PSD Blog - The World Bank Group

Clay Shirky @ the World Bank

Internet guru Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, was at the World Bank last week to share his take on collaboration and new technologies. His main piece of advice for the Bank: "when someone knocks at your door with the next great big collaboration idea that will cost a million dollars, ask them to go outside for a walk and come back until the price tag is closer to 100,000 USD". New technologies have dramatically reduced the cost of failure: trying a new approach is now cheaper than convening a stakeholder meeting to discuss whether a proposed solution might work or not. This week, Gartner actually suggested that 5,000 USD is a realistic estimate for the cost of a collaboration trial.

And, of course, it is not only that the cost of failure has gone down: entry costs have plummeted, too. In the web 2.0 world, one can feed off existing infrastructures to get people to collaborate or campaign for a cause. No need, for example, to create a social networking site of your own -- you can just use Facebook. And once you succeed in getting people together, the cost of empowering them with information and coordinating their efforts are also minimal: as Shirky put it, social networks are "transaction costs lowering machines".

In the Development 2.0 world, there are fewer and fewer justifications for the "not invented here" syndrome and massive budgets spent to develop proprietory IT solutions.  The challenge to adopt a try and test it approach that is open to failure and appropriation of solutions developed by others is not a technological one: it's first and foremost an issue of organisational culture.

Building competitive trade logistics

Global trade could increase by trillions of dollars if transactions costs in developing countries are reduced to OECD levels. But what’s the most effective ways to achieve such reductions?

A group of high-level policy makers, academics, and World Bank Group staff met in Washington last week to strategize as part of a conference organized by the FIAS' Trade Logistics Advisory Program. Presenters discussed case studies from twelve developing and industrialized economies and state-of–the-art approaches to building efficient trade logistics services. Some governments are making progress in simplifying their trade-related regulatory procedures. Pakistan, for example, managed to reduce the number of trade transactions from 26 clearance steps, 34 signatures, and 64 verifications to one declaration form. And it increased the proportion of cargo that is cleared from in less than one day from 4% to 70%.

Small Business Finance - What Works, What Doesn't?

May 5 and 6 saw an interesting research conference here in DC on Small Business Finance, looking at which banking practices and government interventions help foster small businesses' access to external finance. Twelve interesting papers and a stimulating panel discussion addressed an array of issues, ranging from banks' lending techniques over competition, government policies to informal and trade credit. Many papers and speakers questioned conventional wisdom on what we know and what policies are helpful.

Comparing businesses' environmental commitments

Climate Change, an environmental interest group, released a new ranking of "green" companies. The survey purports to measure how serious companies are about climate change in comparison with their sector competitors. 

The survey, which is updated annually, uses 22 criteria to analyze whether companies measure their climate footprint; reduced their impact on global warming; supported progressive climate legislation; and publicly disclosed their climate actions clearly and comprehensively.

A (LED) light at the end of the tunnel

Close to 75 percent of Sub-Saharan Africans, about 550 million people, do not have access to electricity. Lighting Africa, a conference in Ghana that ended today, is tackling how to mobilize the private sector to supply modern off-grid lighting such as Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) to over more 250 million people living in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2030. This is a timely effort given surging oil prices and the fact that Africa spends about $17 billion on inefficient lighting fuels such as kerosene lamps and paraffin yearly.

Credit crunch: Wall Street only, not Queens

Just a few months after opening for business, Grameen Bank America has loaned somewhere between $500 and $3000 to about 175 borrowers.  About a month ago, The New York Times published an article asking weather Muhummad Yunus's  scheme would work in the United States as well as it worked in countries like Bangladesh. The paper may have answered its own question on its City Room blog. The answer seems to be yes, thanks to low income immigrants. To reach the immigrant market, Grameen America just opened its new headquarters to Jackson Heights, a neighborhood flourishing with new immigrants.