In this issue: 1. Making Poverty Analysis Easier and Faster: Launch of ADePT
2. The Midpoint of the MDGs
3. Governance Matters 2007
4. Population Issues and the Role of the World Bank
5. Poverty-Environment Website
6. Help Us!
7. To Receive this Newsletter Welcome to the one hundred and third issue of the PovertyNet electronic newsletter from the World Bank. This newsletter provides an update of new resources about understanding and alleviating poverty available from PovertyNet, http://www.worldbank.org/poverty, and other websites. Please continue to send suggestions on items to highlight in forthcoming newsletters to povertynet@worldbank.org.
1. Making Poverty Analysis Easier and Faster: Launch of ADePT Every year the World Bank produces up to 15 poverty assessments. Almost every poverty assessment entails significant time and resources devoted to the production of a reasonably standard set of tables and graphs with basic poverty and inequality statistics. The ADePT software is designed to simplify and speed-up this work. ADePT is an integrated set of programs that allows users to free up resources for other activities, including drawing policy implications from the empirical evidence. It also helps to minimize human errors, and to introduce new techniques and methods of poverty analysis to a wide audience of practitioners. ADePT can be used as a tool for sensitivity analysis, data checking, and as an educational tool. The program should also be helpful in the situation of the limited access to the micro data. The current version of ADePT accepts individual level data and generates about 30 tables and 5 graphs on poverty, inequality, decompositions of poverty changes, poverty profiles by socio-demographic categories, consumption regressions, poverty simulations and sensitivity analysis. More tables and graphs will be added to the program in the near future.
The program also produces a report with basic statistics on all variables and a list of errors, warnings and notes about the variables used in the analysis, which will help the user understand the ouput and problems with the data and/or analysis. While ADePT is operated from within Stata and written in Stata programming language, ADePT itself is Window-based and the user does not need to know Stata to work with the program. ADePT was tested on a dozen of countries from different regions in the Bank: Bulgaria, Bangladesh, Honduras, Georgia, Jordan, Lesotho, Mongolia, Nepal, Russia, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, Uganda and others. The program itself, installation instructions, documentation including User's Guide, examples of tables produced by ADePT, PPT and Video presentations can be accessed at: http://econ.worldbank.org/programs/poverty/adept
ADePT has been developed by the team of researchers led by Michael Lokshin of the Poverty Group in Development Economics Department at the World Bank. The World Bank believes that ADePT could be a valuable tool for the poverty practitioners. However the World Bank warns users of ADePT against using the program without thorough data cleaning and understanding of the economic principles of poverty measurement. ADePT provides limited indications on the quality of the data specified by the user, but this is clearly not a substitute for the careful data cleaning and checking. As with any computer program, the saying “garbage in – garbage out” could be applied to ADePT. The current version of the program has no means of checking how the welfare aggregate has been constructed or what method has been applied to derive the poverty lines.
Please read carefully the ADePT User’s Guide. We discovered that many questions users have about ADePT could be answered by simply reading the User's Guide. It also contains references on the relevant literature that would help users to understand economic methods and techniques used in ADePT.
The World Bank's PovNet website (www.worldbank.org/poverty) contains information on poverty and inequality measurement to provide the analytical context for this program. The Poverty Analysis site, in particular, contains helpful links: http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTPOVERTY/EXTPA/0,,contentMDK:20202162~pagePK:210058~piPK:210062~theSitePK:430367,00.html
2. The Midpoint of the MDGs
At the midpoint to reaching the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for 2015, the world’s nations, particularly the poorest ones, have made substantial but uneven progress. In its annual report released on July 2, the United Nations focuses on the countries’ successes and setbacks. The MDGs are global targets agreed to by world leaders in 2000 on how to improve the lives of poor people. A new report from the UN, The Millenium Development Goals Report 2007 finds impressive gains in reducing poverty worldwide but much less progress in most of the other goals, including slowing climate change and other steps to protect the environment. Ensuring environmental sustainability – integrating the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs and reversing the loss of resources, providing access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation, improving the lives of slum dwellers – is outlined in the Millennium Development Goals as an important part of the global development agenda. The UN report says “a global effort to eliminate ozone-depleting substances is working, though damage to the ozone layer will persist for some time.” The damaged ozone layer can’t start to heal until there is a significant reduction in chlorofluorocarbons, like Freon, that are still widely used in commerce and industry. To dramatize the threat of global warming, a number of “Live Earth” 24-hour concerts were held Saturday, July 7, across seven continents. For more information, go here: http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/
3. Governance Matters 2007 Countries around the world, including some of the poorest in Africa, have made “significant progress” in improving governance and fighting corruption over the decade, the new “Worldwide Governance Indicators” (WGI) study by the World Bank Institute and the World Bank Development Economics Vice Presidency shows. Significant improvements in governance over the past decade occurred in countries as diverse as Indonesia, Tajikistan, Serbia, and Slovakia. And in Africa in particular, countries such as Niger, Sierra Leone, Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Tanzania, and Rwanda showed significant improvements in some dimensions of governance since 1998. Even over the relatively short period since 2002, there have been big improvements in some aspects of governance in countries such as Liberia, Angola, Argentina, and Georgia. The gains in countries straddling all six continents are “hopeful news,” according to study co-author Daniel Kaufmann, Director of Global Governance at the World Bank. But he acknowledged: “On average, there is no evidence that governance in the world at large has improved markedly over the past decade. It is a very varied picture. The good news is that some countries, including some of the poorest ones in Africa, are deciding to move forward, and are showing to the world that it is possible to make substantial inroads in improving governance over a relatively short period of time – in less than a decade. However, others have stayed behind or even deteriorated.” The study emphasizes that the indicators do not constitute a precise international ranking of countries. “Policy makers and academics agree that good governance matters for economic development,” says “A Decade of Measuring the Quality of Governance” a study accompanying the detailed annual volume of indicators. “[T]he ‘development dividend’ earned through good governance is very large. Based on the WGI, the researchers estimate that when governance is improved by one standard deviation, incomes rise about three-fold in the long run, and infant mortality declines by two-thirds.” The full Worldwide Governance Indicators' (WGI) volume, called “Governance Matters VI,” shows how the six aggregate indicators are constructed. They are based on 33 individual data sources and hundreds of variables, capturing the views on governance of tens of thousands household and firm survey respondents, as well as hundreds of nongovernment organizations and public sector experts, and commercial business information providers worldwide. The indicators measure voice and accountability, political stability and absence of major violence and terror, government effectiveness, regulatory quality rule of law, and control of corruption. The new 2007 volume and study, as well as the revamped and interactive website, showcases the full WGI dataset, covering 212 countries and territories from 1996 to 2006. The WGIs, which are the product of a decade-long research project, are not an official World Bank ranking and do nor necessarily reflect official views of the Bank, and are not used to allocate Bank resources across countries. "This is the job of the Country Policy and Institutional Assessments for IDA [International Development Association, a part of the World Bank] countries, as long mandated by the IDA deputies," said study co-author Aart Kraay.
Kaufmann, Kraay and a third co-author Massimo Mastruzzi, emphasizing the importance they give to transparency in their work, note that complete access to the individual indicators underlying the aggregates is provided on the newly redesigned WGI website. They also say the importance of avoiding superficial comparisons and "elevator economics" that stress small differences over time and across countries. They said users should recognize the clearly marked margins of error accompanying the scores for each country. This dataset attempts to set a standard for transparency, the authors say, noting they have submitted papers relating to the WGI to refereed publications and chapter publications in books. The Worldwide Governance Indicators have provoked debate and discussions about their strengths as well as limitations for monitoring country governance, and for informing specific country reform strategies. The authors emphasize that the aggregate WGI data are just the starting point for identifying the country’s governance strengths, vulnerabilities and broad trends, and for thinking about governance in specific country contexts. An important next step, they say, is to review the many individual data sources and variables on which the WGI are built, so to obtain a more disaggregated picture, as well as relying on complementary in-country measurement and assessment tools, such as the Governance and Anti-Corruption (GAC) country diagnostics, which have already been carried out in well over 20 countries together with domestic stakeholders and institutions.
Kaufmann said it’s not only developing countries that face governance challenges. He said the new WGI data shows that a number of emerging economies rate better in governance and control of corruption than some rich industrialized economies, and notes that research points to continuing bribery by many multinationals headquartered in OECD countries operating in emerging markets. He also says that “even if the WGI only rates countries on governance, excluding international financial institutions, we have explicitly recognized that we need to ‘practice what we preach’, striving to attain exemplary governance standards within our own institution, promoting internal governance reforms and change” For the website, go here: http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi2007/ For the report, go here:
http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi2007/pdf/booklet_decade_of_measuring_governance.pdf To view a video with Daniel Kaufman, go here:
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:21400275~menuPK:51416191~pagePK:64257043~piPK:437376~theSitePK:4607,00.html
4. Population Issues and the Role of the World Bank A new World Bank report today warns that poor countries, wealthy donors, and aid agencies are losing sight of the value of contraception, family planning, and other reproductive health programs in helping to boost economic growth, and reduce high birth rates which are strongly linked with endemic poverty, poor education, and high numbers of maternal and infant deaths.
According to the new report—Population Issues in the 21st Century: The Role of the World Bank—35 countries, mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa, have birth rates of more than five children per mother, and that of the estimated 210 million women who become pregnant every year worldwide, more than 500,000 women die during pregnancy and childbirth, and about one in five of them resorts to abortion because of poor access to contraception. The report says that some 68,000 women die each year as a result of unsafe abortion, 5.3 million suffer temporary or permanent disability, and many end up being ostracized within their own communities. The report also says that because fertility rates have declined significantly in most low-and middle-income countries outside of Africa, “… the priorities of donor countries and development agencies have shifted toward other issues, and global funds and initiatives have largely bypassed funding of
family planning, with less attention being focused on the consequences of high fertility, even in those countries that are lagging in achieving sustainable population growth.” “Poor women endure a disproportionate burden of poor sexual and reproductive health because they run into financial or social barriers getting access to these basic but vital programs,” says Joy Phumaphi, the World Bank’s Vice President for Human Development, a former WHO Assistant Director General, and a former Health Minister in Botswana, 1999-2003. “Their full and equal participation in development depends directly on accessing essential sexual and reproductive health care. The World Bank is committed to helping these women, along with the UN Population Fund, WHO, and the technical health agencies, to make voluntary and informed decisions about fertility.” Phumaphi adds that falling birth rates cannot be achieved through better health programs alone. She says that improved education for girls, equal economic opportunities for women in society, and fewer households living below the poverty line are also vital parts of a strategy to achieve sustainable reductions in birth rates. To view the report, go here:
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:21415943~pagePK:34370~piPK:34424~theSitePK:4607,00.html
5. Poverty-Environment Website The Asian Development Bank has developed the website Poverty Environment Net (http://www.povertyenvironment.net) which is a repository of poverty-environment knowledge and resources. Any further contributions to improve the site's document index is welcome.
6. Help Us! The PovertyNet website needs your input to continue to grow. Send information about new web resources, research, data or events related to poverty alleviation, as well as your suggestions for improvements to the web site and this newsletter to povertynet@worldbank.org .
Thank you!
The PovertyNet Team
povertynet@worldbank.org
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