World Bank

The world is falling into the first global recession since World War II as the crisis that started in the U.S. engulfs once-booming developing nations, confronting them with massive financial shortfalls that could turn the clock back on poverty reduction by years, the World Bank warned Sunday. The World Bank also cautioned that the cost of helping poorer nations in crisis would exceed the current financial resources of multilateral lenders.

Development aid from the United States and other wealthy countries has declined since the middle of this decade, jeopardizing the ambitious U.N. goal they had embraced for reducing poverty by 2015, according to a report issued Thursday. The report card on the Millennium Development Goals, the United Nations' 15-year global anti-poverty plan, cites improvement in easing the debt burdens of the world's neediest countries, but says pledges to help them with stepped-up aid and lower trade barriers were faltering.

The United States cannot lead if it is hated. If Americans still aspire to remake the world as a more democratic, more prosperous place with fewer terrorists and nuclear weapons states, if we seek global cooperation on issues ranging from counter-proliferation to climate change, we must set about earning back the goodwill of nations. The tragic global hunger crisis, which has swelled the ranks of the world's most miserable, provides the U.S. with a golden opportunity to do good while rebuilding its shattered global leadership credentials.

Everyone plays for high stakes in Ilakaka. You can get rich or you can get killed. This city at the heart of Madagascar's sapphire mining industry is estimated to produce 30% of the world's sapphires -- worth at least $30 million a year. And in the Wild West lifestyle of shady casinos and banditry that swaggered into town with the fabulous mining wealth, speculators are being killed at an alarming rate, with as many as 30 homicides a year in a town of 20,000. One of this year's victims was Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law.

Global economic growth will slow for a second straight year in 2008 as tighter credit conditions and higher oil prices weaken expansions in the U.S., Japan and Europe, the World Bank said in an annual forecast. The world economy will grow 3.3% this year, down from an estimated 3.6% pace in 2007 and 3.9% in 2006, the bank said. The U.S. economy, the world's largest, will expand 1.9%, compared with 2.2% last year, it said. Japan's gross domestic product is forecast to increase 1.

If one thing has become clear since Robert Zoellick became World Bank president three months ago, it's that he isn't Paul Wolfowitz. Wolfowitz's stormy tenure ended in a forced resignation in May over allegations that he had arranged a sweetheart salary for his sweetheart, a World Bank employee. Zoellick, a former diplomat, U.S. trade representative and Goldman Sachs executive, was sent in by President Bush to repair the damage.

The Palestinian economy has become weaker and more dependent on foreign aid as the private sector has atrophied because of political violence and Israeli restrictions on the movement of goods and people, the World Bank said Tuesday. The report, which focuses on trends during the last two years, says conditions are especially severe in the Gaza Strip, where unemployment rose to almost 35% last year and more than one-third of residents were living in severe poverty.

For five years, the Washington-based World Bank Group has been trying to save one of Earth's last great forests in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But the bank's private-sector arm is also an investor in a company that is drawing criticism for its connections to logging operations there. World Bank environmental officials say that deforestation is the second leading human contributor to global warming, after power plants and ahead of vehicle emissions.

washington -- At the Group of 8 summit of world leaders in June, President Bush repeated his calls for developing nations to curb their emissions of greenhouse gases. Without their cooperation, he said, drastic measures in the United States to battle climate change would make little sense. "We all can make major strides, and yet there won't be a reduction until China and India are participants," he told reporters. But just weeks earlier, the U.S.

washington -- At the World Bank -- heavily influenced by its largest shareholder, the United States -- the effect of projects on climate change is not even calculated. Bank environment officials pressed to account for emissions in the mid- to late-'90s and again in an unpublished paper in 2002, and only now, five years later, are attempting again.