There are over 830 million people around the world living in extreme poverty today, but who are they, and what do we know about their daily lives? A deeper understanding of the characteristics of people and households living in extreme poverty can help us design more effective policies. To gain those insights, we need key data.
Continue readingWorld Bank Group President David Malpass called on the world to move urgently toward opportunities and solutions that achieve a green, resilient, and inclusive recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic in a speech today that advances the World Bank-IMF Spring Meetings.
“Our collective responses to poverty, climate change, and inequality will be the defining choices of our age.”
Mr. Malpass delivered the speech virtually at the London School of Economics; it was followed by a discussion with students, moderated by Baroness Minouche Shafik, Director of the London School of Economics.
Join World Bank Group President David Malpass, ahead of the Spring Meetings, at the London
School of Economics as he discusses what is needed to build a green, inclusive, and resilient recovery from the pandemic. The crisis has worsened inequality and disproportionately impacted the poorest and most vulnerable, particularly women and children.
In his conversation with Minouche Shafik, Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science, President Malpass will share his thoughts on accelerating a recovery that tackles growing inequalities and improves livelihoods.
Join us for the live conversation on March 29.
Be sure to sign up for an email reminder!
World Bank Group President David Malpass: Speech at Frankfurt School of Finance and Management
You can watch the replay of the event here
Introduction
Thank you, Jens. And thanks to Frankfurt School and the Bundesbank for hosting me virtually. I look forward to engaging with you and taking questions from students, who will be future business leaders in a post-COVID world. I’m here to set the stage ahead of the IMF and World Bank Group’s Annual Meetings, which will focus primarily on COVID and debt, and will also engage partners in urgent discussions on human capital, climate change, and digital development.
School after this pandemic will be different. To a large extent this is due to many actors – 
parents, teachers, mass media, the government, and others – who will have changed their views and perceptions about their role in the education process. This shift of mindsets will be critical for the future of the education system.
Parents now have a better understanding of the need to work jointly with schools to foster the education of their children. They now know that they can be, and actually are, a major figure in the education process of their children. And many parents who are now struggling with supporting they children to maintain some of their learning process at home will have a better understanding of just how demanding and challenging the teacher’s job is. Parents have a much greater appreciation for teachers and what they do. And parents now clearly recognize that education is a social experience – a lot of the magic of learning, of the development of ideas and creativity, come from the social interaction with teachers and peers. If someone ever thought that teachers could be replaced by artificial intelligence, it is now clear that is not the case.
After participating in two events on inequality at the Spring Meetings
– Making Growth Work for the Poor and Income Inequality Matters: How to Ensure Economic Growth Benefits the Many and Not the Few, I received a surprising number of emails asking whether my remarks on the importance of addressing rising inequality meant I had abandoned growth as the main priority for developing countries. One thing I certainly took away from this correspondence: Inequality is too complex a phenomenon to address in a brief session at the Spring Meetings.
Still today, in almost all societies around the world, women are less well-off than men.
Women are still paid less than men; they are less represented in business, politics and decision-making. Their life chances remain overwhelmingly less promising than those of men.
This inequality hurts us all. The world would be 20% better off if women were paid the same as men. Delaying early marriage in the developing world by just a few years would add more than $500 billion to annual global economic output by 2030.
Growth is picking up in South Africa, and this is good news after two years of declining incomes per capita. Observers are revising their forecasts, and optimists foresee economic growth to exceed 2% in next years. In recent months, several events have indeed improved South Africa’s economic outlook: the smooth transition in power, the authorities’ reaffirmed adherence to principles of good governance and debt stability, and the upward revision in national accounts, revealing higher economic activity in 2017 than previously measured.
Netherlands for the World Bank 
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