World Bank Blogs

Thanks for the further details! Ah, the fact that they are marginal rates makes marginally more sense, but it still seems to me that the SWF in fig 5a has very little relation to the real world. > Also, while there is a complicated tax code in the US, in our simulation there is no way for agents to avoid paying taxes :) Seems like an obvious thing to add. I.e. if you believe the World Bank when they say "People are more willing to pay tax when taxes are progressive" [1], then it seems worthwhile to update your model to include this. [1] https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/governance/why-does-progressivity-taxes…

Yes history. If you ignore the clickbait headlines designed to elicit rage, and the news feeds designed to spiral you into a cycle of fear, and just google "poverty graph" to find raw data sources you'll find it's generally a good trend like https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/dataviz-remake-fall-extreme-pover…

Well the OP didn't talk about wipe out people, but birth control. That can be enforced in many ways but for sure the best one is education https://blogs.worldbank.org/health/female-education-and-childbearing-c…

> The United States trains the best computer graduates ― by far: We find that CS seniors in the United States substantially outperform seniors in China, India, and Russia. The average computer science student in the United States ranks higher than about 80 percent of students tested in China, India, and Russia. Seniors in elite institutions in the United States similarly outperform seniors in elite institutions in China, India, and Russia by approximately 0.85 Standard Deviations (SDs). Importantly, the skills advantage of the United States is not because it has a large proportion of high-scoring international students. https://blogs.worldbank.org/education/who-trains-best-computer-scienti… Original paper https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/12/1814646116

Most of my knowledge in the field that I can provide [citation needed] levels of responses to are based on de-classified government documents but here are some links https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_warfare https://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/nudge-units-where-they-cam… PLEASE NOTE! I'm not talking about this particular instance, nor about the cause of it (nor on the original post from a few days back). Sometimes it is best to simply take a deep breath and consider the sage old advice of 'Don't Feed the Trolls'.

Whether China will come up ahead with Belt and Road is uncertain. What is certain is there's a tremendous infrastructure gap, particularly in Asia. This is a great way to turn the overcapacity in Chinese steel and cement into something useful for the world. https://blogs.worldbank.org/ppps/forecasting-infrastructure-investment…

> What's the balance? I've no idea, An obvious solution is rural development, looking to India as an example. The accelerating urban migration in India in the 90s/2000s was not organic: young people were forced to leave their homes because they didn't have job opportunities or enough land to farm, and then older people had to follow for cultural and economic reasons. The ultimate goal is sustainable urban growth, but cities can't immediately handle what this would require. Instead, India has instituted fairly successful rural development programs that are aimed at increasing jobs, improving social safety nets, and empowering women. I think China should seriously consider ramping up similar efforts. http://blogs.worldbank.org/endpovertyinsouthasia/what-india-s-successf…

This is really just more evidence of a longer trending-up in the belief that fibbing is OK if it serves the greater good. You can exaggerate the dangers of secondhand smoke, if that helps you stamp out smoking. [0] You can exaggerate the general population's risk of contracting HIV, if that raises awareness for AIDS research. [1] And you can, clearly, misrepresent the science on gender differences if it serves a larger feminist platform. [2] Surely, some scientists must know they're doing this. But, crucially, most people are just repeating what they've been told by experts. [0] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2017… [1] https://blogs.worldbank.org/impactevaluations/people-think-it-s-easy-c… [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hb3oe7-PJ8

Inequality is increasing WITHIN Western societies because inequality is DECREASING on an Earth-wide basis. The graph here shows the results in more detail. (http://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/the-real-winners-and-losers… If you are cool with the morality or utility argument that you need to take from the haves within a country to help the have-nots/increase velocity of money/etc., it seems to me you should at least be pre-disposed to do the same on a world-wide basis where the inequality/need is much greater. And if you are reading this in the US, the rich is you. Roughly $32k a year in income makes you a one-percenter on a worldwide basis.

> The most recent example is China turning to free markets, and the resulting vast improvement in their economy. China hasn't turned to anything like textbook Anglosphere free markets. Yeah they loosened up and turned away from classical central planning, but state-owned firms still control 30% of assets and their government does quite a to set economic policy and direction. They didn't privatize everything and let the free market run amok. [1] http://blogs.worldbank.org/eastasiapacific/state-owned-enterprises-in-… With all these evidences in hand, we can now answer the question raised before: How big are Chinese SOEs? Even though their share in the economy continued to decline in the past decade, SOEs still make up a substantial part of the national economy – roughly controlling 30 percent of the total secondary and tertiary assets, or over 50 percent of total industrial assets.

> and sometimes wonder if it is willful I think it is. We See What We Want to See and hear what we want to hear [0] Francis Bacon said in 1620 that "the human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion … draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects; in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate." [1] Biased processing and confirmation bias are most likely to occur when people feel threatened in their beliefs[2] [0] - https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/kidding-ourselves/201404/we-see-w… https://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/i-only-hear-what-i-want-hear-… [1] - www.constitution.org/bacon/nov_org.htm [2] - http://psy2.ucsd.edu/~mckenzie/nickersonConfirmationBias.pdf Thanks for the book suggestion though.

"Capitalism" means private ownership of capital. 30% of industrial and service sector assets in China are stated-owned: http://blogs.worldbank.org/eastasiapacific/state-owned-enterprises-in-… About 45% of the industrial sector is state-owned, down from 70% in 1999 (still more than two decades after Deng left office, and more than a decade after China's economic boom began). The profit share of the state owned enterprises is even higher: 43% of industrial and business profits in China yield from state owned enterprises: http://thediplomat.com/2013/06/19/reforming-chinas-state-owned-enterpr… In a purely definitional sense, China is at best a hybrid economy now, and was a primarily communist economy long after its economy started booming. Even to the extent that China's economy is ostensibly privately owned, the government still exercises tremendous control. For example while the banks are joint stock companies, and thus reflect substantial private ownership of equity, the Chinese government still owns the majority of the shares in many of them giving them tremendous power over those banks. I don't think China can be fairly called a "capitalist" economy. It's a managed economy where the managers have allowed the free market to allocate resources at the lower levels, while the central government directs broader, longer-term economic objectives.

do you mean like half of the worldwide population [0]? or anything on top of that like remote villages anywhere in the world that aren't liberal like hippies but are very much tied to pastoral ways of living? heck if back in 1600 we didn't killed dozens of millions of people maybe this type of communities would be much more widespread [0] https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/developmenttalk/half-global-population-…

For the unbelievers, I do have links now: https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/health/female-education-and-childbearin…

https://archive.md/HSTWc World Bank version: https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/voices/how-to-create-jobs-for-the-world…

Coal decline citations: https://cleantechnica.com/2025/11/03/us-coal-exports-drop-11-tariffs-l… https://cleantechnica.com/2025/04/20/chinas-coal-generation-dropped-5-… https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=66524 https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/opendata/weakening-demand--steady-suppl…

It's easy to forget that half the world's population lives in a few dollars a day [1] and sparing $20 month is unrealistic. Also, access to market leading AI is not going to cost $20/mo when everything is said and done. [1] https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/developmenttalk/half-global-population-…

That's like saying "we don't need teachers because we've got books". A how-to guide has to assume a certain level of knowledge, so will inevitably be insultingly basic for some readers or completely impenetrable for others. A static document can't elaborate on something you don't understand or fill in gaps in your knowledge. It can't help you debug a problem or look at your setup and point out where you might have gone wrong. We now have good evidence that AI-assisted learning can be substantially more effective than traditional methods, at incredibly low marginal cost. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/09/professor-tailored-ai-t… https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/education/From-chalkboards-to-chatbots-…

Right, there's already some very encouraging trends (this study out of Nigeria). Clearly AI can lead to laziness, but it can also increase our intelligence. So it's not a simple "better" or "worse", it's a new thing that we have to navigate. https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/education/From-chalkboards-to-chatbots-…

> "A friend of mine is a teacher and kids are already delegating their learning to ChatGPT and their learning isn't sticking." What about this: https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/education/From-chalkboards-to-chatbots-…

The prosperity gap has shrunk quite a lot, and these trends are broadly in the right direction since ~1990: https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/opendata/updated-estimates-prosperity-g… For extreme poverty progress has recently slowed down, the trend there is still positive but very slow - improvement there is needed.

One of the "weird effects" of the Ukraine war is that Russia went from upper-middle income country to a high income country and Ukraine went from lower-middle income to upper-middle income: https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/opendata/world-bank-country-classificat…

Poverty has indeed been decreasing most places, but your framing is very misleading. Half of the people on earth still live on less than $7/day in 2017 PPP dollars, and they are not universally connected or supercomputing. Over 8% of the global population is still below the $2.15/day PPP threshold that defines “extreme poverty”, which means it’s not enough money to purchase enough food to survive, literally still dying from starvation. Note that’s around twice the population of the US. https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/opendata/march-2023-global-poverty-upda…

Yep! The disparity in outcomes from the COVID generation is going to be drastic in 15-20 years. Early childhood development is critical for both social stability and basic morality [0][1] Also, as an anecdote, my mom works as a Low/Med Track Special Ed Teacher, and most students in the Low/Med track tend to be from broken homes not conducive to learning, leading to a cycle of poverty. Poverty is directly correlated to lack of parental intervention, due to time and monetary constraints, which leads to a vicious cycle. [0] - https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29362/w29362.pdf [1] - https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/education/Comprehensive-early-childhood…

Careful with carbon tax plans, they can be regressive: https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/energy/what-carbon-tax-can-do-and-why-i…

The name "inverse hyperbolic sine transformation" or "IHS transformation" is common in econometrics. https://marcfbellemare.com/wordpress/12856 https://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2011/07/a-ran… https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29998/w29998.pdf https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/impactevaluations/interpreting-treatmen… https://academic.oup.com/ectj/article-abstract/24/2/334/5948096 https://marcfbellemare.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Bellem…

Not sure why you think that? The nomadic population is between 25%-30%, two sources: 1) World bank gives 25% "around one quarter of households live nomadic life in Mongolia" https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/counting-uncounted-how-mongolian-… 1) Wikipedia gives 30%, "Approximately 30% of the population is nomadic or semi-nomadic" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolia. Population of of Ulaanbataar is 1.6M, Mongolia as a country is 3.3M. So just under 50% live in the capital city.

A couple other recent blog posts on the topic: https://blogs.worldbank.org/allaboutfinance/expiring-money-part-i https://blogs.worldbank.org/allaboutfinance/expiring-money-part-ii

This is how it works: https://blogs.worldbank.org/peoplemove/is-it-possible-to-send-remittan…