The most recent replenishment of the World Bank’s International Development Association, a fund through which the bank provides grants and loans to poor countries, involved attempts to enlist more support from the so-called emerging donors—developing countries that have only recently begun giving aid to other developing countries. In an email interview, Sadika Hameed, who works with the Project on Prosperity and Development at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, explained how developing countries contribute to each other’s economic growth through trade and aid. WPR: What has been the recent trajectory of “South-South” trade? Sadika Hameed: Following the financial crisis [...]
Governments have been collecting data on their citizens almost from the first moment that they came into being. Data was needed to determine what was out there that could be extracted: The Egyptian Pharaohs conducted a census to find out the scale of the available labor force to build the pyramids, and in the Roman Empire, the five-yearly census was all about finding out who was available for military service and what wealth existed to be taxed. But governments have also used data to find out what people needed: The ancient Babylonians collected data from their citizens nearly 6,000 years [...]
On Nov. 5, 2010, Ghana Statistical Service, the country’s government statistics office, announced that it was revising its gross domestic product (GDP) estimates upward, and as a result Ghana’s GDP per capita almost doubled. The country was upgraded in an instant from a low- to lower-middle-income country. A sense of bewilderment and confusion arose in the development community. When did Ghana really become a middle-income country? What about comparisons with other countries? Shanta Devarajan, the World Bank’s chief economist for Africa, struck a dramatic tone in an address to a conference organized by Statistics South Africa, calling the state of [...]
