World Bank Report: Turmoil at Twenty

For those who don’t have time to slog through 276 pages of World Bank Reports, here are the main points from the introduction of the report:

> The nature of the transitional economy made the impacts of the current financial crisis more severe due to not as strong financial policy and banking oversight. Avoiding a humanitarian crisis is critical.

>Utility infrastructure is important, but only if it’s going to be open to private enterprise and make revenues to attract foreign investment.

>The high growth (up to 7%) in the last decade has created capacity constraints in terms of an educated work force and infrastructure.

>The economy will recover and development will surpass where it was in about 20 years.

While the World Bank is talking mostly about electricity infrastructure the reality is that electricity is only good if you have other public goods as well. Water, electricity, telecommunication, and transportation infrastructure are all important to development. The reason electricity is coming up (and sometimes natural gas) is because there is a potential for foreign direct investment and a potential for profit. It’s probably a good time for a large utility company to come in and buy the land or surface easements for their future power lines. But it’s harder to plan for utilities when you don’t have enough transportation infrastructure to facilitate centralized development along the corridors.

World Bank: ECA 20 Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Lots of publications coming out of the World Bank this week on ECA (Europe and Central Asia) which includes memberstates of the CIS too. The summary of the report on 20 years after the fall is linked here.

It looks like a pretty mixed bag of successes and failures, but transportation infrastrucre seems to have improved. In general, World Bank project ratings have improved. These ratings are from the report linked earlier today from the IEG.

Here's an interesting footnote though on how countries are classified:

The International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook (October 2009) projects GDP in Centraland Eastern Europe and in the Commonwealth of Independent States (the former Soviet Union excluding the Baltic States) to contract by 5 percent and 6.7 percent, respectively, in 2009. In this book, Central and Eastern Europe comprises Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, FYR Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania,
Serbia, the Slovak Republic and Slovenia. Turkey is part of the World Bank’s ECA region but is not a transition country; thus, it is added selectively to the discussion. The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) includes Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Moldova,
the Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. Georgia is not part of the CIS but is included in the group because its economy shares many features of the other countries.

Looks like I'll have to add the IMF's outlook from last month to my reading list.