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Latest blog posts from The World Bank Blog

Do casinos produce anything valuable?
"Are markets simply casinos for betting?" Asli recently asked this question on the All About Finance blog. She argues that financial markets do a lot more than that, and I agree. But there are some markets that come very close to being casinos. Surprisingly, in the wake of the financial...
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Published 21 hours ago

A technical update
Some readers have complained in the past that they have gotten error messages when trying to submit comments to the blog. We've put in a request with our software provider to look into the problem, but in the meantime, please send an email to rru@worldbank.org if you encounter a problem. We'll be...
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Published 4 days ago

Does the World Bank have a sense of humor?
Perhaps the title is a rhetorical question, but I felt obliged to ask it after seeing the latest parody of a World Bank initiative. If you've been ignoring CNN, you may have missed the news that the World Bank Institute recently launched a massively multiplayer game called Evoke designed...
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Published 6 days ago

FPD Forum Day 1
The first day of this year's Financial and Private Sector Development Forum is about to wind down. I had the opportunity to attend several fascinating discussions, including: A workshop on catastrophic risk insurance in the Caribbean A discussion on building venture capital opportunities in...
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Published 2 weeks ago

Stop the Wars!
Does Haiti (or Chile) need a Marshall Plan to help recover from the ruins of natural disasters? How has the War on Poverty progressed in the United States? What about the Gates Foundation's War on Malaria? Foreign Policy editor Moises Naim has a simple suggestion to each of these questions:...
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Published 2 weeks ago

Bureaucrats into bankers?
The World Bank's new chief economist for Financial and Private Sector Development, Asli Demirgüç-Kunt, has entered the blogosphere with the new All About Finance blog. In her first post, Asli considers whether the financial crisis ought to make us consider turning bureaucrats into bankers....
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Published 3 weeks ago

Unemployment and the Oligarchs
Mark Thoma takes a look at who pays the cost of the recession: The recession is taking away opportunity for the young to gain employment experience, and many who are employed are working below their abilities in jobs they are likely to get stuck in for many years, if not forever. The recession...
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Published 3 weeks ago

Can Berlin learn from Abu Dhabi?
Bloomberg has announced that the worst is yet to come for the euro, thanks to ongoing Greek woes. The last time I discussed Greece was in this post last November: The unfolding events in Dubai bring into question the stability of the global recovery, which has largely been fueled by...
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Published 3 weeks ago

Obstacles to reform: South African bus edition
The New York Times has an interesting story on the controversy surrounding improvements to South Africa's bus lanes. The government has been building special bus-only lanes and modernizing its fleet with new Brazilian-made buses, making it cheaper and faster for workers to travel from townships...
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Published 3 weeks ago

Kenyan Microfinance
Picking up from yesterday's microfinance discussion, let's have a look at what's happening in Kenya. Over at CGAP, Kate McKee discusses the relationship between microfinance and consumer protection. Through interviews with a Kenyan driver who runs his own taxi company, McKee highlights three...
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Published 4 weeks ago