PSD Blog - The World Bank Group

Happy New Year

Regardless of when you celebrate new year, we would like to wish you a prosperous 2008.

We are going to take a short break and will be back in early January, continuing to bring you news, resources and ideas on the role of the private sector in development.

Meditation for development?

If meditation is scientifically proven to increase the IQ, should governments interested in promoting socio-economic well-being invest in meditation rather than biotechnology?

This is apparently the type of questions that arise when you start applying futures thinking to development.

Going green for the holidays

Feeling guilty at the excesses of yet another office party or Secret Santa exchange? Envirowise in the UK has come up with a company guide to a green Christmas. Most suggestions are pretty undemanding, but hopefully the impact adds up given the sharp spike in waste generated by the typical holiday season.

In reinforcing the call for climate-friendly celebrations, Lloyds of London notes that over 8 million Christmas trees are bought in the UK alone, generating an estimated 160,000 tonnes of additional rubbish. This is apparently equivalent to the weight of 21 Eiffel Towers.

There are also business opportunities around environmental concerns. In the retail sector, firms are seeing the growing trend for green giving. Deloitte's holiday survey finds that 18% of consumers will buy more eco-friendly gifts and many are willing to pay more for them.

On the receiving end, 58% of Americans want to get a green gift this year according to the 2007 Cone Holiday Environmental Survey. So don't be surprised to find your stocking stuffed with products proudly proclaiming their green credentials from organic to carbon-neutral to biodegradable. If you don't like what you find, perhaps you need have no guilt over recycling gifts.  You would simply be doing your part for the environment.

Prison with a paycheck or a cruise ship ride?

A short video shows Albion Village, Shell's $12billion facility housing 2,500 workers in Wood Buffalo, in Alberta, Canada, where oil deposits are comparable to those in Saudi Arabia.

Though some call it a prison with a paycheck, the company hopes that the Albion's five recreational directors, a golf simulator, and a generous three-pound weekly steak allowance will be enough to prevent losses of millions of dollars caused by labor shortages.

Democratizing entry

Who benefits most from financial liberalization - incumbents or new entrants? A recent study of the U.S. branching deregulation from the mid-70s to the mid-90s suggests a differentiated answer.

Consistent with the hypothesis that small firms were the ones that benefited most from financial liberalization, branch deregulation fostered entry of start-ups more than the expansion of existing enterprises, especially among establishments with fewer than 20 employees.  However, there was also a significant increase in business failures, again concentrated among small start-ups.

Liberalization seemed to have increased churning and creative destruction – and many entrants did not survive to challenge the incumbents.

Is Peru on its way up?

The center of Lima, notoriously crime-ridden and dirty, has become safe and attractive. […] Consumer goods and services—cell phones, household appliances, and private education, for example—previously unavailable or in short supply have proliferated and serve all markets, rich and poor.

[…] The quality of service and attention to detail seems to have improved among Peruvian workers and management across a broad array of businesses. Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa recently noted that he was now much more hopeful about Peru, not because of Peru's positive economic indicators, but rather because 'something profound seems to have changed in the culture of the country. One would have to be blind not to see that.'

That's from Ian Vásquez at the Cato Institute. The Doing Business report ranked Peru 58 in the world and 7 in the region on the ease of doing business. The Enterprise Surveys has a snapshot of Peru's business environment, including the number of power and water outages in a typical month: 1.14 and 0.73, respectively.

Dyslexics make for fine entrepreneurs

Thirty-five percent of entrepreneurs surveyed in a new study self-identified as dyslectic. As it turns out, this common disability can be good for business:

dyslexics were more likely than nondyslexics to delegate authority, to excel in oral communication and problem solving and were twice as likely to own two or more businesses

Bright but jobless

Though today's 15-to-24-year-olds are overall the best educated generation of youth in history, they often have to struggle the most in the job market, finds the World Youth Report 2007.

This age group which makes up 25 percent of the global working-age population also accounts for nearly 44 percent of the unemployed.

More on the subject: four new working papers on youth and employment in the Middle East.

I say development, you say développement

Maybe it's because I am under the influence of Spoken Here, but one of the key messages coming out of the GK3 conference last week was the increasing importance of promoting local content and language to address the digital divide.

It is well known that out of the 6,000 languages spoken on the planet, only a tiny percentage is represented on the web. Perhaps less intuitive are the factors that preclude multilingual digitization of content.  They range from the problems of recognition of minority languages, the lack of local language computing capacity, through the plethora of internet governing bodies involved in encryption projects, to the lack of interface between linguistic and IT expertise.

History didn't help either. 

World's largest untapped consumer segment

With a monthly income varing from $63 and $700, many of them use "branded shampoos and detergents regularly, and they sometimes indulge in a bar of chocolate or bottle of perfume.  A good number own televisions, refrigerators, and DVD players." 

Known as the "next billion," these consumers - who spend over $1 trillion a year - can't "afford to make mistakes" and will "carefully compare [products] functional, technical, and emotional benefits."

BCG has five tips for companies on how to reach this group: