About the World Bank's Development Prospects Group

The Development Prospects Group (DECPG) provides information, analysis, and advice on global trends in the world economy, especially on trade, financial flows, commodity prices, and remittances flows, and the impact of these trends on developing countries. The Group’s global projections underpin country and regional projection exercises and are central to the Bank’s short-term monitoring activities. During the last year, the Group added three new areas of activity to its workprogram: development of a new model (MAMS-Maquette for MDGs Simulations) to help monitor the progress toward reaching the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), international remittances and migration.

Within the Bank, this information and analysis is used by Senior and Executive Management for planning, investment, and policy-advice purposes. Part of the Group’s analysis is made publicly available to a broad audience, including policymakers, academia, and the private sector through its two annual flagship publications——Global Economic Prospectsand Global Development Finance. Each GEP and GDF provides a vehicle for the dissemination of the Bank's outlook on the global economy, as well as more in-depth consideration of policy issues of current concern, such as the development impact of the Doha Development Agenda, the role of regionalism within the multilateral negotiation framework (GEPs), or the changing structure of external development finance, the growing importance of workers' remittances, reforming the international financial architecture, and managing financial crisis (GDFs). Working closely with External Affairs staff, the Group places particular emphasis on the timely and well targeted dissemination of these and other products to the Bank’s main external clients (policymakers, academics, researchers) in both developing and industrialized countries.

With 30 full time staff and 11 consultants, the Group comprises four Teams—Global Trends, International Finance, Migration and Remittances, and Global Economic Prospects.

Global Trends
The Team specializes in the analysis and forecasting of developments in the international environment for developing countries, and for macroeconomic trends in the Bank's client countries themselves. The group combines expertise in regional issues, market trends (world trade, financial conditions and others) and forecasting methods to construct a consistent view for global economic prospects. The Team is responsible for projections underlying the Prospect’s two flagship publications (Global Economic Prospects and Global Development Finance), as well as short-term monitoring of developments in the world environment.

The Team has also played a key role in developing methodologies and tools to monitor progress towards reaching the MDGs. To examine the potential of scaling up aid to achieve the MDG targets, the Team, in collaboration with the Chief Economist and other staff in the Development Economics Vice Presidency (DECVP), is developing dynamic country models that explicitly take into account different aspects of absorptive capacity. These models describe availability of skilled labor, efficiency of service delivery and Dutch-disease mechanisms; all potentially key obstacles to effective use of additional aid. The models also illustrate how development programs can reinforce each other. Policymakers using these models can analyze various policy scenarios, while also comparing the outcomes of actual policies and programs, with the counterfactuals. The models therefore, can explain not only what happened as a result of a given policy, program or project intervention, but what would have happened in its absence. These modeling exercises aim to overcome the difficulties encountered in establishing linkages between non-income aspects of MDGs, such as, for example, the links between public health service provision and child mortality.

The Team’s efforts have been largely focused on implementing two pilot studies in Ethiopia and possibly in the Dominican Republic, the results of which will allow for further development and testing of a standardized and easily adapted methodology for wider use in the Africa Region and elsewhere. The Team coordinated with the United Nations Development Programme on the report on Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals by Jeffrey D. Sachs (2005).

International Finance
The International Finance Team monitors and analyzes international financial developments and their impact on growth and poverty reduction in developing countries. The main areas of emphasis include financial markets in industrial countries, private capital flows to developing countries, economic policies in developing countries that affect their ability to benefit from international financial integration, and official flows. The Team produces Volume I: Analysis and Statistical Appendix of the annual Global Development Finance, which is released in mid-year. Among other staff in the Bank, the Team works closely with the Data Group (DECDG), Financial Sector group (FSE) and the newly created Debt Department (PRMED).

Migration and Remittances
An increasingly important part of the unit's work is the monitoring of global migratioin and remittance flows and contributing to the global policy agenda on migration and development. The publication of the chapter 7 on remittances in the GDF 2003 is believed to have sparked the current surge in interest on this topic among policy makers and the media. The Migration and Remittances Team is the Bank’s focal point on remittances. The Team has been playing a leading role in the G8 working group to improve remittance statistics (in collaboration with DECDG), in the BIS-CPSS-World Bank task force on payment systems (in collaboration with FSE), and in developing survey tools for understanding the links between remittances and development.

The popularity of remittances has led to increasing attention from the Regions on migration as a development tool. Global Economic Prospects 2006 focused on migration and remittances issues. Since then the team has prepared briefings on remittances and migration for high-level meetings such as the G8, G20, G24, Annual Meetings, and meetings of the heads of multilateral financial institutions. DECPG has also established partnerships in the area of remittances and migration with international financial institutions including the AfDB, United Nations, IMF, IOM, GCIM, ILO, IDB. ADB, EC, ECB, DFID, USAID, and CIDA.

Global Economic Prospects
Each year the Global Economic Prospects Team produces the Global Economic Prospects report, which provides in-depth analysis of selected current leading topics in the global debate, in addition to the companion website, Prospects for the Global Economy. Global Economic Prospects 2008 (released in January 2008) focused on the impact of technology innovation on developing countries in the coming years. The Team works in close collaboration with staff from various World Bank departments, including Operational Regions, Research, and International Trade.