The PSD Blog

The Private Sector Development Blog (PSD Blog) gathers together news, resources and ideas about the role of private enterprise in fighting poverty. The blog is informal and represents the quirks and opinions of the bloggers, not the World Bank Group. Please contact us if you have any questions.

Our objective
  • To provide intelligent comment on private sector development issues in the news.
  • To highlight new Web sites, articles and books that development practitioners might find useful.
  • To provide a link between the detailed resources on the World Bank Group’s Rapid Response Web site, and the ever changing world of the blogosphere.

Our hosts

The PSD Blog is maintained by the World Bank Group’s Rapid Response knowledge service, which specializes in policy advice on business environment reform and privatization policy in developing countries. Rapid Response is a joint knowledge initiative of the World Bank and International Finance Corporation (IFC). Information on the mission and products offered by Rapid Response is available online.



About the authors

All of the PSD Blog authors are members of the World Bank Group. Their posts are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the World Bank Group, its Board of Directors or the governments they represent. For more information, please see our content policy above.

The regulars

Thorsten Beck is a senior economist in the Finance and Private Sector Development Team of the Development Research Group. He has published numerous academic papers and is co-author of Making Finance Work for Africa Flagship report and the forthcoming Policy Research Report on Access to Finance: Measurement, Impact and Policy. He is also co-editor of the Interest Bearing Notes, a bi-monthly newsletter reporting on financial and private sector research. What he likes most about his job, however, are the trips to developing countries where he can find anecdotes, stories and photos to back up his research findings.

Alex Burger is a program manager in IFC's Private Enterprise Partnership for Africa (PEP Africa). He works in Chad and other parts of Africa to help ensure that the benefits from large oil and mining projects find their way to the local citizenry. Alex cut his teeth working in Calcutta with Mother Teresa and once lived on a ranch and slaughtered cattle, but now thinks better of it. He is currently plotting his next career as a film director and playwright.

Laurence Carter is Director of the IFC Small and Medium Enterprise Department. Prior to joining the IFC Laurence worked for 10 years in Botswana, Swaziland, Malawi and St Helena. He wishes he'd written those wonderful books about the No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency in Gaborone, so has entered the blogosphere in order to tell some stories about development which - we hope - will be at least half as good as those. Laurence grew up within sight of the snows of Kilimanjaro and is sad that climate change means that they are disappearing.

Robert Cull is a senior economist in the Finance and Private Sector Development Team of the Development Research Group. His most recent research is on the performance of microfinance institutions and the design and use of household surveys to measure access to financial services. He is also co-editor of the Interest Bearing Notes, a bi-monthly newsletter reporting on financial and private sector research. In his little free time, he also managed to turn his fanaticism for sports into a book - Rumors of Baseball's Demise, How the Balance of Competition Swung and the Critics Missed.

Andrea Dall'Olio is the project manager of the IFC Tajikistan Business Enabling Environment Project, which works to reduce the administrative barriers faced by businesses in Tajikistan. Prior to joining the IFC, Andrea spent several years as a management consultant with McKinsey & Co., focused on SME banking and financial markets. Andrea is known in Dushanbe primarily as "Dodo's owner". Dodo is a white lab puppy who followed Andrea from his native Italy and thanks to whom Andrea socializes in the city of Dushanbe.

Lucie Giraud is the communications officer for IFC's Environmental and Social Development Department. After nine years spent at the World Trade Organization convincing the world that trade and economic development go hand in hand, she realized that it had to be sustainable, too, and traveled all the way down to Australia to study environmental law. While there, she sang in the Sydney Opera House. Now in DC, she is yet to make her debut on the Kennedy Center stage.

Michael Jarvis is a corporate responsibility specialist for the Business, Competitiveness & Development Program at the World Bank Institute. He leads several initiatives on global corporate responsibility and sustainable private sector development, including a global learning program on Business and the Millennium Development Goals. Prior to joining the World Bank, Michael worked as a consultant on historical corporate responsibility and legal compliance issues with Fortune 500 companies as well as promoting transparency in the arms trade. Once a part time DJ in his native England, he can regularly be found in obscure local music venues to hear up and coming bands.

Rachel Kyte is Director of the IFC Environment and Social Development Department. Previously she was Principal Specialist in the Office of the Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman for IFC and MIGA. Prior to joining the World Bank Group she was a Representative and senior policy and gender advisor to the European Union for IUCN, The World Conservation Union. She has worked extensively within the environment, women's and health movements as both policy analyst and advocate, serving as an advisor, and on the boards of a number of NGOs, private philanthropic foundations, the United Nations, and government.

David Lawrence has worked with IFC since 1996, when he was sent to a small Ukrainian town to set up a small business advisory center. Since then, he has focused on post-conflict and post-disaster posts, ideally where water, heat and electricity are in short supply. In the 1990s he worked in Armenia, Georgia and Russia, more recently, in the Tsunami-ravaged province on Aceh, Indonesia. Currently he is working on advisory services programs targeting private sector development in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, the coldest capital city in the world.

Giulio Quaggiotto works as a program officer in Knowledge and Innovation for the Environment and Social Development Department of the IFC. Prior to joining the World Bank Group, he worked at the United Nations University in Yokohama, Japan, and was Knowledge Manager for WWF International. Apart from obscure technologies and pandas, Giulio's interests include Slavic philology and kitsch paraphernalia (you know, snowdomes and the lot) - which combined make him the last person you'd want to be stuck in a lift with.

Jim Rosenberg is the Communications Officer for the Technology Program at the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP). The program is a multi-year learning initiative co-funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to find and test promising technology solutions to improve access to finance. In previous incarnations Jim has been a Web editor at the World Bank, a satellite radio producer, and a reporter at WAMU-FM, the National Public Radio (NPR) affiliate in Washington DC. As a local reporter he contributed frequently to Marketplace, NPR's business program of record in the United States.

Blogger emeritus

Pablo Halkyard was a private sector development associate in the joint World Bank-IFC Private Sector Development Vice-Presidency and for the IFC Chief-Economist. Along with Tim Harford he was the original founder of the PSD Blog. Prior to joining the World Bank, he worked at an international strategy consultancy specializing on country and project risk analysis. In July 2006 he left the World Bank and is currently at New York University. He is still trying to catch-up to Tim and finish his first book.

Tim Harford was an economist at the International Finance Corporation and was, with Pablo Halkyard, one of the original founders of PSD Blog. His book of popular economics, The Undercover Economist was published in late 2005. He is also the author, with Michael Klein, of The Market for Aid. In January 2006 he left the IFC to join the Financial Times as a columnist. You can find his latest writings online at TimHarford.com.

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