirt can be virtually zero for the poorest person. But that makes no sense; the cost of a socially-acceptable linen shirt will not be zero, and will presumably be no different for a poor person. This is a troubling property of such poverty measures.
To come up with a feasible approach to measuring “relative poverty” that can span both poor and rich countries, Tony Atkinson and Francois Bourguignon (AB) have postulated two key capabilities, namely physical survival and social inclusion. The former is the capability of being adequately nourished and clothed for meeting the physical needs of survival and normal activities. On top of this, a person must also satisfy certain social inclusion needs. Each capability has a corresponding poverty line, giving the absolute and relative lines. AB proposed that one should only be deemed “not poor” if one is neither absolutely poor nor relatively poor.
However, AB follow the Western European model of assuming that the relative line is a constant proportion of the mean. This assumption needs to be dropped, to allow for the (strictly positive) cost of Adam Smith’s linen shirt. On doing so one gets the “weakly relative poverty lines” that I have proposed in a paper with Shaohua Chen, soon to be published here. The following figure shows how we implement the idea, using the same data set on national poverty lines that we used to derive the new international absolute line of $1.25 a day (as documented here).




The weakly relative line is $1.25 a day up to a mean consumption of $2 a day, and then rises with a slope of 1:3. The lower bound to the relative line is $0.60 a day, which can be thought of as the cost of Adam Smith’s linen shirt.
With economic growth, our weakly relative poverty lines tend to rise after some point, and proportionately more as average income rises. But they will never be proportionate to the mean. So if all incomes grow at the same rate, all poverty measures will show a decline. This is in marked contrast to the strongly relative measures, which will show no change even when incomes of the poor grow at the same rate as for others.
On implementing this schedule of weakly relative poverty lines using 700 surveys for 115 countries, Chen and I find that there is more relative poverty in the developing world than previously thought. And the pace of progress against relative poverty is slower than that against absolute poverty. We find that 47% of the population of the developing world lived in relative poverty in 2005, of which about half lived in absolute poverty, as measured by the $1.25 a day line. The incidence of relative poverty fell from 53% in 1990 and 63% in 1981. This was not a sufficient rate of decline in the incidence of poverty to prevent a rise in the number of poor. By contrast, the corresponding absolute poverty measures show falling poverty counts in the aggregate.
http://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/what-does-adam-smith-s-linen-shirt-have-to-do-with-global-poverty

POVERTY: MDG poverty goals may be achieved, but child mortality is not improving

Claire Provost guardian.co.uk, 18 April 2011


IMF and World Bank advocate 'performance-related' pay for medics to improve maternal and child mortality, but the greatest threat to MDGs remains the 'cycles of violence' in fragile states

 
Children in Delhi, next to a billboard for a comic book fair in February. Child mortality targets for the millennium development goals are unlikely to be met and, despite India's economic progress, there remain deep-rooted wealth disparities and enduring social exclusion. Photograph: Manish Swarup/AP

Two-thirds of developing countries are on track or close to meeting the millennium development goal (MDG) targets for extreme poverty and hunger, say the World Bank and the IMF.
According to the Global Monitoring Report, released on Friday in Washington during the Bretton Woods spring meetings, the number of people living in extreme poverty – on less than $1.25 per day – will drop to 883 million by 2015, from 1.4 billion in 2005 and 1.8 billion in 1990.
The joint IMF-World Bank report explores current successes and shortfalls on achieving the MDGs, attempting to project future progress while also offering policy prescriptions – with an emphasis on sustained economic growth.
Much of world's recent progress on the first goal – to halve between 1990 and 2015 the proportion of people in extreme poverty and those suffering from hunger – reflects rapid growth in China and India; the report projects that, by 2015, only 4.8% of China's population will be in extreme poverty compared with 36% in sub-Saharan Africa. While the world is set to halve extreme poverty by 2015, 17 African countries are still off-track.
Progress on reducing poverty at national levels often obscures deep-rooted disparities, says the analysis, adding that enduring issues of social exclusion could lead to uneven improvements that would put at risk aggregate success.
At a press conference on Thursday, Robert Zoellick, the World Bank president, warned that high and volatile food prices could prevent success on poverty and hunger targets. Forty-four million people have "fallen into poverty" since June 2010, said Zoellick.
"If the food price index rises by just another 10% … another 10 million people will fall into extreme poverty where people live on less than $1.25 a day. And a 30% increase would add 34 million more people to the world's poor."
Zoellick's proposed steps to reduce the impact, and likelihood, of future food crises include a new code of conduct on export bans, improved information on the quality and quantity of food stocks, and preparing small stocks of humanitarian food in places like the Horn of Africa.
"The World Bank and the regional development banks can help countries with quick support for the most vulnerable through effective, targeted nutrition and safety-net programmes rather than mistaken price controls or broad-based increases in wages," he added.
Many developing countries are close to meeting targets on primary education completion and eliminating the gender disparity in education, as well as access to safe drinking water. However, no low-income country has reduced mortality for under-fives sufficiently and they are unlikely to meet that MDG target.
Maternal and child mortality targets remain among the most intractable of the goals: 40% of developing countries are far from meeting health MDGs, despite unprecedented amounts of aid funnelled into the health sector in the past 10 years.
Delfin Go, the World Bank's lead economist and the report's lead author, said: "Certain health and education outcomes are disappointing, in part because spending has focused largely on increasing the quantity of services, while not paying enough attention to quality." Go suggests improving incentives for health workers by, for example, paying on the basis of their performance, as well as "strengthening institutions".
The report points to Rwanda's experience, where the government supplemented primary healthcare with a "cash for performance" programme – paying clinics on the basis of, for example, the number of children vaccinated, the number of women who start to use contraceptives, the number of mothers who give birth in the presence of skilled midwives, or the number of malnourished children referred for treatment.
But 45% of developing countries are far from meeting the notoriously neglected international targets on sanitation.
And lagging furthest behind on MDG targets are the so-called "fragile states". These countries "require additional support, to help in building institutions and moving towards a virtuous circle of development, peace, and security", says the report.
The World Bank also urges a stronger focus on development in fragile states in its 2011 development report (WDR), released on Monday last week, in advance of the meetings. But, warns the WDR, the greatest blocks to reaching international development goals are the chronic cycles of criminal and political violence.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/apr/18/millennium-development-goals-world-bank-imf-report

MALNUTRITION: World Bank president, said food prices are at “a tipping point”,

Philip Aldrick 14 Apr 2011

The food problem has been exacerbated by weather problems in Russia, Ukraine, North America and China. Photo: Reuters

Robert Zoellick, World Bank president, said food prices are at “a tipping point”, having risen 36pc in the last year to levels close to their 2008 peak. The rising cost of food has been much more dramatic in low-income countries, pushing 44m people into poverty since June last year.

Another 10pc rise in food prices would push 10m into extreme poverty, defined as an effective income of less than $1.25 a day. Already, the world’s poor number 1.2bn.
Mr Zoellick said he saw no short term reversal in the damaging effect of food inflation, which is felt much more in the developing world as packaging and distribution accounts for a far larger proportion of the cost in the advanced economies.
Asked if he thought prices would remain high for a year, Mr Zoellick said: “The general trend lines are ones where we are in a danger zone… because prices have already gone up and stocks are relatively low.”
Rising prices have been driven by the changing diet of the ballooning middle classes in the emerging markets. “There is a demand change going on, with the higher incomes in developing countries. People will eat more meat products, for example, that will use more grain.
“I am not suggesting that the improved diets in the developing world are the source of the problem but it means it takes longer to rebuild the stocks when you get a supply [shock].
The problem has been exacerbated by “weather problems in Russia, Ukraine, North America, China”.

Making matters worse has been rising fuel prices, which go into fertilisers and energy.
However, he played down the impact of speculators on prices, saying only that “it can exacerbate some of the shifts”.
He also raised concerns about the food investment policies of some of the world’s wealthier nations in poorer countries. China has been buying up huge tracts of Africa to grow enough food to feed its growing middle class.
Using Saudi Arabia’s decision to scrap wheat production and invest overseas for food instead as an example, he said: “This raises sensitivities about the purchasing and investment and the land.
“We are now working with the Food and Agriculture Organisation on responsible principles for food investment – this has included sub-Saharan Africa, also some in central Asia – the idea that investment can
be helpful and create additional food production, but one needs to do it in a way that helps the local people and meets local needs.”

The World Bank is investing $7bn in improving agricultural production, from seeds to irrigation to sewage. One key area of research is in developing better seeds.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/8451684/World-Bank-Food-prices-have-entered-the-danger-zone.html

POVERTY: Tools for the Expert Economists

ADePT: Software Platform for Automated Economic Analysis — ADePT software was developed in the research department of the World Bank to automate and standardize economic analysis. ADePT is now freely available for download from this site for applied economics researchers willing to quickly and reliably analyse their data using most modern statistical and econometric techniques.
PovcalNet — An interactive computational tool that allows you to replicate the calculations made by the World Bank’s researchers in estimating the extent of absolute poverty in the world ($1 a day). It also allows you to calculate the poverty measures under different assumptions and to assemble the estimates using alternative country groupings or for any set of individual countries of your choosing. PovcalNet is self-contained. PovcalNet is a product of the World Bank's Development Research Group.

PovSTAT — an Excel based program that produces forecasts that vary by level of complexity depending on the availability of reliable data for the post survey period and on the extent to which various factors influencing poverty levels are incorporated. You will find a chapter describing the tool, as well as a file with the program itself.
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTPOVERTY/0,,contentMDK:20271992~menuPK:497971~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:336992~isCURL:Y,00.html

POVERTY: More developing countries closer to achieving Millennium Development Goals: World Bank

 2011-04-16
WASHINGTON, April 15 (Xinhua) -- Two-thirds of developing countries are on track or close to meeting key targets for tackling extreme poverty and hunger, but more work remains to be done, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund said Friday.
Among developing countries that are falling short on the Millennium Development Goals, half are close to becoming on-track. With improved policies and faster growth, these countries can still achieve the targets in 2015 or soon after, according to the two Washington based international institutions' Global Monitoring Report 2011: Improving the Odds of Achieving the MDGs, which was released during the ongoing IMF and World Bank spring meetings.
"Reaching the MDGs is a significant achievement for developing countries. But there still is much to do in reducing poverty and improving health outcomes even in the successful countries," said Hans Timmer, director of development prospects at the World Bank. "Donors should build on this success and help countries make the next step through investments in effective service delivery."
The report showed that on the whole, the fight against poverty is progressing well. Based on current economic projections, the world remains on track to reduce by half the number of people living in extreme poverty.
The number of people living on less than 1.25 dollars a day is projected to be 883 million in 2015, compared with 1.4 billion in 2005 and 1.8 billion in 1990.
The report noted that much of this progress reflects rapid growth in China and India, while many African countries are lagging behind: 17 countries are far from halving extreme poverty, even as the aggregate goals will be reached.
Developing countries will also likely achieve the MDGs for gender parity in primary and secondary education and for access to safe drinking water, and will be very close on hunger and on primary education completion.
But progress is slow and targets may be missed on others. Among developing countries, 45 percent are far from meeting the target on access to sanitation; 39 percent and 38 percent are far from the maternal and child mortality targets, respectively.
"Good macroeconomic policies remain crucial to progress toward the MDGs," said Hugh Bredenkamp, deputy director of the IMF's Strategy, Policy, and Review Department. "The challenge in low income countries is to sustain and accelerate growth through better policies that will create jobs and greater opportunities for the private sector."
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/world/2011-04/16/c_13831353.htm

POVERTY: Food prices: World Bank warns millions face poverty

14 April 2011
The World Bank has warned that rising food prices, driven partly by rising fuel costs, are pushing millions of people into extreme poverty.
World food prices are 36% above levels of a year ago, driven by problems in the Middle East and North Africa, and remain volatile, the bank said.
That has pushed 44 million people into poverty since last June.
A further 10% rise would push 10m more below the extreme poverty line of $1.25 (76p) a day, the bank said.
And it warned that a 30% cost hike in the price of staples could lead to 34 million more poor.

'Protect the poor'
The World Bank estimates there are about 1.2 billion people living on less than $1.25 a day.
"More poor people are suffering and more people could become poor because of high and volatile food prices," said World Bank president Robert Zoellick.

 Food price changes Q1 2010 to Q1 2011 : Source: World Bank Development Prospects Group
Maize: 74%; Wheat: 69%: Palm oil: 55%; Soybeans: 36%; Beef: 30%; Rice: -2%

"We have to put food first and protect the poor and vulnerable, who spend most of their money on food."
Mr Zoellick was speaking before IMF and World Bank spring meetings later this week.
The gatherings will be attended by finance ministers and central bankers including Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, and Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King.

Nutrition
The World Bank says prices of basic commodities remain close to their 2008 peak, with the prices of wheat, maize and soya all rocketing.
The only exception is rice, which has fallen slightly in price in the past year.
The bank suggests a number of measures to help alleviate the impact of high food prices on the poor.
They include encouraging food-producing countries to ease export controls, and to divert production away from biofuels production when food prices exceed certain limits..
Other recommendations include targeting social assistance and nutritional programmes to the poorest, better weather forecasting, more investments in agriculture, the adoption of new technologies - such as rice fortification to make it more nutritious, and efforts to address climate change.
It also said financial measures were needed to prevent poor countries being subject to food price volatility.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13086979

POVERTY: The World Bank is recommending a major difference in the way aid is spent.

April 11, 2011:  David Loyn : BBC international development correspondent

Poverty rates are 20% higher in countries hit by violence, so aid should target violence, the Bank says Food prices at 'dangerous levels'
The World Bank is recommending a major difference in the way aid is spent.
A quarter of the world's population live in states affected by conflict.
In a report released on Monday, the World Bank says that there should be far more focus on building stable government, and on justice and police, than on health and education.
The report says if there is not a major refocusing of aid in this direction, then other targets on poverty, health and education will not be reached.
There is far more spent on alleviating the effects of conflict than preventing it from breaking out, and conflicts tend to be repeated.
Ninety percent of recent civil wars occurred in countries that had already had a civil war in the last 30 years.
The report found that cycles of violence were hard to stop, for example in South Africa and Central America.
In Guatemala, twice as many people are dying now at the hands of criminals than died in the civil war in the 1980s.
Poverty rates are 20 percentage points higher in countries affected by violence, but up to now, the World Bank found, there had been too little focus on ending corruption or reforming state institutions and justice systems. For instance, reform of justice was not one of the Millennium Development Goals.

Police, not hospitals
The report's author Sarah Cliffe says this is the greatest development challenge facing the world.
"It's much easier for countries to get help with their militaries than it is with their police forces or justice systems, and much easier for them to get help with growth, health or education than it is with employment," she says.
"Our analysis would indicate that that should change."

A lot of this thinking is not new.
Britain is already refocusing its aid towards conflict states.
If other countries do the same it would mark a fundamental shift, where spending money on good police becomes a higher priority than good hospitals or schools
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-13032938

POVERTY: World Bank Sees Poverty Down, Inflation as Biggest Risk

31 March 2011: Irina Filatova
The government's social spending measures appeared to bear fruit last year, resulting in declining poverty rates, although Russians are likely to face additional inflationary pressure ahead of the 2012 presidential elections, the World Bank said Wednesday.
The government should focus on controlling inflation in the short term, as the growth of budget expenditures is possible due to upcoming elections and preparations for the Sochi Olympics in 2014, the bank warned in a report.
"The upside risks for inflation, associated with additional fiscal spending during the election cycle, will remain in 2011 and 2012," the report said.
According to the report, the government's economic policy should be aimed at "a more ambitious fiscal adjustment and a long-term non-oil fiscal deficit of about 4.3 percent of gross domestic product," as the budget remains vulnerable to a sudden decline in oil prices.
Zeljko Bogetic, the World Bank's leading economist for Russia, said efficient budget policy was crucial, since the Russian economy largely depended on oil prices.
The country is facing a risk of returning to "the oil curse" with high oil prices resulting in "unjustified government expenditures, especially in the pre-election time," he told reporters at the bank's Moscow office.
The government should reduce the budget's vulnerability to new spending by cutting the non-oil fiscal deficit, which currently stands at a very high level of 12.7 percent of GDP, Bogetic said, adding that the government's current plan to reduce the budget deficit was "reasonable."
The World Bank supports the Finance Ministry's recent initiative to put additional revenues coming from the oil and gas sector in reserve as a measure to lower inflation rates, said World Bank economist Sergei Ulatov.
"We support this decision because it's aimed to fulfill two tasks — first to lower inflation rates and second not to cause additional expenditures," Ulatov said.
Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said earlier this month that part of the additional revenue coming from the oil and gas taxes and duties would be used to lower the budget deficit and increase the reserve fund, which now stands at just 2 percent of GDP.
The reserve fund decreased almost 50 percent over the last year, having reached $26 billion by March 1, compared with $59 billion in March 2010, according to the Finance Ministry's web site.
Inflation stood at 8.8 percent in 2010, while the Central Bank expects that it will drop to 6 percent to 7 percent this year.
"Inflation is Russia's main problem in the short term," Bogetic said.
He said inflation was not only a macroeconomic problem but a social one as well, because it resulted in serious pressure on real incomes for the middle and lower class.
According to the report, food prices jumped by 17.5 percent in June to February largely because of last summer's severe drought.
Low-income households were most affected by the surge in food prices, which caused a 5 percent drop in consumption, the report said.
However, the government's social support measures, which included increasing pensions and wages in the public sector as well as unemployment benefits, resulted in the percentage of the population living below the poverty line falling from 13.2 in 2009 to 12.7 last year, it said.
An impoverished person, according to the government figure, is anyone earning less than 5,902 rubles ($208) per month.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said late last year that the government had no intention to trim social spending.
The government will increase pensions by 10.3 percent starting Friday, with a total of 20 billion rubles ($700 million) being set aside in the Pension Fund's budget.
The World Bank expects a further decline of the poverty rate, which is likely to reach 11.2 percent this year and 10 percent in 2012 due to the positive economic growth rates and falling unemployment.
The bank lowered its forecast of economic growth rates in 2011 to 4.4 percent, compared with last year's prediction of 4.5 percent.
Bogetic said cutting inefficient expenditures was one possible way to reduce budget spending and prevent inflation growth. Additional funds, which will appear as a result of the move, could be used to finance "priority infrastructure projects," he said.
Upgrading transport and road infrastructure will require significant budget spending, while the funds currently appropriated for these purposes are not sufficient, the World Bank said.
The government plans to spend a total of 644 billion rubles on upgrading transportation infrastructure this year, with 453 billion rubles being spent on road maintenance.
"According to estimates, the proposed funding levels for the road sector by 2013 will narrow –– but not eliminate –– the funding gap for maintenance of the federal highway system," the World Bank reported.
According to the bank, poor infrastructure is a key factor constraining economic competitiveness.
Improving the country's investment climate is one of the crucial tasks for the government for the coming years, Bogetic said.
"It's not a problem of one sector. It requires the government's highest attention and the attention of state agencies in charge of developing small and medium business, as well as the issues of investment climate in general," he said.
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/world-bank-sees-poverty-down-inflation-as-biggest-risk/434103.html

POVERTY: Dependency On Imports Would Entrench Poverty in Africa

Hatab Fadera : 24 March 2011
The President of The Gambia has once again underscored the importance of agriculture in Africa's quest for economic salvation, warning that poverty would become entrenched in the continent if the citizens continue to bank or depend on imports.
His Excellency Sheikh Professor Alhaji Dr Yahya Jammeh made this statement Tuesday afternoon at the Jama Hall of the Kairaba Beach Hotel while launching the US$24 million World Bank funded projects that are designed towards promoting government's job creation agenda and boosting the agriculture sector, the mainstay of the country's economy. The Gambian leader, who doubles as the minister of Agriculture stressed that the continent's salvation from the bondage of poverty is agriculture irrespective of what natural resources it is endowed with. He then reiterated his clarion call for all and sundry to go back to the land.

"Counter-productive"
The president used the opportunity to commend the nation's womenfolk for their high sense of commitment towards national development, as well as their efforts in the poverty alleviation strides. He also condemned the attitude of the men folk in serving as back-sitters in the crusade against poverty eradication.
He said that the "attitude of the men in this country is counter-productive", while also observing that the nation's men folk have "overloaded" the women of The Gambia. He added: "We have one chronic disease in this country, and this disease is inimical to [our] socio-economic development.
There is nowhere in the religious book or in the constitution of The Gambia where it is stated that it is only Gambian women that should take part in agriculture. After all, agriculture used to be a male-dominated area and that is why there was no poverty." He also pointed out that the country cannot expect to eradicate poverty when men are only interested in going to offices, either to work or beg.
President Jammeh further observed that the Community Driven Development Project (CDDP) also a World Bank funded project, is being utilised mostly by the women, and queried the whereabouts of the nation's male folk. "Each time I talk, they say oh, he is castigating the men. I am not accusing you of anything, but I am telling you what you are doing and it is wrong," he stated. He stressed that the government can only create a conducive environment for the citizens to be able to eradicate poverty, but that they [government] will not be able to achieve this when people sit idly by and expect others to feed them, especially the male folk.
The Gambian said that it is unfortunate to note that if the women did not participate in all these projects that are in place, they [projects] are going to fail. He further noted that even the vegetable that is consumed in the country is being imported from Senegal, where it is grown by the men and women of that country. He added: "How do you expect poverty to be eradicated? There are two types of poverty in this country - poverty created by circumstances beyond one's control, and self-inflicted poverty, which is rampant in this country. How do you expect household poverty to be eradicated when the woman cooks, does the laundry, takes care of the children and at the same time goes to the vegetable garden to grow for food and clothing for the family when the men sit around and look for more wives."

Youths must change attitude
The Gambian leader equally challenged the youths of the country to take government's projects seriously, stressing that there is no government on earth that can provide job for every youth. While emphasising that he is not a "politician" but a servant of the people, the president deplored the attitude of the country's young people as very frustrating. "If you go around our markets, we have created the conducive environment by building the modern markets; but guess who you find there; the only Gambians you will find there are women and the rest are foreigners. And everyday, you want to go to Babylon," he lamented.
The Gambian leader opined that the amount of money that is spent to pay "those criminals [middlemen] to put you in [unsafe] boats so that you can be a breakfast for a shark or maybe a lunch for crocodile" could be used to invest in a lucrative venture to earn a living.
He again noted with dismay that they [foreigners] have dominated the country's facilities, such as fisheries facilities, amongst others, when young people of this country are sitting down all day long asking for a conducive environment. President Jammeh echoed the saying that "you can only take the horse to the pond, but you cannot force it to drink," implying that the government can only create the conducive environment by providing facilities, but cannot force the citizenry to make best use of them for their own good.
While calling for attitudinal change on the part of the young people, the Gambian leader observed that 98 per cent of the shops - retail and skill workshops such as carpentry and so on, belong to foreigners. "If you go to the fishing sector, where we spent more than US$28 million , the people you find there are foreigners. And the only Gambians you find there are our sisters and mothers struggling to carry fish to the shore. All what we are interested in is going to Babylon and becoming a semester," he further lamented.
President Jammeh concluded by asserting that attitudes must be changed to achieve the common goals of ending poverty in this country, expressing optimism that such is possible in view of the fact that the country is very small.
http://allafrica.com/stories/201103250568.html

POVERT: CAMBODIA: Botched World Bank Project Leads to Thousands of Evictions

Irwin Loy
 Credit:Irwin Loy/IPS

Tile floors are all that remain of homes that once stood on the eastern shore of Boeung Kak lake.

PHNOM PENH, Mar 17, 2011 (IPS) - The World Bank botched the handling of an ambitious multi-million-dollar land- titling project in Cambodia and has done little to protect thousands of people in a lakeside slum from eviction.
That is the finding of the World Bank’s inspection panel, the financial institution’s main accountability mechanism. Unfortunately the judgement came after local authorities issued final eviction notices to many of the Boeung Kak’s remaining residents.
"The claims of the Boeung Kak lake community are serious," Roberto Lenton, the chair of the panel, said in a statement. "The issues raised involve fundamental questions of their land rights and tenure security… the panel found that the evictions took place in violation of the bank policy on involuntary resettlement and resulted in grave harm to the affected families and community."
In a series of reports and statements the inspection panel ruled that a controversial bank-funded land-titling project failed to protect some 4,000 families living around Phnom Penh’s Boeung Kak lake - a low-income community that had grown in the centre of the capital following the collapse of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime.
In doing so, the bank broke many of its own regulations meant to ensure its programmes would not cause inadvertent harm to local populations.
Many people in this Southeast Asian country still lack basic legal titles to their land, a legacy of the Khmer Rouge, who outlawed private ownership. The bank funded the Land Management and Administration Project, or LMAP, as part of a plan to address Cambodia’s lingering land problems.
LMAP has courted controversy by following the government’s policy to not issue land titles to some 4,000 families around Boeung Kak lake. The government declared the land to be owned by the state, even though many of the residents had lived there for years.
The government later leased the land to a developer. The Chinese-backed developer and local authorities have since told the residents that they must move to make way for a series of office towers and villas on the 133-hectare site.
The World Bank inspection panel ruled that the bank should have followed its safeguards - agreed to by the bank, donor governments and Cambodian authorities at the inception of the project - which would have allowed the residents to argue their cases for land titles. Instead bank management ignored the residents’ claims until it was too late.
"The harm the people have suffered as a result of the evictions and the following displacement… was evident to the panel team," the panel stated in its investigation report. "The panel found no record that bank management raised this issue with the government or project staff until 2009, when the situation had already deteriorated beyond repair."
LMAP managed to issue more than one million land titles to mostly rural residents throughout the country before the government abruptly cancelled the programme in 2009, complaining the World Bank had demanded "too many conditions".
But the situation for the families in Boeung Kak shows how the project struggled with its primary goal: to help the government establish an "efficient and transparent" land administration system.
"The Boeung Kak case highlights the failure of LMAP to establish an equitable, transparent and rule-based process for titling decisions," said David Pred, executive director of the advocacy group Bridges Across Borders Cambodia. "In the end, like elsewhere in Cambodia, titling decisions have been made based on the interests and direction of the powerful rather than the rule of law."
In response to the panel report, World Bank management has accepted that LMAP failed to protect the Boeung Kak lake residents, but it says the project itself wasn’t responsible for their evictions. For its part, the government has continued to insist that the lake residents are living illegally on state land, and that LMAP should never have covered the community.
It’s estimated 1,600 families have already moved from the area, accepting a compensation package totalling 8,500 dollars which requires giving up any right to the land - far less, critics say, than the land is worth and not enough to start rebuilding their lives.
The remaining residents may soon follow. Earlier this month, authorities issued eviction letters to many of the households that stayed behind.
Along the dusty lanes that trace the edges of the lake, the signs of change are everywhere.
Many of the homes have been torn to the ground, leaving stark patches of floor tiles where buildings once stood.
"I’ve seen many families taking down their homes and moving," said Simoni Mao, who runs a shop a few lanes back from the eastern shore of the lake.
Mao says he came here in 1992 as his country was beginning to look past two decades of war. He says he bought the land from a local official at the time, long before the government had any major development plans for the area. "If I had known they were going to do this," he said, "I would never have bought land here."
In the meantime, the World Bank has acknowledged that there may be thousands more families facing eviction in areas where LMAP was supposed to be helping. As part of a review of its actions, bank management discovered more than 8,400 other households who could be at risk of eviction.
http://ipsnews.net/newsTVE.asp?idnews=54888

POVERTY: MADAGASCAR: A poor country gets poorer

ANTANANARIVO, 18 March 2011 (IRIN) - Madagascar, one of the world’s poorest countries, has lost about US$400 million in donor support since the 17 March 2009 coup in which Andry Rajoelina, with the support of the military, deposed President Marc Ravalomanana.
A World Bank report, Aid Effectiveness During Political Instability: A Look at the Social Sectors, published on the second anniversary of the island's illegal transfer of power, said donor money traditionally contributed about half the government's budget, and around 70 percent of public spending, making it "by far, the main source of funding in social sectors", but this had fallen by about $200 million a year.
The political crisis, now in its third year, remains unresolved, preventing donors from reviewing their decision to freeze all aid apart from emergency funding. The African Union and the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the regional body, also cannot reinstate trade benefits and lift sanctions.
However, the freezing of donor funding has been counter-balanced by increased humanitarian assistance for education, health and social protection, rising to $260 million in 2010 from a pre-crisis amount of $180 million. Infrastructure, productive activities and institutional support had experienced the steepest decline in funding, the World Bank report said.
In the absence of donor confidence there is less financing available to fund programmes for health and agriculture and economic development
"In the absence of donor confidence there is less financing available to fund programmes for health and agriculture and economic development. In all sectors there are fewer resources to support the poorest people in Madagascar, and in this absence there are clear trends of important indicators worsening," CARE International country director John Uniack Davis told IRIN.
According to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), government funding for health dropped to $2 a head in 2010, its lowest level, compared to $5 in 2009 and $8 in 2008.
A joint survey by the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, and the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) found assisted births fell from 51 percent in 2006 to 44 percent in 2009, and more than half the people living in the drought-prone south reported that financial difficulties prevented them from visiting clinics.

Increasing poverty
Madagascar's National Institute of Statistics (INSTAT) said its latest five-yearly household survey (Enquête Périodique Auprès des Ménages), showed higher poverty levels, especially in rural areas, where about 80 percent of the 20 million population live.
Using a $230 individual annual income benchmark as the poverty line, INSTAT reported that nationwide poverty increased from 68.7 percent in 2005 to 76.5 percent in 2010, while rural poverty rose from 73.5 percent to 82.2 percent. A rising income disparity between urban and rural populations was highlighted.
"When you think that the years before the crisis were growth years, this shows poverty has increased by nine percent in just two years, which is directly attributable to the domestic political crisis and compounded by the global economic crisis," the head of a leading international institution in Madagascar, who declined to be named, told IRIN.
UNICEF's January 2011 newsletter noted that INSTAT's 2010 survey showed the second highest levels of poverty since measurements began in 1993. "This indicates a slow but mounting crisis in rural households, despite two past years of comparatively good harvests."
Frequent government interventions attempting to fix the price of rice, such as banning exports and paying for imports, have failed to prevent the price of the staple increasing to about $1 per kilogram.
Oil companies recently failed to overturn a government decree allowing the state to fix the price of petrol at the pumps.
"The government can't keep prices down by decree forever, it doesn't have deep enough pockets to absorb very fast commodity price rises on the international market," Patrick Raleigh, Madagascar analyst at The Economist Intelligence Unit, commented.
In December 2010 the World Food Programme said 720,000 people in eight southern districts - Betioky, Ampanihy, Beloha, Bekily, Tsihombe, Ambovombe, Taolanaro and Amboasary - were food insecure after a second consecutive year of drought.

Short-term crisis solutions unworkable
In February 2011 Cyclone Bingiza struck northeastern Madagascar, causing extensive damage to crops, which is likely to deepen food insecurity and hit cash-crop production.
"There are crises of structural food insecurity, particularly in the arid south, that will not be resolved until there is significant long-term donor investment… rather than short-term crisis solutions, and clearly this long-term kind of investment doesn't look to be forthcoming in the current climate of [political] uncertainty," said Uniack Davis, of CARE.
"Since the crisis, Madagascar, a highly donor-dependent country, has experienced a dramatic decrease in development assistance and national budget allocated to crucial services for children,” UNICEF Representative Bruno Maes told IRIN. “These financial shortfalls, along with political uncertainty, have threatened the continuity and quality of basic social services."
UNICEF said each year more than 70,000 Malagasy children died before the age of five from preventable diseases, including diarrhoea, acute respiratory infections and malaria.
"We should continue finding ways of protecting social basic services” Maes said. “All stakeholders, national and international, need to reinforce efforts to mitigate the impact of the crisis on the most vulnerable population, including children."
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=92236