Month of May, 2008

I had the chance today to attend a speech by ASEAN's (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Secretary General, Dr. Surin Pitsuwan, right after he had met with the Bank's President Bob Zoellick. He told us they discussed ways to increase the cooperation between the two organizations, but the most interesting and pressing aspect of it all is that they talked about specific ways in which the Bank will be helping out the victims of Cyclone Nargis through ASEAN. ASEAN had announced on May 13 that it was setting up a "Coalition of Mercy" for the Myanmar relief effort, and today Zoellick offered to have Bank experts assess the devastation and plan for the country's recovery. The key point here is that ASEAN is the organization with best access to Myanmar right now --it has already secured entry visas for its emergency team--, so this collaboration between the Bank and ASEAN can start being effective really quickly, which is what the people of Myanmar need.

World Bank Group President Robert B. Zoellick said the institution was ready to help the victims of China’s earthquake as he expressed his condolences following the disaster that hit the central province of Sichuan on May 12, killing about 15,000 people.

“The World Bank stands ready to support the Chinese Government in any way it may find useful in the recovery and reconstruction process,” Mr. Zoellick wrote in a May 12 letter to Chinese Premier Mr. Wen Jiabao. “Our thoughts are with the Chinese people at this tragic and sorrowful time,” he wrote.

Mr. Zoellick said the Bank Group would draw on its considerable expertise in catastrophe management and reconstruction.

World Bank representatives on Tuesday held detailed discussions on possible technical support for the recovery effort with representatives of the Chinese Ministry of Finance and the National Reform and Development Commission.

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?

The U.N. announced it was suspending relief supplies to Myanmar on Friday after the Government seized the food and aid material that had been flown into the country. Find reports from the New York Times, BBC News, and updates at ReliefWeb.

Update as of 1:00 p.m.: the World Food Programme, a U.S. agency, says it will send in two more relief planes tomorrow, as planned. Again, I encourage you to keep updated by checking a news aggregator like Google News or other online media.

A couple of days ago a reader, Nicholas Cantrell, posted a very interesting comment in my post “Nam Theun 2: Just about ready to start filling in.” The comment poised a number of questions, but if I can paraphrase just one of them, I think the basic premise was this: “how does the World Bank [or any of the financiers] ensure that the new lives of the resettled populations are sustainable in the long run?”  The truth is, I ask myself the same question all the time.

As advanced in an earlier post, here's a short list to the webpages for online donations of international NGOs that have a large presence in the country and so are likely to be most effective under the difficult circumstances:

• International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent - Donations
• Save the Children - Donations
• CARE - Donations
• Malteser International (This is a German medical NGO which was able to send in supplies within a couple of days after the cyclone). - Website with info on donations
• Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières - Donations

The question of whether China is overwhelmed by capital inflows has been asked for quite a while now. If a question continues to be asked, there is probably a good reason for it. Whether the answer is yes or no depends on how you look at it.

Brad Setser, in his highly recommended blog at RGE Monitor, has written a lot about the drivers of capital inflows into emerging markets and how they challenge fixed exchange rate policies.

The New York Times reports that some aid has begun flowing into Myanmar, but it looks like the mobilization for major relief operations is still underway and not clearly defined. However, you can keep track of what's going on in this regard by visiting the site that ReliefWeb has set up for the disaster caused by cyclone Nargis in Myanmar.

ReliefWeb, administered by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), is the main gateway to information --including news, documents and maps-- on humanitarian emergencies and disasters. It's targeted to the international humanitarian community that works on delivering emergency assistance, so you can hardly find a better site for up-to-date, reliable information on all aspects of this emergency.

Incidentally, there's also a site on the effects of the floods caused by Nargis in neighboring Thailand.

As for individual donations, it still seems too early to know how or where to contribute. I'll try to post this information later as it becomes available.

As the official estimate of fatal victims of cyclone Nargis raises to 22,000 --not counting the more than 40,000 missing--, World Bank President Bob Zoellick has just issued a statement:

"Our sympathy goes out to the thousands of victims of this terrible tragedy in Myanmar. I urge the government in Myanmar to allow relief agencies to reach those in need."

(Sadly, it's a vain attempt to try to keep this blog updated on the estimated death toll, and these postings are bound to become outdated fairly quickly in that aspect. Please check any major online news site or a news aggregator like Google News to keep track).

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 .

With winds clocked at over 190 kilometers per hour Cyclone Nargis made landfall in Myanmar on Friday, May 2, about 250 kilometers southwest of the capital Yangon.  On Monday United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said he was “very much alarmed” over estimates from Myanmar’s Foreign Ministry that over 10,000 people may have died.  The New York Times is reporting on the devastation, which comes before a constitutional referendum scheduled by the military government for this Saturday.  According to CNN.com, the U.N. has made $30 million available for emergency aid.  Check these CNN video reports from Yangon.

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.