PSD Blog - The World Bank Group

Women and soccer: what have you done for me lately?

The 2010 Fifa World Cup in South Africa will generate the demand for service and tourism industries potentially benefiting local women entrepreneurs. First National Bank promised financial and know-how support.

The question is whether the boom in business activity can be sustained beyond the games.

Got game?

Can video and computer games help people manage their health? The Changemakers at the Ashoka Foundation think so. "Why Games Matter: A Prescription to Improve Health and Health Care" seeks innovation, along with a potential for social impact, and sustainability.

The rules are simple and the deadline is on September 26, 2007, coinciding with the release of the 2008 Doing Business report which will focus on gender.

Al Gore must be smiling

It seems that U.S. big business is doing its best to make up for any past rectitude on climate change. Barely a day goes by without another firm announcing a "green" initiative.

In back to back announcements this month, first Citigroup announced that it will shift $50 billion to investing and financing for projects that reduce global carbon emissions, then General Motors became the first US car maker to join the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a business coalition calling on the U.S. government to support a mandatory nationwide cap on global-warming pollution. GM Chief Executive Rick Wagoner announced that:

GM views the need to promote energy security and reduce greenhouse gas emissions as both a business necessity and an obligation to society.

Meanwhile, a company with more long standing green credentials, Starbucks Coffee, has partnered with environmental group Global Green USA to create Planet Green Game. At this new site players take on the mission of reducing CO2 emissions in the fictional town of Evergreen. If you feel up to the task, click here.

Funny money

Virtual money, when backed by trust in the guarantor, can function like any other currency. QQ coins are online tokens, created by Chinese Internet company Tencent, that can be sold for cash on the Web. The Wall Street Journal writes:

The trouble starts when a virtual currency that isn't backed by a trusted government, becomes linked to a real one that is through an exchange rate. Virtual currency brokers call that RMT, or real-money trade. When that happened to the QQ coin, it effectively turned into a parallel currency operation alongside the yuan, says Yipping Huang, the chief Asia economist of Citibank.

QQ coins, currently priced at $0.13, are no laughing matter for the Chinese authorities who fear that the real-money trade, estimated at $2 billion a year, may facilitate money laundering and even an emergence of underground economy.

Vote in Changemakers competition

One week left to vote in the current Changemakers competition - Entrepreneuring Peace: Innovations in Managing Group Conflict. A few entrants of note:

• Peacemaker, the serious game featured in the New York Times and PSD Blog last August.
• A proposed Palestinian Shippers' Council, to encourage Palestinian-Israeli private sector dialogue.
• Participatory theatre for conflict transformation in the Democratic Republic of Congo

(Disclosure/small world: in a strange twist of fate, Changemaker's executive director was my brother's best friend in college. Also, his name is Charlie Brown, and he really had a dog named Snoopy. That is all.)

A virtual trip to Haiti

Pienso points us to Ayiti, a new serious game about a family of five struggling to survive in Haiti. Yet again, I find myself dying of cholera.

Real world issues crash online party

Daniel Drezner points out how serious the virtual world has become. A real economist suggests that burgeoning virtual economies should be taxed. Does this imply that the government will provide virtual services to game-players? The campaign trail has already entered the virtual world, as a former Virginia governor held court on Second Life recently via an avatar.

Sweatshops have also invaded the online world, and I'm not talking about the cubicle farms of avatar-builders. Sim Sweatshop is the latest serious game to catch my eye (thanks Pienso), where you make sneakers for 50 cents an hour. Interesting timing, given the recent multinational huffing and puffing over China's proposed labor legislation.

Taxes, politicians, sweatshops. Anyone else miss Pong?

End-of-summer reading list

Ordered from short to long for your time-management convenience...

• Sachs for President? (and a nice bit of commentary from Gristmill)
• A would-be serious game is looking for volunteer designers: "Village is a multiplayer online real-time strategy game for the PC that immerses the player into the role of an entrepreneur building companies to bring prosperity to the villages of the third world"
• FastCompany explains how Timberland just raised the bar on Corporate Social Responsibility Reports
• A "born-again organic farmer" in Turkey helps hundreds in his poverty-stricken region
• Can good economics ever be good politics? Case study of India's power sector, a World Bank working paper on how the lack of political will often reflects rational political behavior
• Managing governments: Unilever in India and Turkey, 1950-1980, a Harvard Business School working paper on how the strategies of this global consumer products company enabled it to survive the postwar "era of confrontation" which deterred most other foreign firms from investing in India and Turkey

Scenarios: disaster response and the media

Strong Angel III (SA III) is a disaster response event/project/conference going on this week in San Diego. Blogging from the event is Sanjana Hattotuwa from ICT for Peacebuilding. He has several excellent posts up about how technology can/should be used in disasters, such as this one describing an audio interview with Internews regional director Mark Frohardt:

Speaking about new and traditional media, Mark emphasised the importance of disconnected traditional media such as FM radio and newspapers...he also said that we need to look at new and innovative ways to get messages out and in particular mentioned Microsoft FM radio enabled wrist watches (that at presently are first generation, somewhat unreliable for essential communications and not designed for humanitarian aid) that in the future could evolve into devices that could really help first response mechanisms work cohesively and collaboratively.

The title threw me at first (sounds a little too much like the Dark Angel TV show), but the event sounds fascinating. What exactly are they doing in San Diego? Addressing this scenario:

Two new serious games

Seems like every time I hear someone describing the development of African business, crumbling or nonexistent infrastructure is cited as a major limiting factor. Similarly, you can't talk about healthcare in Africa without mentioning the delivery systems on the ground. A new game, The Transaid Challenge, puts you behind the wheel of a four wheel drive and asks you to deliver health supplies to remote African villages. My problem was not so much with the potholes as with my (apparently very limited) hand-eye coordination.

You may have read about Peacemaker in the NYTimes recently, a game where you try to bring peace to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. YouTube has an excellent 3 minute video featuring the Carnegie Mellon team who created Peacemaker and images from the game. Timely and much more sophisticated than the other serious games we've written about.

African farming: would you survive?

The simply designed 3rd World Farmer is a serious game that “aims at simulating the real-world mechanisms that cause and sustain poverty in 3rd World countries”. The brainchild of IT-University of Copenhagen students, this addictive game forces you to make tough choices on a tight budget. (Does it remind anyone else of the Oregon Trail?) Visit their forum for discussion and suggestions. My advice: start with corn and hope someone offers you a wife.

Other serious games we have written about include: Darfur is Dying, CyberBudget, A Force More Powerful, EU Water Game, Food Force, and a Hungarian budget game.

Who to root for in the World Cup?

Owen has found a tool to help those of you with a conscience who are still undecided:

The World Development Movement has a handy tool to help the ethical football supporter decide which team to support. As I type, Tunisia is beating Saudi Arabia - according to the WDM, this is good news as it means that the 3rd most supportable team is beating the 29th most supportable, on measures such as carbon emmissions, corruption and military spending.

Also see our World Cup special or this iPod raffle.

World Cup, economics and development

The World Cup starts on Friday, and for many of us our productivity will plummet as a result. For me the efficiency-loss started early, as last week I pulled together this brief reading list on football, sports and development. Lots of it we have already blogged about, but some of the new stuff includes:

• The World Cup and Economic 2006
• The Homeless World Cup
• Legal Determinants of World Cup Success
• Impact of Overwhelming Joy on Consumer Demand: The Case of a Soccer World-Cup Victory
• The Soccer Wars: Bono Says the World Cup Is a Peacemaker. Not Quite
• The Beautiful Game: Why Soccer Rules the World

Also see this story about Sierra Leone’s National Amputee Football Team.

Soccernomics, part 2

The latest soccernomics analysis from ABN AMRO focuses on the relationship between football and the economy in emerging markets. For example:

Beware Argentina! The Dutch team should not underestimate group rival Argentina. In the past, that country's performance on the football pitch often mirrored its economic performance. Each economic crisis after 1987 was followed by poor results by the football team, while every economic recovery was usually followed by better results on the pitch. The Dutch team may have roll their sleeves up: in the past few years the Argentinian economy has expanded by 9% on average.

Here is our earlier post on soccernomics, and more on the increased mobility of soccer players. Also see Chiappori et al. on 'Testing Mixed-Strategy Equilibria When Players Are Heterogeneous: The Case of Penalty Kicks in Soccer.' (via Freakonomics)

Public policy and serious games

The winners of USC’s Reinventing Public Diplomacy Through Games Competition have been announced. Micki Krimmel has a good round-up. Second place went to Hydro Hijinks:

A class project designed to promote discussion about international water issues and to educate players from around the world about sources of international conflict over water rights.

Relevant serious games we have written about include: Darfur is Dying, CyberBudget, A Force More Powerful, EU Water Game, Food Force, and a Hungarian budget game.

Darfur is dying

Darfur is Dying is the serious game that has won mtvU's Darfur Digital Activist campaign. The other finalists are also online. See the Washington Post for more coverage. (via houtlust)

Want to play French Budget Minister?

Because if you do, now you can:

French Budget Minister Jean-Francois Cope has announced the launch of an online game for the country's taxpayers to have a go at balancing the books. The game, called Cyberbudget, will launch in May and will let users manage 300bn euros ($373bn)… It allows each person to get familiar with how [the budget] functions. In this game each French person can pretend they are the budget minister and make decisions to understand how much each [ministry's] budget costs, education spending, military spending, how it's all organised and see what kind of decision we can make when we want to cut taxes.

Seems the idea is to convince people how hard the job is. A better idea would be to track and use any collective wisdom that might emerge. (Tnx Tim)

Globalization, football and goals

Branko Milanovic looks towards the world’s most globalized sport for possible lessons on how poor countries can harness globalization for their benefit.

Soccer (football in the non-American terminology) is the most globalized sport. Free circulation of players has markedly increased during the last ten to fifteen years as limits on the number of foreign players in the European leagues have been lifted, and clubs have become more commercially-minded. On the other hand, the rules governing national team competition have remained restrictive: players can play only for the country where they were born. We show that, in a model where there is free circulation of labor, increasing returns to scale, and endogeneity of skills, this produces on the one hand, higher overall quality of the game and increasing inequality of results among clubs, and on the other hand, lower inequality in the national teams’ performances.

The empirical examples from the history of the European Champions’ League and the World Cup support the implications of the model. We argue in the conclusions, that soccer’s global rules allow poor countries to capture some of their “leg drain”, that is the improved skills which their players have acquired playing for better foreign clubs. This provides an example as how forces of efficiency but also inequality unleashed by globalization can be harnessed by the existence of global institutions to help improve the outcome for the poor countries.

The paper is old, but Branko rehashed some of these ideas in a recent op-ed.

Also see Franklin Foer's 'How Soccer Explains the World,' a previous post on soccernomics, and a workshop on the economics and psychology of football.

Update: Sunil Gulati, Columbia econ professor and former World Banker, is the new president of the US Soccer Federation. (via The Sports Economist)

Soccernomics

A team of ABN Amro economists (who have way too much time on their hands) have published Soccernomics 2006. They claim that:

The world economy will benefit most from an Italian victory at the football World Cup in June/July… Although the direct economic impact (higher sales in bars and cafes) is marginal, good performances on the pitch can certainly stimulate an economy. In the past, countries winning the World Cup added around 0.7% to their economic growth. And at the last three tournaments the winning country's stock market considerably outperformed the losing finalist's market. On average there was 10% positive effect in the winner and a 25% negative effect in the loser.

But what of the health costs from all that extra beer? And having been in Peru, Chile and Brazil during World Cups – I know that the productivity loss is considerable. For example, I was supposed to go on a mission to Brazil in July/August but was told that their schedule was booked in preparation for World Cup celebrations.

ABN Amro also concluded that Brazil is the gambler’s pick, Argentina got the most unfavorable draw, England was the luckiest, and that Group F is the ‘group of death.’ A related interview.

Could a game win the Nobel Prize?

Probably not, but that won’t stop people from trying – at least not Eric Zimmerman, the man behind the Game Design Challenge. This year he has challenged game designers to concoct up something that could win the Nobel Peace Prize. The ideas include a game that aims to inspire players to spontaneously meet and carry out humanitarian acts such as food drives, another is meant to make players assume the role of their enemies – and see the human costs of their decisions. While none of the designers will ever be invited to Stockholm, serious games are certainly getting more serious.

Conflict resolution meets Xbox

Can a computer game teach how to fight real-world adversaries—dictators, military occupiers and corrupt rulers, using methods that have succeeded in actual conflicts—not with laser rays or AK47s, but with non-military strategies and nonviolent weapons? Such a game, A Force More Powerful (AFMP), is now available. A unique collaboration of experts on nonviolent conflict working with veteran game designers has developed a simulation game that teaches the strategy of nonviolent conflict. A dozen scenarios, inspired by recent history, include conflicts against dictators, occupiers, colonizers and corrupt regimes, as well as struggles to secure the political and human rights of ethnic and racial minorities and women.

I have been hearing about this for a while. It is now finally out of beta and available for download. More on Z+Blog.

Tracking bank notes to model Avian Flu risks

Using a popular internet game that traces the travels of dollar bills, scientists have unveiled statistical laws of human travel in the United States, and developed a mathematical description that can be used to model the spread of infectious disease in this country. This model is considered a breakthrough in the field.

Via Science Blog. More on New Scientist and Nature. (tnx to Christopher for the pointer)

Can a ball change the world?

Kofi Annan on the power of sport:

It is a global language capable of bridging social, cultural and religious divides. It can be a powerful tool for fostering understanding, tolerance and peace… it teaches us teamwork and fair-play. It builds self-esteem and opens up new opportunities. This in turn can contribute to the wellbeing of whole communities and countries.

Hear the full podcast from Davos. Or listen to Tegla Loroupe discuss how she leverages her running to help poverty and children in Kenya. Later today you can catch the live webcast and podcasts from Davos on sport and development.

As Annan mentions, and we have discussed before, the private sector can play an important role in maximizing the development potential of sport. For more, see the UN Year of Sport 2005 or the Magglingen conference.

Update: Mirror podcasts up on Loic's blog. Also, apparently Annan's wife is more skier than football player.

Synthetic worlds

Pablo has called attention to my review of Acemoglu and Robinson's 'The Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy'. I wrote another review recently, for those of you who've been following our thread on computer games and development. It's of Castronova's 'Synthetic Worlds'. You can read the review here.

What to see at Davos

The World Economic Forum has released their program and webcast/podcast schedules for Davos - which kicks off Jan 25. Also see ForumBlog. For some PSD & development-related highlights, see below the fold.

Food Force Superbowl contest

Here is one more reason to try the UN World Food Program’s innovative Food Force game: they have teamed up with the NFL Players Association to offer a trip to the Superbowl. The deadline is December 23. (via Youthink!)

Outsource to China… your video game playing?

Gold farming is being outsourced to China. Not the 24 karat variety, but the virtual kind:

The people working at this clandestine locale are "gold farmers." Every day, in 12-hour shifts, they "play" computer games by killing onscreen monsters and winning battles, harvesting artificial gold coins and other virtual goods as rewards that, as it turns out, can be transformed into real cash…

"For 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, my colleagues and I are killing monsters," said a 23-year-old gamer who works here in this makeshift factory and goes by the online code name Wandering. "I make about $250 a month, which is pretty good compared with the other jobs I've had. And I can play games all day."

Who pays them? Rich gamers who lack the time and patience to develop their own players (and hence reach the better levels), or private firms who employ teams of miners to convert the virtual ore into US dollars. In some of these virtual worlds 40-50 percent of the players are Chinese ‘farmers’. The worlds and currencies might be synthetic, but the economics and dollars figures behind them are very real. Entrepreneurial yes, but also apparently illegal.

Update 1: For more on synthetic worlds, Terra Nova is the place. Also see Lance Koonce on virtual sweat shops.

Update 2: NYTimes virtual slideshow also available.

Fix the Hungarian budget

Hungarian blog Pestiside explains that the Hungarian government have an online computer game designed to help you explore the budget. Go and play around, if you speak Hungarian.

EU water game

Welcome to life as a poor country. You are trying to collect aid money for vital water and sanitation services. You will be taken through three levels that show you the difficulties in getting aid from the European Union (EU).

WaterAid and Tearfund have come together to make the water game – which aims to highlight EU aid disbursement inefficiencies. The graphics and animations are basic, but its creative approach makes it worth a play – even if only once.

Video games for change

The Games for Change Annual Conference wrapped up today in NYC. The conference featured a discussion of the very popular and much talked about UNWFP Food Force game. (You should download and try it, see press coverage).

This issue of using games to improve development results is slowly gaining momentum, and it will be interesting to see where things go. For example, one of the debates is whether these games should be targeted at increasing awareness in the developed world or instead as teaching tools in less developed countries. Also, might a creative board game not be even more effective - do we need the 2.0 approach? For more, see Net Aid or Social Impact Games. (via Terra Nova)

Sports, business and development

Sports are universally popular – it doesn't matter if the ball is made out of leather, rags, or whether it is just a tin can. Sport also has the unique ability to engage across cultural differences, while incorporating built-in mechanisms that promote aspiration, reward effort and encourage teamwork. Accordingly, many groups (such as IBLF) have suggested that sport is an area where development partnerships between donors and businesses might flourish. See this IBLF strategy paper offering guidelines on how to run a successful sport-development program.