Attend Spring Meetings on Development topics 
from Apr 17-21. Comment and engage with experts. Calendar of Events
Taxation plays a fundamental role in effectively raising and allocating domestic resources for governments to deliver essential public services and achieve broader development goals.
High and rising income inequality is a serious concern in many countries, as highlighted in the IMF’s recent Fiscal Monitor. Wealth, however, is distributed even more unequally than income, as in the picture below.
Photo: Free-Photos / Pixabay Creative Commons
In order for investors to see the potential in developing long-term attractive infrastructure assets, projects must be well prepared. The lack of such primed projects is a major obstacle for ramping up global infrastructure, particularly in developing and emerging economies.
This is one of the priorities for the G20, as Argentinean President Mauricio Macri emphasized in December 2017: "Infrastructure for development" will be one of the key issues of focus during the country's G20 Presidency and it will "…seek to develop infrastructure as an asset class by improving project preparation."
Forty years ago in December, Deng Xiaoping delivered his historic speech "Emancipate the mind, seeking truth from facts and unite as one to face the future." This triggered four decades of reforms that have transformed China into the world’s second largest economy. By some time in the next decade, China will be among the few countries in the world that will have transitioned from low income to high income status since World War II.
Understanding the path China traveled, the circumstances under which historical decisions were made, and their effects on the course of China’s economy will inform future decision makers. Increasingly, this reflection is important to the rest of the world as more and more countries see China as an example to emulate. At the 19th Party Congress in November 2017, China accepted this mantle for the first time since the onset of reforms.
In some ways, China’s reforms were fairly mainstream. The country opened up for trade and foreign investment, liberalized prices, diversified ownership, strengthened property rights, kept inflation under control, and maintained high savings and investment. But this is simplifying the reforms and obfuscates the essence of China’s reforms: the unique steps China took reforming its system are what makes its experience of interest (see the Annex). Its gradual approach to reform was in sharp contrast to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Although often compared, China and other transition countries were simply too different in terms of initial economic conditions, political development, and external environment.
Predominantly rural and among the poorest nations on earth, China was marred by the failure of the Great Leap Forward and the political disruptions during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Integration into the global economy was minimal. Industry was inefficient, but also far less concentrated than in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Perhaps most importantly, because China retained political continuity, the country could focus on an economic and social transition instead of a political one.
Comparison with much of the Latin American reforms also seems out of place. Brazil, Mexico and Argentina were far closer to a market-based system than China, and their reforms—liberalization and macroeconomic stability—were focused on macroeconomic stabilization, whereas China’s reforms aimed for a transformation of the economic system as a whole. So there is no need to juxtapose the “Washington Consensus” with a “Beijing Consensus:” the approaches taken served very different purposes indeed.
The composition of wealth fundamentally changes with economic development. Natural capital—energy, minerals, land and forests—is the largest component of wealth in low-income countries. Its value goes up, but its share of total wealth decreases as economies develop. By contrast, the share of human capital, estimated as the present value of future incomes for the labor force, increases as economies develop. Overall, human capital accounts for two-thirds of the wealth of nations. Read more in The Changing Wealth of Nations
Global wealth grew by 66% between 1995 and 2014 to a total of over 1,140 Trillion dollars. The share of the world’s wealth held by middle-income countries is growing — it increased from 19% to 28% between 1995 and 2014, while the share of high-income OECD countries fell from 75% to 65%. Read more in The Changing Wealth of Nations
This year’s World Economic Forum Annual Meeting comes at a time of good news for the world economy
. As we said in this month’s Global Economic Prospects report, for the first time since the financial crisis, the World Bank is forecasting that the global economy will be operating at or near full capacity. We anticipate growth in advanced economies to moderate slightly, but growth in emerging markets and developing countries should strengthen to 4.5% this year.
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Two years in the making, last week the Islamic Development Bank Group (IsDBG) and the World Bank Group officially launched the landmark report Mobilizing Islamic Finance for Infrastructure Public-Private Partnerships at a discussion broadcast online from Washington, D.C. We illustrated that, through partnerships, the power of Islamic finance can be instrumental in unlocking financial resources necessary to meet the tremendous demand for critical infrastructure.
In fact, infrastructure PPPs funded with Islamic finance have proliferated in the Middle East, and have flourished in other countries throughout Africa and Asia. Both of our institutions are committed to leverage our competitive advantages, achieve effective interventions, and yield measurable results in scaling up and broadening the use of Islamic finance.
