Doing Business 2015. Going Beyond Efficiency

Ministerial Conference approves Russia’s WTO membership

Today, on 16 December 2011, Russia cleared the final hurdle to become a WTO member. WTO Ministers adopted Russia’s WTO terms of entry at the 8th Ministerial Conference in Geneva. Russia will have to ratify the deal within the next 220 days and would become a fully-fledged WTO member 30 days after it notifies the ratification to the WTO.

Trade Ministers welcomed Russia as a new member to the Organization and called this accession a historic achievement. According to WTO Ministers, Russia’s accession to the WTO will strengthen the multilateral trading system, making the WTO a more universal organization.

“This is a historic moment for the Russian Federation and the rules-based multilateral trading system. After an 18-year marathon, the finish line has been crossed. This is a double win for Russia and the WTO. The package we have just adopted is the result of hard technical work, led by modernizing political leadership,” said WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy.

The Working Party Chair on Russia’s accession, Ambassador Stefán Jóhannesson (Iceland), said that all members contributed to Russia’s accession, by constructing the consensus necessary to conclude the accession. The documents before the Ministerial Conference, constituting Russia’s terms of entry into the WTO, resulted from a tough and successful engagement between Russia and WTO members.

Russian Economic Development Minister, Elvira Nabiullina, said: “this is an event we have been awaiting for a long time. In these difficult times, risks of protectionism are looming on the horizon and Russia will contribute to combat protectionism as a WTO member.” She added that this accession was not a finishing line but a starting point for Russia.

At the end of the meeting, Pascal Lamy and Elvira Nabiullina officially signed the protocol of accession.

Annual Report 2013

Over the past three decades, the extent of global poverty has declined rapidly. The percentage of people living in extreme poverty in 2013 is less than half of what it was in 1990. Based on this trend, it is possible to envision a world in which extreme poverty has effectively been eliminated within a generation. Yet today, more than 1 billion people worldwide are still destitute, inequality and social exclusion seem to be rising in several countries, and many urgent and complex challenges must be overcome to maintain the recent momentum in poverty reduction.

In this context, the World Bank Group has established ambitious but achievable goals on which to anchor its work in meeting these historic challenges. Specifically, the institution will strive to end extreme poverty at the global level by 2030 and to promote shared prosperity in developing countries, which will entail fostering income growth for the bottom 40 percent of the population. This effort will involve investing in opportunities for all citizens and reducing inequality, which are integral to creating prosperity and sustaining economic growth. These goals will be pursued in an environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable manner to ensure that development gains do not harm the welfare of current and future generations.

This Annual Report focuses on the work of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Development Association (IDA), collectively known as the World Bank. We encourage you to explore the Annual Report 2013 website to learn more about the Bank’s work—the activities and outcomes it supports in the six regions in which it works, and the results of that work in helping to overcome poverty and create opportunities for people in developing countries. In addition to the report itself, you will find comprehensive lending data, organizational information, full financial statements, the Results 2013 report, as well as the updated World Bank Corporate Scorecard.

Doing Business 2015. Going Beyond Efficiency

Doing Business 2015: Going Beyond Efficiency finds that entrepreneurs in 123 economies saw improvements in their local regulatory framework last year. Between June 2013 and June 2014, the report, which measures 189 economies worldwide, documented 230 business reforms, with 145 reforms aimed at reducing the complexity and cost of complying with business regulation, and 85 reforms aimed at strengthening legal institutions - with Sub-Saharan Africa accounting for the largest number of such reforms.

Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 5 of the 10 top improvers in 2013/14. The region also accounts for the largest number of regulatory reforms making it easier to do business in the past year—75 of the 230 worldwide. More than 70% of its economies carried out at least one such reform.

Case studies highlighting good practices in 8 of the areas measured by Doing Business indicator sets are featured in the report: the growing efficiency of company registries in starting a business; zoning and urban planning in dealing with construction permits; measuring quality of land administration in registering property; importance of registries in getting credit; going beyond related-party transactions in protecting minority investors; trends before and after the financial crisis in paying taxes; judicial efficiency supporting freedom of contract in enforcing contracts; and measuring strength of insolvency laws in resolving insolvency.

The report this year expands the data in three of the 10 topics covered, with further plans to expand on five topics in next year’s report. The Doing Business rankings are now based on a distance to the frontier measure. Each economy from the 189 economies measured is evaluated based on how close their business regulations are to the best global practices. A higher score indicates a more efficient business environment and stronger legal institutions.

Country Representation

Unlike the General Assembly of the United Nations, where each country has one vote, decision making at the IMF was designed to reflect the position of each member country in the global economy. Each IMF member country is assigned a quota that determines its financial commitment to the IMF, as well as itsvoting power.

To be effective, the IMF must be seen as representing the interests of all of its 188 member countries, from its smallest shareholder Tuvalu, to its largest, the United States.

In November 2010, the IMF agreed on reform of its framework for making decisions to reflect the increasing importance of emerging market and developing economies.

Giving more say to emerging markets

In recent years, emerging market countries have experienced strong growth and now play a much larger role in the world economy.

The reforms will produce a shift of 6 percent of quota shares to dynamic emerging market and developing countries. This realignment will give more say to a group of countries known as the BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, and China.

Protecting the voice of low-income countries

The reform package also contains measures to protect the voice of the poorest countries in the IMF. Without these measures, this group of countries would have seen its voting shares decline.

Timeline for implementing the reform

The Board of Governors, the IMF’s highest decision-making body, must ratify the new agreement by an 85 percent majority before it comes into effect.

The plan is for the reform to be implemented in 2012.

Globalization and Integration (1989-1999)

Transition to the Free Market

With the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, the Iron Curtain began to recede. Within two years, Communism was a thing of the past in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia (later the Czech Republic and Slovakia), Hungary, Poland and Romania. For former Eastern bloc countries, the transition from central planning to a free market economywas not easy and progress was uneven. They have, however, taken the first steps toward joining the global economy.

Hungary began its reforms early and built up a vigorous market economy in the early 1990s. Under its Solidarity-led government, Poland plunged into the free market. Almost immediately GDP fell by 10%, real wages fell by 40% and electricity prices rose by 300%. Though painful, the strategy proved successful: by the early 1990s, Poland had completely divested itself of central planning and was well on its way to prosperity. The Czech Republic opted for a more gradual approach to economic reform than Poland, possibly losing precious time by delaying the inevitable. Romania spent the 1990s reforming its socialist economy.

The revolutions in Eastern and Central Europe also shook the U.S.S.R. Soviet debate on economic reform began in 1986, but produced only minor palliatives. Growth stagnated, and foreign debt doubled between 1986 and 1991.

Economic reform proved to be the final issue that drove the old Soviet empire apart. In 1990, the Baltic Republics – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – declared their independence. By late 1991, the Soviet Communist Party voted itself out of existence, and soon the U.S.S.R. itself was replaced by 15 independent republics. Progress in establishing a market economy has varied from country to country in the former Soviet Union. Western aid, loans, and investment have speeded the transition.

Use of Gold in the IMF

The IMF's Articles of Agreement strictly limit the use of the gold following the Second Amendment in 1978. But in some circumstances, the IMF may sell gold or accept gold as payment from member countries.

A total of 212 metric tons was sold during this first phase, comprising sales to the Reserve Bank of India, the Bank of Mauritius, and the Central Bank of Sri Lanka. An additional amount was later sold to the Bangladesh Bank. In February 2010, the on-market phase of its gold sales program began. So as to avoid disruption to the gold market, these sales were phased over time. In December 2010, the IMF concluded the gold sales program with total sales of 403.3 metric tons of gold. Total proceeds amounted to about $15 billion (SDR 9.5 billion).

Proceeds equivalent to the book value of the gold sold, about $4.2 billion (SDR 2.7 billion), were retained in the IMF's General Resources Account. Profits from the gold sales were invested in an income-generating fund to supplement IMF income. In February 2012, the Executive Board approved the distribution to all IMF member countries of about $1.1 billion (SDR 700 million) in reserves attributed to a portion of the windfall profits from recent IMF gold sales, with the expectation that member countries would return equivalent amounts to support concessional lending to low-income countries. The distribution will be effected only when members provide satisfactory assurances that they would make new Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust subsidy contributions equivalent to at least 90 percent of the amount distributed—i.e. about $1 billion (SDR 630 million).

The selling of gold by the IMF is rare as it requires an Executive Board decision with an 85 percent majority of the total voting power. Prior to the recent sale of gold, the last time gold was sold by the institution was through off-market transactions completed in April 2001, with 12.9 million ounces traded. This transaction was approved by the membership as a means to finance the IMF's participation in the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative and the continuation of the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility.

Four Waves of Lebanese Feminism (introduction)

RITA STEPHAN, NOV 7 2014

Lebanese feminism cannot be understood unless contextualized within the postcolonial legacy that shapes politics in Lebanon and regulates its political discourse. This factor, which is common to other postcolonial societies, creates especially complex problems for feminists, who are continually being reminded, as they attempt to make their claims, that their discourse emanate from the mindset of the Western colonial powers. A history of colonialism and the existence of long-term Western hegemony in the Middle East mark all political and social movements in the region, which not only look inward towards achieving change in a given community or state, but also look outwards, to the West, inasmuch as the West provides both resources and limits.

While American feminism has produced a historiography that traces the movement through different waves, rarely do we hear a discussion of waves of women’s rights activism or feminism in other parts of the world, which I argue exist at least in the Lebanese contexts. Waves are linked concretely to changes in the collectivity both of activists and of the social context in which they are acting. In fact, a discussion of feminist waves from a Lebanese perspective—summarized in the chart below—might be helpful to understanding the connections and temporal lags binding together the global struggle for women’s rights.

Manufacturing money

Fiat money is more efficient to use than precious metals. Adjustments to its supply do not depend on the amount of precious metal around. But that adds its own complication: Precisely because there is a finite amount of precious metals, there is a limit on the amount of notes that can be issued. If there is no gold or silver to back money, how do governments know how much to print? That gets into the dilemmas governments face. On the one hand, the authorities will always be tempted to issue money, because governments can buy more with it, hire more people, pay more wages, and increase their popularity. On the other hand, printing too much money starts to push up prices. If people start expecting that prices will continue to rise, they may increase their own prices even faster. Unless the government acts to rein in expectations, trust in money will be eroded, and it may eventually become worthless. That is what happens during hyperinflation. To remove this temptation to print money willy-nilly, most countries today have delegated the task of deciding how much money to print to independent central banks, which are charged with making the call based on their assessment of the economy’s needs and do not transfer funds to the government to finance its spending. The term “printing money” is something of a misnomer in itself. Most money today is in the form of bank deposits rather than paper currency.