Month of April, 2008

A few weeks ago I wrote that “many perceive NT2 to be a World Bank hydropower project. From my perspective, that’s inaccurate in every respect. More on that in a future posting.” Following intense pressure from my reading public (thanks, Nanda), it’s time to explain what I meant.

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.

Priests and vicars have long demonstrated a penchant for biodiversity. There have been missionaries in remote places who have built up and preserved beautiful collections of butterflies, plants etc. which eventually found their way into the great natural history museums of the world.  The Rev. Gilbert White (1720-93) was the classic 18th century English clergyman-naturalist. Over many years he made observations of the plants and creatures he saw and he pulled the strands together in a widely-read book, 'The Natural History of Selborne'.  In a reflective letter to a colleague in 1768 he wrote, "It is, I find, in zoology as it is in botany: All nature is so full that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined". 

I see there has been some blog chatter about the World Bank's position on Thailand's rice exports. Let me take the chance here to set the record straight: Thailand is a great international trading partner, it's commited to maintaining its rice exports, and we support this action. This is very important at this time of food price hikes and it's the responsible thing to do.

(The chatter --see some examples here and here-- started with a Bloomberg story  published yesterday).

If you’ve read any of the posts in my blog so far, you’ll notice that I’ve mentioned multiple times how much information there is on Nam Theun 2. One of the cornerstones (pdf) for the World Bank’s involvement on NT2 was that the project would be handled in a transparent manner, and that’s why all of the key reports on NT2 are publicly available. The aim of being transparent means that key documentation related to the project as it was being developed and now implemented is public, that the Bank proactively keeps people informed about what is happening (ahem, the blog for one), and that there would be continuous outreach to stakeholders including local and international consultations.

Last week China reported its first quarter GDP data.  Consumer inflation for the quarter was 8%, which is too high, but we already knew that.  The main news was that GDP growth came in at 10.6% year-on-year.  This is down from last year’s 11.7% rate, but higher than most forecasts for 2008 (including the Bank’s revised 9.4% forecast).  There was a healthy decline in the trade surplus for the quarter of about $5 billion or 10%.  The trade adjustment took a good form in that exports grew at a respectable 21% rate while imports surged 29%.  Most of this increase in exports was to the European Union, while growth of exports to the U.S. moderated to a 5% rate.  All of this looks to be in the direction of the rebalancing that China is trying to achieve.

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.

There are two types of people in the world. Those with whom mosquitoes fall passionately in love, and those to whom mosquitoes turn only as a last resort. I unfortunately am one of the former, and I was awoken a little before sunrise by a swarm of well-informed mosquitoes in Lak Sao, behaving a little like my 3-year old when he thinks he can persuade me to give him chocolate milk for breakfast.

(But first, take a look at the new villages for the local residents. My colleague Nanda does the talking):

Lak Sao is one of the closest places to stay to the NT2 dam wall, where we were headed for the tunnel closure ceremony. The event went off smoothly: Monks blessed the event; His Excellency Borsaikham Vongdala, Minister of Energy and Mines spoke of the importance of the project to the country; engineers and executives explained what was happening; and His Excellency Deputy Prime Minister Somsavat Lengsavad waved the flag that prompted workers across the river to start slowly dropping the “stop-log” across the diversion tunnel. 

I just returned from the Mekong Delta – Vietnam’s “rice basket” – to look at the results of development projects partly financed by the World Bank. With rice prices going through the roof, I expected to see farmers enjoying a financial boom. But, reality was more nuanced and underscored how difficult it is to grow more rice at the drop of a bamboo hat.

One of the projects I looked at improved water management in the delta by upgrading canals and building more gates (known as sluice gates). The idea is to prevent water from the sea from intruding and ruining crops in the dry season; and stop floods from washing away the harvest during the rainy season. The results have been dramatic.

Better irrigation and more security have allowed farmers like Ngo Kim Tan, 64 years old, in Can Tho province, to plan ahead and plant more crops. Keeping salt water out has translated into tastier fruit and higher rice yields. Her rice yield has gone from about 700 kilos of rice per “cong” (1,000 m²) to about a 1 ton per cong. Meanwhile the price of paddy has been multiplied by 1.5 in one year (from 3,000 VND per kilo to 4,500 VND – about 28 cents ofa US$ - this year).

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.“

So the last couple of days have been – how should I put it? – intense. I’m sure at some point when you’ve had some major deadline approaching like preparing a major report for work, handing in a PhD or Masters thesis, preparing for a presentation at a big meeting, making a speech at a conference… You had to double check all your facts, or make sure the footnotes where right, or endlessly practice your presentation, or ensure all the attachments were prepared, or have all the documentation necessary to submit your report, or pray the computer didn’t swallow your information and damage the floppy disk or USB drive in the process (or all of the above)…. Well, getting ready to start the gradual process of filling the NT2 reservoir is easily 100 times more complex than that.

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.

About a couple of months ago I took over as the team leader of the Nam Theun 2 Social and Environment project  and am joining Nanda to blog about the project. Nanda’s description of eating insects made an American colleague mention a popular US reality TV show called “Fear Factor” that apparently revolved around eating insects. Here in Laos that’s no big deal – I can recommend crickets stir fried in soy sauce to accompany your beerlao – but the thought of being stuck in endless NT2 team meetings does seem to induce real terror among some.

Meetings abound because NT2 is a pretty big and complex program, and we have a large team with a broad range of expertise, including a number of long-standing consultants. A number of us, including me, are based in Vientiane. The rest of the team is spread across Asia, Europe and North America, which makes videoconferences part of life, and guaranteed to be at a bad time for someone.

Andrew  Leonard posts in his blog an interesting report from journalist Tony Cheng of Al-Jazeera:

China has banned, for environmental reasons, the free hand-out of plastic bags.  As a result, the country’s largest plastic bag factory has closed, throwing 20,000 workers out on the street.  Some see this as posing a dilemma between environment and economy, but I don’t agree that good environmental policies are bad for the economy, just the opposite.  What this case illustrates instead is the dilemma between doing something good for the whole people, but at the expense of adjustment costs borne by a small group – the 20,000 workers and the factory owner.