The green sukuk, or Islamic bond, is a big step forward to fill gaps in green financing. Proceeds are used to fund environmentally sustainable infrastructure projects such as solar farms in Malaysia.
Photo: Aisyaqilumar/bigstock
Zimbabwe is not known as an economic dynamo in Africa. In fact, most people who know anything about the country probably have the opposite impression. Yet not so long ago, Zimbabwe was the bread basket of Africa – endowed with amazingly fertile land, abundant mineral resources, and one of the best educated populations on the continent.
Over the years, Bangladesh has taken major strides to reduce the vulnerability of its people to disasters and climate change. And today, the country is at the forefront in managing disaster risks and building coastal resilience.
Let’s compare the impact of the Bhola Cyclone of 1970 to the far stronger Cyclone Sidr in 2007. The 1970 cyclone was then the deadliest in Bangladesh’s history, and one of the 10 deadliest natural disasters on record. Official documents indicate that over 300,000 lives were lost, and many believe the actual numbers could be far higher.
By contrast, Sidr was the strongest cyclone to ever make landfall in Bangladesh. This time, fewer than 3,500 people lost their lives. While tragic, this represents about 1% of the lives lost in 1970 or 3% of the nearly 140,000 lost lives in the 1991 cyclone.
The cyclones of 1970 and 1991 were unprecedented in scale. Yet, they steered the country into action.
"In summary, the similarities between follow-up studies with and without baseline randomization are becoming increasingly apparent as more randomized trials study the effects of sustained interventions over long periods in real world settings. What started as a randomized trial may effectively become an observational study that requires analyses that complement, but go beyond, intention-to-treat analyses. A key obstacle in the adoption of these complementary methods is a widespread reluctance to accept that overcoming the limitations of intention-to-treat analyses necessitates untestable assumptions. Embracing these more sophisticated analyses will require a new framework for both the design and conduct of randomized trials."
Afghanistan is not exactly an easy place to undertake a rigorous study on the ease of doing business. And collecting primary data for a micro-based study in Kabul and several Afghan provinces can be a daunting task. Just how daunting is underscored by the fact that the country conducted its most recent census almost 40 years ago, in 1979. Vast tracts of the country remain unsafe and many of its provinces are inaccessible.
Despite the security challenges, our experience from the recently launched Subnational Doing Businessin Afghanistan report shows that the barriers to collecting micro data are not insurmountable. The data and related findings can help guide business reforms toward the kind of smart regulations that are imperative for attracting private sector investment to the capital city and beyond. A regulatory environment that enables private enterprise, especially small and medium firms, to function and be creative boosts job creation and is, therefore, good for the economy.
The report, the first of its kind in Afghanistan, benchmarks Kabul and the provinces of Balkh, Herat, Kandahar and Nangarhar across four Doing Business indicators: Starting a Business, Dealing with Construction Permits, Getting Electricity and Registering Property.
The key takeways?
Kabul leads in two of the areas measured, Starting a Business and Getting Electricity. Kandahar ranks first in Dealing with Construction Permits and Registering Property, while Balkh comes in second in all four areas measured by the report.
Regulatory quality and efficiency vary considerably among the five locations. Rolling out reforms already implemented in Kabul across all of Afghanistan would improve the business environment for entrepreneurs in the provinces.
By adopting all the good practices, Afghanistan could move up 11 places in the global Doing Business ranking, to 172.
Just ask the investors: businesses in emerging markets can no longer afford to ignore the risks posed by the changing climate to their bottom lines. Ranging from increasingly frequent and severe weather events to new regulations and changing consumer preferences, climate change is fundamentally transforming the way we do business. Increasingly, companies and their investors are seeking opportunities to transition to and invest in climate-smart portfolios.
Well-known blog skeptic Jishnu Das continues to blog at Future Development, arguing that higher wages will not lead to better quality or more effective teachers in many developing countries – summarizing evidence from several countries that i) doubling teacher wages had no impact on performance; ii) temporary teachers paid less than permanent teachers do just as well; and iii) observed teacher characteristics explain little of the differences in teacher effectiveness.
Are we now all doomed from ever finding significance? In a paper in Nature Human Behavior, a multi-discipline list of 72 authors (including economists Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, Guido Imbens, David Laibson, John List and Jon Zinman) argue for redefining statistical significance for the discovery of new effects from 0.05 to using a cutoff of 0.005. They suggest results with p-values between 0.005 and 0.05 now be described as “suggestive”. They claim that for a wide range of statistical tests, this would require an increase in sample size of around 70%, but would of course reduce the incidence of false positives. Playing around with power calculations, it seems that studies that are powered at 80% for an alpha of 0.05 have about 50% power for an alpha of 0.005. It implies using a 2.81 t-stat cutoff instead of 1.96. Then of course if you want to further adjust for multiple hypothesis testing…
Have you ever seen a rhino walking into the African sunset? It’s an unbelievable sight. Now let me ask you this- have you ever seen a carcass of a dead adult rhino with its horn sawn off and the body lying on the dusty ground? It is an unforgettable and tragic sight.
The world’s wildlife is under a grave threat of either being slaughtered or captured alive. The wildlife commodities -- whether an ivory tusk, a rhino horn, live birds or reptiles -- are illegally moved through well-organized transnational supply chains and sold in international markets where consumers are willing to pay a high price.
Mother and son in front of their family ger. (Photo: Khasar Sandag / World Bank)
International Children’s Day is celebrated in Mongolia as an official holiday. I could see that it provided an opportunity to reflect on the country’s commitment to create opportunities for its children to thrive and realize their full potential in school and adult life. Nowhere is this commitment more evident than in the education sector. With near-universal access to basic education achieved, legislation and government policy now calls for the expansion of early childhood education (ECE) services to cover every child in the country.
