We, the Intergovernmental Group of Twenty-Four on International Monetary Affairs and Development, held our eighty-ninth meeting in Washington, D.C. on April 18, 2013 with Mr. Luis Videgaray Caso, Secretary of Finance and Public Credit of Mexico in the Chair, Dr. Ashraf El-Araby, Minister of Planning and International Cooperation of Egypt as First Vice- Chair, and Mr. Alain Bifani, Director General of Finance of Lebanon as Second Vice-Chair.
New Delhi: Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia, on Wednesday, said that the G-20 countries should find ways for recapitalising multilateral development banks. He made this suggestion at an event organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). Various industry heads met to gather inputs in the run-up to St. Petersburg G-20 Summit Meeting to be held in September.
Johannesburg: Emerging market economies need to urgently think of ways and means to keep their growth rate up in order to cushion themselves against the harsh effects of the economic slowdown in the euro zone and the United States, a senior World Bank official said on Tuesday. Kaushik Basu, Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank, told economists, academics, company executives and journalists in Johannesburg that in the global world a financial crisis in one country affects another country. "No matter how bad the global situation is, emerging markets must strive to do better," Basu said when delivering a lecture on emerging market economies in a changing world at the University of Witwatersrand Business School in Johannesburg.
New Delhi: BRICS nations - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - are likely to finalise the structure of a development bank that will fund infrastructure in the associate nations at the BRICS summit in Durban in March. The bank, however, may not start functioning before 2014 and is likely to have substantially less initial paid-up capital than the amount of $240 billion that is doing the rounds currently. Officials of BRICS countries are scheduled to meet in Pretoria, South Africa on January 10-11 to look at the viability and feasibility of setting up the bank.
Beijing: The World Bank Group and China have launched a new knowledge hub to improve development outcomes, aiming to spread practical knowledge from China’s successes in reducing poverty both within China as well as to other countries. Initially, the knowledge hub will help find environmentally friendly solutions to expand urban transport in China’s cities.
Fifty-two years after its creation, the International Development Association (IDA) is facing a watershed moment. Drastic changes in the supply of and demand for the World Bank’s concessional finance mean that IDA’s purpose, tools, and broader role within both the international aid system and the World Bank Group need to be reconsidered. Even under conservative assumptions, IDA will face a wave of likely client graduations over the next 10 to 15 years. Its client base will soon be much smaller, more fragile, and almost entirely African, creating major implications for its operational model, future replenishments, and its relationship with other multilateral development institutions.
Tokyo: India has voiced concern over the depleting financial resources of the World Bank, which it thinks could handicap the ability of the multilateral lender's fight against poverty. The issue assumes significance as emerging economies that are part of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) grouping have proposed a BRICS Development Bank as an alternative to the World Bank.
Tokyo: World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said the global economy is at risk of a slowdown that wipes out gains in Africa, the poorest continent, and Latin America. "Our job now is to make sure the growth over the last five years that we've seen in Africa and Latin America is not destroyed by further worsening in the situation," Kim said in an interview with Bloomberg Television today on a Japanese bullet train to Sendai, a city in the region hit hardest by last year's earthquake and tsunami.
Nairobi: Land equivalent to the size of Cameroon or Kenya was sold off during the last decade to foreign investors, says international development agency Oxfam. The existing 700 land deals on the African continent represent 50 million hectares of land. Globally, the amount of land sold off in the past ten years is enough to grow food for a billion people, Oxfam says. The agency called on African Union member states and the World Bank to freeze large-scale land acquisitions for a year. In its new report, Our Land, Our Lives, Oxfam warns that more than 60 per cent of global investments in agricultural land by foreign investors between 2000 and 2010 were in developing countries with serious food security challenges.
Pretoria: I have to admit it. I’m a bit of a development junkie. For most of my adult life, I’ve been reading thick tomes describing the success or failure of projects. I talk to friends over dinner about development theory. And I can’t stop thinking about what I believe is the biggest development question of all: How do we most effectively deliver on our promises to the poor? So you can imagine how excited I was to have a day full of meetings with South Africa’s foremost experts on development: the country's ministers of finance, economic development, health, basic education, water and environmental affairs, and rural development and land reform - and then with President Jacob Zuma.
