All East Asia & Pacific

The Web is abuzz with the role of Twitter (which I wrote about last week) in spreading news about the China earthquake. A reminder and an update: Twitter is the site where users post messages of no more than 140 characters to say what they're doing at any certain moment. This is kind of... limited, and users of Twitter are coming up with other applications. But yesterday, the first news about the earthquake in Sichuan were made known to the world not through CNN or BBC, but through Twitter, when Robert Scoble started reporting accounts from residents in China just as the earthquake was happening. He was ahead of even the USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) by three minutes.  Does this mean Twitter has "come of age" and proved itself to fill a niche that other media can't?

Soaring food prices have suddenly become a major concern for policy makers in East Asia.  The price of rice - which provides one third of the region's caloric intake - is a particular worry.  Rice prices have been moving higher since around 2004, although this was from very depressed levels in the early years of the decade.  Prices surpassed $300 a ton in early 2006 for the first time since the late 1990s, kept moving higher, and then took off at an accelerating pace from late 2007:  up 11 percent in the the fourth quarter, then 56 percent in the first quarter of 2008 and then 61 percent in April 2008 alone. Prices touched over $1000 a ton on some days in April. Domestic food price and overall consumer price inflation has accelerated in most economies and the pace of poverty reduction in East Asia  in 2008 is - at a minimum - likely to slow .

One morning two weeks ago I learned that, three floors above me, World Bank President Bob Zoellick was in animated teleconference with superstar Shakira on education issues (Shakira heads her own foundation called Pies Descalzos --Barefoot). I got the news via the Twitter feed of 10 Downing St., since Gordon Brown was the third party in that conversation. I’ll admit it right away: I don’t get Twitter, the site that encourages you to post what you’re doing at any moment in 140 characters or fewer. Don’t see what’s the point. The only couple of feeds I’ve been interested in following are parodies of well-known characters, including the King of Spain (for English speakers, an example would be the twits from the Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke). But I got intrigued when I saw Serious Institutions and People like the British PM using it and started wondering if there may actually be a point in getting the Bank to join.

Still unsure. You tell me what you think. This is what I’ve found so far:

There's been much talk in recent months about the revision of the International Comparison Program and the PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) figures derived from it. The Bank's China Quarterly Update launched in early February included a special section on the implications of this revision for China, and our own David Dollar explained here that the new PPPs show poverty in China has in fact reduced more than previously calculated.

For more details and full estimates, check out this site that includes explanatory sections on the Poverty PPPs, the methodology used, and the final results for Asia. Also, you can create and download your own data query here.

The World Bank's EdStats (Education Statistics) collects worldwide data on education from national statistical reports, statistical annexes of new publications, and other data sources. The database has just been updated and its Query tool offers preliminary education indicators for the 2006 school year (with new imput from 93 countries) and the 2007 school year (nine countries).

Check out the interactive Query tool to customize reports by country (or group of countries), choosing from more than 100 indicators over many years. And put your results in a chart or map that you can export to use in your own documents and reports.

The new Global Monitoring Report 2008 is warning that most countries are likely to fall short on the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which have a due date of 2015.  World Bank president Bob Zoellick stresses that eradicating extreme poverty and hunger (Goal 1) is fundamental to making progress on additional goals like reducing child mortality.  This graph shows the actual as well as projected decline in the population of people living on $1 a day in the world's regions, including East Asia and the Pacific.

The Bank’s increased attention to governance since the early 1990s has naturally brought with it calls for robust measures that enable us to specify what exactly we are trying to improve in this area and how well we seem to be doing it.  Overall, however, the consensus on the centrality of good governance to development is yet to be matched by agreement on good indicators for it.

High food prices on the international markets are getting a lot of attention and are leading to different types of policy action in different countries. Discussions on the impact of international commodity prices on domestic prices often look at how much food countries import. The reasoning is that if countries are significant importers of food, domestic food prices are affected a lot by international prices, and if they are not significant importers, the impact of international prices should be limited.

In recent months I have come across several of these discussions. The most recent one was yesterday, in the Lex column in the Financial Times. Writing about the appreciation of the China’s Renminbi, Lex discusses the view of many, including we at the World Bank, that inflation concerns have strengthened the case for appreciation of the RMB. “But this belief, predicated in large part on China’s resurgent inflation, misses a key point. Consumer prices rose nearly 9 per cent year on year in February, largely as a result of rising food prices. A stronger currency would, however, do little to make food cheaper. China is largely self-sufficient in food, which accounts for just above 1 per cent of imports.“

Web reporters were busy last week with news of soaring prices for grains and other agricultural commodities.  Economist.com posted an early entry with Food for Thought on March 27.  NYT.com ran this piece on March 29.  BBC.com followed on April 3, focusing on Asia with Asian states feel rice pinch.  The following day FT.com had posted an entire page titled: In depth: the rising cost of food, while Bloomberg.com’s Glenys Sim reported from Singapore.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick is calling for a New Deal for global food policy – a reference to the 1930s Great Depression-era initiatives of American president Franklin D.