In a report released [Tuesday], the World Bank analyzed the consequences of allowing temperatures to reach 4°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. ... the report's authors admit that predications are a challenge. Still, they do their best to try to paint a picture, and boy, is it grim.
posted by Egg Shen
on Nov 20, 2012 -
84 comments
Can
your Partners in Health co-founder college president World Bank president do
this?
posted by lukemeister
on Mar 23, 2012 -
36 comments
Who Will Run the
Frog Hospital World Bank? Robert Zoellick has
announced that he will step down from his role as World Bank President on June 30, at the end of his five-year term. Though the president has
traditionally been selected by the President of the United States through an informal agreement with European powers, emerging powers including Brazil and India have argued for a
change in policy.
[more inside]
posted by psoas
on Feb 15, 2012 -
18 comments
The US may be the economic superpower, and China the new manufacturing powerhouse, but there is one industry in which Africa still leads the world: the manufacture of red tape. The World Bank releases its 2008
Doing Business report (
overview, pdf) on the ease of, well, doing business. The USA is pushed into third by plucky New Zealand and Singapore but overall Eastern Europe has overtaken East Asia as the most business-friendly environment behind high-income OECD countries.
[more inside]
posted by patricio
on Oct 22, 2007 -
34 comments
A recent article in Reason magazine discusses a World Bank report that comes to some unexpected conclusions, not the least of which is that "human capital and the value of institutions (as measured by rule of law) constitute the largest share of wealth in virtually all countries." Worldwide, the study finds, "natural capital accounts for
5 percent of total wealth, produced capital for 18 percent, and intangible capital 77 percent." In other words, rich countries are not rich because they have cheap natural resources (or exploited those of other countries), they are rich because of their social institutions.
[more inside]
posted by woodblock100
on Sep 11, 2007 -
31 comments
The Rise of Disaster Capitalism --
...Although hotels and industry have already started reconstructing on the coast, in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia and India, governments have passed laws preventing families from rebuilding their oceanfront homes. Hundreds of thousands of people are being forcibly relocated inland, to military style barracks in Aceh and prefab concrete boxes in Thailand. The coast is not being rebuilt as it was--dotted with fishing villages and beaches strewn with handmade nets. Instead, governments, corporations and foreign donors are teaming up to rebuild it as they would like it to be: the beaches as playgrounds for tourists, the oceans as watery mines for corporate fishing fleets, both serviced by privatized airports and highways built on borrowed money....
Naomi Klein on "reconstruction" money after natural disasters--and who benefits.
(Makes Wolfowitz seem like a less unlikely choice to head the World Bank after reading, too.)
posted by amberglow
on Apr 17, 2005 -
36 comments
Oh Wolfie! Wolfie! Invade me like you invaded Iraq! Pegged to head the World Bank, is Wolfowitz' lover,
Shaha Riza, one of the reasons we invaded Iraq?
Critics say it would be impossible for Wolfie - as he is nicknamed by Bush - to make independent decisions when his lover, who works on Middle Eastern and North African issues, is so committed to overthrowing Middle Eastern regimes.
"His womanising has come home to roost," a Washington insider said. "Paul was a foreign policy hawk long before he met Shaha but it doesn't look good to be accused of being under the thumb of your mistress."
posted by amberglow
on Mar 26, 2005 -
34 comments
TRAPPED, CUFFED & BUSSED Two Diamondback (Univ. of Maryland student newspaper)reporters covering the IMF-World Bank protests were arrested Friday morning and manacled for 23 hours. Surrounded by hundreds of protesters in Pershing Park, Washington Metropolitan Police circled and arrested the entire group. Jason Flanagan and Debra Kahn were there as impartial observers, and despite the newspaper's efforts to release them, they were stripped of all their possessions - even their shoelaces. What follows is a first-person account of their arrest and detention.
posted by Ty Webb
on Oct 2, 2002 -
71 comments
The New Gilded Age and its Discontents. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz began explaining why markets fail long before Enron and WorldCom rose, exploded and crashed. But not many people wanted to listen during the boom-boom '90s; Stiglitz was even fired from his position as chief economist at the World Bank after he repeatedly criticized the organization's free-market obsessions.
posted by Ty Webb
on Jul 3, 2002 -
8 comments
ANTHRAX AGAIN! The World Bank in Washington DC said today that some of its mail had tested positive for possible anthrax contamination. 1200 employees there will be staying home tomorrow. It's the third report of a positive test in DC this week. Hysteria, residue from before, or is it happening all over again?
posted by crunchland
on May 21, 2002 -
11 comments
Rising Sea Level Forcing Evacuation of Tuvalu. "During the twentieth century, sea level rose by 20-30 centimeters (8-12 inches)." The 1,196 tiny islands of the Maldives are "barely 2 meters above sea level". "In 2000 the World Bank published a map showing that a 1-meter rise in sea level would inundate half of Bangladesh's riceland." Here are
EPA and
NASA sites on the sea level. (NASA? They may be promoting justification to colonize other planets ASAP!)
posted by mmarcos
on Nov 25, 2001 -
17 comments
Did you hear about the
Trash Bloc? Some anti-authoritarians are planning a bloc for the weekend of the IMF/World Bank protests that would go around Washington DC neighborhoods and pick up trash. I think we can all get down with that.
posted by sudama
on Aug 20, 2001 -
4 comments
No way but to decommission the World Bank and IMF -- BusinessWorld columnist Walden Bello explains why the policies of these two institutions have magnified world poverty and inequality, and traces the opposition movement from its origins in the Global South, to Seattle, Prague and beyond:
"The historic Prague Spring of 1968 spelled the beginning of the end of the Soviet Empire. Will Prague, the site of the World Bank-IMF annual meeting for the year 2000, join Seattle in December 1998 and Washington, D.C. in April of this year as one of the catalytic events ushering the beginning of the end of hegemony of corporate-driven globalization?..."
posted by johnb
on Sep 26, 2000 -
8 comments
