Yes, according to Martin Ravallion's recent paper.
More resources here.
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We have blogged about migrant remittances in the past, from an economic point of view.
The New York Times magazine (for members) includes this week an excellent article on remittances that looks at the personal stories behind migration and at its costs and benefits. Jason DeParle's article focuses on the Philippines, a country with 10 percent of its population living abroad and where remittances make up 14 percent of its GDP.
More information on remittances at the World Bank website. Weijian Shan recently ignited a debate over the profitability of Chinese companies with his essay in the Far Eastern Economic Review “The World Bank’s China Delusion”, which had a reply in World Bank economists Bert Hofman and Louis Kuijs’ “Profits Drive China's Boom."
FEER’s blog told the full story.
Thank you Yan Wang for the heads up. 
Full report and interviews with the authors.
(Via PovertyNet) PADI, which stands for Poverty Analysis and Data Initiative, is a network of data producers, analysts and policy makers that had its original roots in East Asia. PADI has organized a number of training activities in East and South Asia. Now, the secretariat of this network is housed at the International Poverty Reduction Center in China (IPRCC).
For more information on East Asia PADI, have a look at their first newsletter. In a little over a quarter of a century, economic reforms and openness have let to rapid economic growth and poverty reduction in China with her international trade soaring to reach $1.1 trillion in 2004 when China became the world’s third largest trading economy (WTO 2005, 16). Policymakers and development practitioners the world over are wondering how. In a recent NBER paper “China’s Embrace of Globalization”, Lee Branstetter and Nick Lardy (2006) provided an excellent overview of China’s pre-WTO and post-WTO reforms, encompassing reforms in trade, investment and foreign exchange regimes.
Several main themes in this paper are inspirational: first, prior to WTO accession, China had achieved a greater degree of openness to foreign trade in manufactures than is generally acknowledged; and the reforms accelerated in the late 1990s. Second, to date, China has made reasonable progress toward meeting her WTO obligations, which will likely to make China the most open of large developing countries. Third, the patterns of China’s trade have conformed to patterns of her comparative advantage, benefiting China and her trading partners. In particular, multinational corporations (MNCs / FIEs) are using China as an export platform, and the biggest exporters in China are foreign invested firms. As a result of this displacement effect, the combined shares of the US global trade deficit accounted for by China, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea actually fell. So it is misleading to just focus on the US-China bilateral trade deficit which is rising rapidly causing so much concern.
One particular point got me thinking. The authors eluted to the possibility that “an overdevelopment of the export sector was a function of a long undervalued exchange rate”. “The longer a currency’s undervaluation encourages an overexpansion of the export sector, the greater the power of the lobbying groups that could seek to halt or limit the adjustment ….” To which I might add, the overexpansion of goods exporting sector is in sharp contrast with an inefficient service sector: even though progress has been made, China’s service sector has been largely sheltered from international competition until recently, and many subsectors are under state monopoly. FDI in these areas has been limited and the budgetary allocation to social services (0.6 percent of GDP on health and 2.4 percent on education) has been lower than other developing countries. The imbalances between the manufacturing and the service sector (accounting for only 40 percent of GDP and declining) are more pronounced in China than elsewhere. It is now the time for rebalancing the pattern of growth to shift the focus on the reform and trade in services. (detailed program) A "handy guide to the leading Asia-Pacific think tanks working on development and economics", from our colleagues at the Asian Development Bank Institute.
Via Truck and Barter. Lawrence Summers delivered today at the World Bank his presentation “Almost a Free Lunch: Investing Foreign Exchange Reserves in Global Equity Markets”, following similar presentations at the Reserve Bank of India in Mumbai or at the Center for Global Development in Washington DC.
Mr. Summers claims that the flow of capital today is exactly the opposite of what the “International Financial Architecture” had in mind after the World War. Today we see a net flow of capital from the poorer to the richer countries. In particular, large amounts from developing countries are being accumulated as reserves in US Treasury Bonds.
He sees two main problems here:
The gap between the return obtained at a typical central bank or what could be obtained with a typical pension portfolio or in stock is around 4 % or 5 % respectively (this gap would be of around 10 % if compared to the return of Harvard’s endowment while he was President).
Therefore, we have some of the most rapidly growing economies in the world, with high percentages of their populations living in poverty, with a “fair amount of money deployed in clearly suboptimal investment”.
And what is the cost of this excess of reserves invested in low yielding US Treasury Bonds? The excess of reserves for the 121 developing countries is, according to Mr. Summers, around $ 2 trillion, or 19 % of their combined GDP. If developing countries where able to deploy 10 % of their GDP in global equity markets that produced a 5 % extra return, the amount earned would clearly exceed the amount spent in foreign aid worldwide.
Food for thought … The conference Asia 2015: Promoting Growth, Ending Poverty was held in March, organized by DFID, the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank. Its web site has plenty of papers, speeches, presentations and in general materials on growth and poverty in that region.
The paper Meeting the Challenges to Growth and Poverty Reduction, published in the Development Policy Review, serves as an introduction to the papers presented in the conference.
(Via Eldis) The June issue of IMF's Finance and Development magazine is out. Focus is on Asia.
In Asia's Winds of Change, David Burton, Wanda Tseng, and Kenneth Kang analyze Asia's growth over the last 50 years, the crisis in the late 1990s and the new challenges of globalization.
This is their take on Growth and Poverty in Asia.
(Hat tip PSD and Truck and Barter) |
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