About This Issue: Letter from the Editor | World Bank Institute (WBI)

The World Bank Institute (WBI) is a global connector of knowledge, learning and innovation for poverty reduction. We connect practitioners and institutions to help them find suitable solutions to their development challenges. With a focus on the "how" of reform, we link knowledge from around the world and scale up innovations. Read More »

About This Issue: Letter from the Editor

Every crisis has its lessons. A global financial and economic convulsion of the magnitude we have just experienced should offer more lessons than most. That is why we have selected “Growing out of Crisis” as the theme for this issue of Development Outreach.
 
As 2009 draws to a close, policymakers in all countries are assessing the fault-lines in their economic management systems, and working together in international forums such as the G-20 and IMF/World Bank meetings, among others, to define an agenda for reform, and to improve international coordination systems.
 
We asked some of the world’s leading economic thinkers, as well as regional experts and policymakers, to discuss the impact of the crisis from different perspectives and in different parts of the world, and to reflect on changes at national and international levels that would better protect us from the next crisis.
 
World Bank President Robert Zoellick, in an address at Johns Hopkins University in September, pointed to the vital role now played by developing economies in leading the world out of this crisis. Indeed, this is perhaps the major watershed produced by the crisis. The emerging market countries have arrived, the G-20 has replaced the G-7, and more hands are on the levers of global economy.
 
Not least, this has had implications for international financial institutions. The World Bank Group committed itself to lending $100 billion over three years to provide a counter-cyclical stimulus to the developing world. The IMF has also tripled the resources it has available to lend to $750 billion. Both institutions must seek additional support to cover these new demands, and both face pressure to reform their governance and representation to reflect shifting global economic influences.
 
The World Bank Institute, whose mission includes capacity building for government officials and other stakeholders, responded to the economic and financial crisis by hosting videoconference discussions among policymakers in developing countries’ finance, planning and trade ministries, as well as central banks. A series of seminars, Pathways to Development, will follow, aimed at drawing further lessons to help countries grow out of crisis.
 
For his guest editing of this issue of Development Outreach, I would like to thank Raj Nallari, Lead Economist with WBI’s Growth and Crisis Unit.
 
Christopher Neal
Executive Editor    
Development Outreach Magazine