PSD Blog - The World Bank Group

The latest news from Bubblesville

FT Alphaville has published a chart, via The Global Property Guide, showing the latest trends in real estate prices from around the world:

 

A few observations from the bottom of the list:

• Western Europe's most vulnerable economies continue to suffer. Spanish home prices are down more than last year, the UK remains in the red, and Irish prices have declined by a whopping 21 percent. As the ECB puts forth its strategy of removing many of its exceptional crisis support provisions, Europe's recovery will become even more uneven (just ask Greece). This has already led some to re-ignite the debate over the future of the eurozone, though currency markets seem to be shrugging it off. 

• Parts of Eastern Europe's real estate market are in dire straits. Latvian prices are down by nearly 60 percent, while Bulgaria (28%), Russia (19%) and Slovakia (15%) are all experiencing double-digit falls.

• Dubai is looking to be the ultimate boom and bust story. One year ago, real estate prices had increased by over 61 percent. Now, they are down by 48 percent. The government-owned holding company, Dubai World, is struggling to service its $59bn in liabilities, in spite of a recent $5bn bailout by Abu Dhabi.

The BRIC Temptation

My final posts on Crisis Talk addressed issues concerning capital flows and emerging markets (see here and here). As most of the world emerges from the crisis, the demand for 'safe' investments, such as American and European government bonds, has diminished. This has been exacerbated by negligible interest rates in mature economies, which generate low investment yields and inexpensive lending. As Nouriel Roubini observed, this is the perfect recipe for borrowing cheaply in dollars, and investing outside the United States, primarily in emerging markets. This is likely to go on for some time: dollar depreciation continues to look like a one-way bet, and the Fed has indicated that low interest rates are here to stay.

Meanwhile, emerging markets have gone from strength to strength. China is leading the world out of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Brazil is increasingly feted as one of the Western Hemisphere's most dynamic economies, with a diverse economic base ranging from aircraft production to vast hydrocarbon reserves. India has emerged from the crisis relatively unscathed. Even Russia, long considered by many as the black sheep of the BRICs, is looking up. Oil prices are on the rise (and may get much higher), while the rouble has been the best performing major currency against the dollar since the start of September.

Yet, I can't help wondering if this is all too good to be true. To me, the question isn't, "are emerging markets overheating?" Rather, I tend to ask myself, "to what degree are they overheating, and what risk (if any) does this exceptional growth pose to the global economy, particularly as it emerges from the crisis?"

Weekend Reading: Unemployment Edition

Can development workers win wars?

Is transport infrastructure the most important aspect of urban evolution?

The Treasury's courtship of the blogosphere.

Is China's changing worldview bad for business?

America's largest retailer: it's not Wal-Mart.

Why are some marathons more volatile than others?

The EU's role in reducing state fragility in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Thoughts on migration: Kosovo edition.

Unemployment

What America can learn from Europe about unemployment.

Other difficulties that arise from high unemployment.

Plus, unemployment charts galore from Calculated Risk.

A less pessimistic take on today's numbers (it's still ugly).

Why employment is down and GDP up? It's all about productivity.

Improving Credit in Armenia

The 2006 and 2007 Doing Business reports both found that Armenia has been reforming in the area of credit. Armenian lenders can now rely on a credit registry when deciding on loan applications. But have these reforms really had an impact?

The recently-released enterprise surveys country note on Running a Business in Armenia shows that these reforms have indeed resulted in improved access to credit, which in turn is making it easier for Armenian firms to operate efficiently.

Both prepaid sales and sales on credit nearly doubled in recent years, from 15 to 16 percent in 2005 to 30 percent in 2009. Furthermore, the figure below shows that the value of collateral (expressed as a percentage of the loan amount) necessary to secure a loan has decreased substantially across all sectors of the economy.

 

World Bank gets its own data visualizer

Perhaps taking a page from Hans Rosling's extremely popular presentation of development data at the 2006 TED Talks, the World Bank now has its own publicly accessible tool for data visualisation. This first version of the tool contains 49 indicators for 209 countries taken from the World Development Indicators.

Just to get a taste of how the tool works, I looked at the number of internet users per 100 people (Y-axis) compared to GNI per capita (X-axis) and got the chart below. Each of the colored blobs represents a country, and the size of the blob represents total population. On casual observation, it looks like a lot of countries that are more wired than their income levels would predict are in eastern Europe.

For those who really want to get crazy, the tool also allows you to "play" the statistics over time. If you want to learn more about how not to bore your audience to death during your next Powerpoint presentation, check out this video tutorial. (Highly recommended for all development professionals.)

Belarusian Business Reform: Less Time with the Taxman

Has the regulatory burden for Belarusian businesses decreased?  According to a new World Bank Country Note on Running a Business in Belarus, progress has indeed been made over time. For example, the number of visits or required meetings with tax officials has significantly decreased from 2005 to 2008: from 3.2 to just 1 visit per year. Also, the percentage of firms reporting incidence of bribes with these tax officials decreased as well.

Comparing the firm-level data obtained in Belarus to similar Enterprise Survey data in 28 other Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA) countries yields two interesting statistics as discussed in the Note:

1. Belarusian firms have the highest proportion of government or state ownership in private firms, on average 10 percent.
2. Belarus stands out in the region as having high percentages of female participation in both firm ownership (53%) and in the labor force

Should the public sector guarantee private sector financing for PPPs?

The financial crisis and subsequent credit crunch has greatly reduced the options available to governments regarding PPPs. The reason is very simple: There is no longer enough money available for long-term private infrastructure investment. However, I see this as a temporary situation, as the rationale for PPPs remains as strong as ever. 

In the meantime, governments in many countries are in the middle of procuring large PPPs and therefore in need of solutions to the temporary dislocation in credit markets. More and more governments have been turning to public sector guarantees of private sector loans for PPP projects as a way to overcome shortfalls in available financing.

The question is: Is this solving the problem? There are voices that say this doesn’t make sense, why should the public sector guarantee a loan by the private sector? Isn’t the rationale behind PPPs to get the private sector to put its own capital at risk?

Uzbekistan’s struggling private sector

Exactly one year ago, the Financial Times gave a positive gloss on Uzbekistan’s economic prospects. One of the sources for the FT’s take on Uzbekistan was Alisher Ali Djumanov, a managing partner at Eurasia Capital Management and (as the article points out) the only alumnus of Insead in the country. He had this to say:

Recent supercharged high-flyers Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan have now found themselves at the epicentre of the ongoing crisis in the region…Uzbekistan, the fourth largest economy in the CIS, is in better shape because of government policies which at the time were considered to be too rigid and less pro-market. There is still a question of whether this policy will be better for the economy in the long term but, in the current environment, the conservative approach will benefit Uzbekistan. We believe the long-term investment story for Uzbekistan is intact.

While Djumanov may be correct that certain sectors in Uzbekistan have good prospects, there is another side to this story. Hard data on the private sector suggest that most firms in Uzbekistan face pretty substantial hurdles. The latest results from Enterprise Surveys paint a sad picture:

Despite crisis, positive outlook for PPPs in Russia

Editor's Note: The following is a joint submission by Filip Drapak and Natalia Reznichenko.

Many countries are experiencing a big infrastructure gap, and Russia is no exception. The Russian government is well aware of the problem, and it has announced that it will invest about US$1 trillion over the next 10 years in improving infrastructure. But how can the government raise that kind of capital? The expectation is that the private sector will contribute most of the financing though a Public Private Partnership (PPP).

While Russia does have some experience with PPPs, the track record so far has been spotty. We might mention in this regard one project that is sometimes considered to be the first PPP in Russia—the South-West Wastewater Treatment plant of St. Petersburg. The project was agreed upon by the Russian, Finnish and Swedish governments all the way back in 1986, but due to a lack of public financing the project was stopped. It was resurrected as a PPP in 2002 and formally procured as a 12-year BLT (Build-Lease-Transfer) contract.

What is driving businesses to adopt the use of the internet?

Few would contest that the internet revolution has saved us a lot of time keeping in touch with others and conducting searches. For firms, time saved is labor saved and this is particularly attractive in countries that have stricter labor laws. What I’m suggesting here is that stricter labor laws may encourage firms to adopt modern labor-saving technologies such as the internet and computers. In theory this could magnify the adverse effect of stricter labor laws on employment and wages documented in the literature. So what does the data tell us?