Securing Development In An Unstable World

The Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics (ABCDE) brings together the world's finest development thinkers to present their perspectives and ideas. In recent years, a parallel, second conference has been held in Europe with the same goal of expanding the flow of ideas between thinkers, practitioners, and policymakers in the field of international development. This title presents selected papers from the seventh annual ABCDE - Europe meetings, held May 2005 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

This important book tackles some of the main security challenges facing the international development community today. Containing contributions by leading experts, including some who have been at the centre of the international policy debate, it goes further by putting forward suggestions and recommendations as to how best deal with these threats as well as challenges in this crucial area.

This book investigates issues related to health inequality with a particular interest on developing countries. It provides rigorous empirical work on both trends and causal factors behind health inequality, analyzes the implications of health deprivations on poverty traps and suggests practical policies which can be implemented.

ABCDE 2011 presents papers from a global gathering of the world?s leading development scholars and practitioners held May 31 - June 2, 2010. Paper themes include: Environmental Commons and the Green Economy, Post-crisis Development Strategy, the Political Economy of Fragile States, Measuring Welfare, and Social Programs and Transfers.

The Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics (ABCDE) is one of the world s best-known series of conferences for the presentation and discussion of new knowledge on development. The conference provides a forum for the world s leading development thinkers to share new knowledge and ideas. 'Lessons from East Asia and the Global Financial Crisis' was the theme of the ABCDE held in Seoul, Republic of Korea, on June 22 24, 2009. The conference was co-organized by the Government of the Republic of Korea, the Korea Development Institute (KDI), and the World Bank.

The authors assess the effect of economic instability on the success of projects funded by the World Bank using the outcome of the projects, which is a notation of their overall success determined by the Bank's Independent Evaluation Group. It has been argued in macroeconomic studies that aid effectiveness is higher in vulnerable countries because it dampens the negative effects of shocks. The authors show that this finding is not inconsistent with the observation that the success of the projects is lower in an unstable environment. Instability, in particular the instability of exports, harms aid projects as it harms the rest of the economy, while the success of projects decreases when the total amount of aid received increases, due to absorptive capacity limitations. But this decrease is slower when instability is higher, showing a positive effect of aid through its stabilizing impact. The authors find the same results keeping only the projects funded by nonconcessionary loans, which suggests that the cushioning effect of aid extends not only to aid funded projects but to whole sets of projects. Corroborating macroeconomic findings, their results lead to the same conclusion that more aid should be allocated to more vulnerable countries, in spite of the lower success of the projects in an unstable environment: project evaluations cannot include the macrostabilizing effect of the aid delivered through projects.

Small island developing states (SIDS) are characterised by high economic, geographical and social vulnerability. These states are perceived as economically vulnerable, exhibiting poor economic performance, and embedding low levels of achieved well-being on most criteria. SIDS, which occupy very large parts of the world, face idiosyncratic development challenges largely owing to their susceptibility to external shocks. Still, these countries are all too often overlooked in the development research literature. Arising from a UNU-WIDER research project, this book provides in-depth research on the international dimensions of SIDS development experiences. Using a wealth of data, as well as case studies, the main topics examined comprise: aid, policies and growth; the costs of neglect, in terms of losses owing to a country falling into the fragile states group, of that country and those in its region; the composition of trade and the impact of external shocks, and the impact of remittances. The studies jointly provide valuable insights for small islands and other developing countries in the pursuit of sustainable growth and development. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Development Studies.