Imagine if a city of almost four million people disappeared every year. A Los Angeles, Johannesburg, Yokohama. It would be hard to miss.

 Yet it goes largely unnoticed that almost four million girls and women “go missing” each year in developing countries.

It’s a shocking statistic. For comparison, AIDS and TB each kill around 1.7 million people a year – malaria a million. So why are so many women missing? What’s happening to them? And what does the Bank want to do about it?

Burrow into the report and the total drops a bit – to 3.882 million. A third of the ‘missing’ are from China, 30% from Sub-Saharan Africa, and 22% from India. The two big rising powers and the countries of the world’s poorest region clearly have some questions to answer.

The initial analysis follows a well-trodden path. According to the Bank, the largest group, 37%, are ‘missing at birth’. This is largely a problem for China and India (95% of missing baby girls). Many parents in these countries want sons rather than daughters, and are prepared to use ultrasound and abortion to make sure they get them.

It’s when we move onto infant mortality that the WDR gets into trouble. 617,000 of the missing (16% of the total) are girls who die before the age of 5, it reports. These girls die in much larger numbers than their brothers because they are neglected by their parents and are starved of healthcare by the prejudiced societies into which they have the misfortune to be born. Right?

Well no, not at all, as it happens.

The WDR is based on a measure of ‘excess mortality,’ with methodology drawn from this 2010 paper by Anderson and Ray (which is, itself, inspired by Amartya Sen’s work on missing women from more than thirty years ago).This indicator assumes that men should die faster than women at a rate set by the developed world, where female life expectancy is nearly 7 years higher than for males. Any deviation from this, at any age, is evidence that women are ‘missing’.

Take Nigeria. Of every 1000 boys that are born, 146 die before their fifth birthday. The figures are slightly lower for girls, but still eye-poppingly high: 135 deaths. In developed countries, only 8 boys and 7 girls out of every 1000 die before the age of 5.

For the Bank, though, this is evidence not of excess mortality among children, but of excess mortality among girls. Seven fewer girls (or eight more boys) would need to die in Nigeria for the country to provide girls with the ‘correct’ health advantage. The same pattern holds across Africa and India: more boys die than girls, but the gap is not as wide as the Bank thinks it should be.

So why are too many African and Indian girls dying?

• Are parents discriminating against girls? No – “there is little association between excess mortality among girls and disadvantages in vaccination, differential use of medical care, or differences in childhood nutrition as measured through the heights and weights of boys and girls.” In many countries, more boys than girls are “stunted, wasted, or underweight.”
• What about doctors? Presumably, they simply can’t be bothered to treat females properly. Again, no. Researchers watched 30,000 medical consultations in Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, India, Mozambique, Paraguay, Rwanda, and Uganda and failed to find any discrimination at all. “In all seven countries, doctors spent the same time, asked the same questions, and completed the same number of examinations regardless of the sex of the patient.”

So what’s going on? The answer is slightly hard to follow: girls are significantly less likely to die of infectious diseases than boys, but they are even less likely to die of perinatal conditions (in or just after childbirth). So while all children benefit as infectious diseases are tackled, girls benefit slightly more than boys.

In other words, there’s no discrimination in play and this section of the report is based on a statistical artefact. Or a red herring. Or a tendentious attempt to beef up a press release (and if the result implies the health of poor girls matters more than that of poor boys – well, hey ho).

The WDR gets back onto much firmer ground when it moves on to adult women. Again, too, there is no evidence that discrimination in the health system is having a significant impact. The Bank cites Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Paraguay, Peru, South Africa, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, and Kenya as examples of countries where women get more healthcare than men.

But women in developing countries suffer horrendous levels of maternal mortality, due to large family sizes, early pregnancies, and poor, or missing, health care. Women are forty-three times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth in Africa than in the developed world. This is clearly not a problem men suffer from. Women also account for 52% of people living with HIV worldwide, and 60% of infections in Africa (where people are most likely to succumb to AIDS).

According to the Bank, these two factors are mainly responsible for another 1.3m missing women of child-bearing age and another 334,000 missing women in their fifties.

But, buried away in the report, we find that there are excess male deaths too – countries where men die even faster relative to women than in developed countries. Apparently there are 1 million ‘missing men’ – although we don’t get much of a breakdown of this figure. The Bank gives these deaths short shrift, putting them down to men’s need to take too many risks and an excess of “manliness” in contemporary societies. Don’t worry, in other words, these deaths can be discounted because they are men’s fault.

So, all in all, what does the “4 million women go missing every year” figure add up to?

First, families – mothers included, presumably – prefer sons over daughters in some parts of India and China. It’s a big problem with no obvious solution (the Bank suggests a crackdown on abortions and the re-education of families). And one that has already been intensively researched. The Bank’s added value is zero.

Second, children die far too often in poor countries. Boys and girls. Whatever the Bank insinuates, there’s no ‘correct’ gender balance when it comes to children’s births. How can anyone learn that an African boy is 10% more likely to die before the age of 5 than an African girl, and come away thinking – “if there was any justice in the world, that gap would be wider”? Especially when no evidence is presented that discrimination is a factor.

Third, women are more likely to die in childbirth (and of AIDS in some countries), and men take too many risks, especially when they’re young. Well, no shit Sherlock. Maternal health is one of eight MDGs for a reason, and the 1990 WDR did a much better job of banging the drum for ‘safe motherhood’ than its 2012 successor. This report doesn’t take the debate on women’s health forward an inch – and its discussion of men’s health is so thin as to be risible.

My conclusion: the 4 million figure is an advocacy stat of the worst kind. Lazy in its execution. And borderline dishonest in its presentation – especially for those who read the op-ed, and fail to find the detail buried in the report.

And it’s not even  an original approach. Amartya Sen said that 100 million women were missing in 1990. Stephen Klasen calculated a similar figure a decade ago. The Economist led with gendercide in 2010 – and did a better job of explaining the issue in a thousand words than the Bank does in 450 pages.

Securing women’s rights continues to be a massive challenge (and one with the potential to bring huge economic and social benefits). But the Bank does nothing for the cause. The analytical core of its report is rotten and its need to impress the media seems to blame.

The WDR website may be cock-a-hoop that it garnered “156 news stories published by lead print news outlets across the world, in just a week.” But I don’t think a blitz of favourable media for the Bank is what the WDR should be all about…

- The core negotiations seem set to finalise agreement over a “framework for balanced and sustainable growth” – particularly critical from US and Chinese perspectives – that seeks to give the IMF a greater reporting role in policing global imbalances. The FT’s Money Supply blog offers a sceptical comparison of the leaked draft agreement with the IMF’s current role.

- As to the Europeans: Gordon Brown seems to be adopting a broader focus, calling in an NYT op-ed for “a new system of governance” to form the “next common economic goal”. (He also announced that UK Business Minister Shriti Vadera would be going on secondment to the South Korean government to help develop proposals on global financial architecture ahead of their G20 presidency next year.) For Angela Merkel, the “most important subject” is financial regulation; she argues that “we must not search for substitute issues”; and for Sarkozy too, the top priorities look to be bankers’ bonuses and agreement over capital requirements for banks.

- Trade and protectionism are sure to form another important aspect of negotiations, particularly for China and India. VoxEU takes an interesting look at trends in world trade since the November 2008 Washington Summit,  highlighting how G20 states’ oft-proclaimed commitment against protectionism has been broken by member governments approximately once every three days since last year’s commitments. “No other statistic”, Simon Evenett argues, “better demonstrates the paucity of global leadership on contemporary protectionism”.

- Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank, calls for the summit to focus on the world’s developing economies, highlighting the positive contribution they can make to the health of the global economy. Pittsburgh, he argues, can mark the advent of a more “responsible globalisation” founded on “multiple poles of growth”. Brazilian President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, meanwhile, presents his take on the G20 grouping in the LA Times.

- Around the think tanks, finally: Brookings has an in-depth report focusing on some of the broader implications of the G20 agenda, from the protectionism issue to African and Latin American perspectives, as well as assessing the G20’s approach to climate change. The Carnegie Endowment, meanwhile, has an interesting take on Saudi Arabia’s approach to the summit, given its increasing exposure to instability in the financial markets and vulnerability to shifts in oil and food prices.

Elsewhere, Chatham House has analysis of some of the key short-term economic indicators, as well as long-term GDP forecasts – arguing that it is still to early too be coordinating exit strategies. The Canadian-based Centre for International Governance Innovation, meanwhile, takes a comprehensive look at some of the challenges facing the G20 as a forum for global economic governance, with contributions from policymakers and academics alike.

Enshrining a principle of equity in a global deal would do much to dispel such concerns and generate trust. A long-term goal of per capita emissions converging to a band could ensure that no country is locked into an unequal share of the atmospheric commons. India has recently stated that it would never exceed the average per capita emissions of high-income countries. So drastic action by high-income countries to reduce their own carbon footprint to sustainable levels is essential. This would show leadership, spur innovation, and make it feasible for all to switch to a low-carbon growth path.

Hey, did the Bank just endorse Contraction and Convergence? Not quite. As I explained a few weeks back, converging to equal per capita emission levels is not the same as converging to equal per capita emission entitlements – the difference being the small matter of whether poor countries get to benefit from emissions trading markets worth, oh, a few billion dollars. Shame the Bank missed that trick. Not so UNCTAD, on the other hand, as we saw a couple of weeks ago:

… if population size were to be given an important weight in the initial allocation of permits across countries, many developing countries would be able to sell their emission rights because they would be allotted considerably more permits than they need to cover domestically produced emissions.

Interesting coda: I was having lunch the other day with a senior official from an international agency that shall remain nameless.  I was saying I couldn’t figure out why low income countries didn’t get out there and demand quantified emission targets – allocated on the basis of immediate convergence to per capita convergence in emission entitlements. His answer: because they lack an equivalent to the OECD  – i.e. a think tank that supports them as a bloc.

Back in the 1970s, he continued, UNCTAD was increasingly showing signs of fulfilling this role; but it started to get too good at it, so major donor nations deliberately scaled back its funding. All the more welcome, then, to see UNCTAD punching above its weight on the biggest development issue of the 21st century.  Bravo.

(PS. You might think that the G77 performs the role of an OECD for poor countries, on climate as on other issues. But you’d be wrong, on two counts. First, there’s the point that G77 lacks a secretariat – in contrast to OECD’s small army of extremely smart people in Paris. But second and more fundamentally, there’s the point that however cohesive G77 might look like from the outside, the fact is that low and middle income countries have increasingly divergent interests on climate change.

Partly it’s a question of where climate finance goes: middle income countries want to see lots of cash being pumped into low carbon development programmes that will help them to grow and to access clean technology, whereas low income countries are far more concerned with adaptation.

But more fundamentally, it’s about the emission entitlements issue. Pretty much all low income countries have per capita emissions far below the global average – so if emission permits were shared out on an equal per capita basis, they’d be making real money.  Not so most of the major emerging economies – above all China, which already has per capita emissions above the global average, and would hence be a net purchaser of permits from the get-go, whenever the convergence date might be.  No surprise, then, that G77 skirts around the issue, preferring to lead on the need for developed countries to cut their own emissions and cough up more climate finance…)

As its title would suggest, the report focuses on the impact of the financial crisis on international development efforts. It opens on a grim note with the news that DFID estimates that by the end of next year 90 million more people will be living in extreme poverty as a result of the crisis. Moreover, the WHO believes that up to 400,000 additional children could die as a result. The International Development Committee adds that progress towards the MDGs may have been set back by up to three years.

A major point made in testimony given to the Committee was that initial expectations that the developing world would be insulated from the impact of the crisis have proven false. Whilst the contagion effect of the crisis has only directly harmed western economies, the indirect knock-on effects have applied pressure to transnational business flows worldwide. The World Bank reports that of the 107 counties it categorises as ‘developing’, 40% are ‘highly exposed’ to the downturn.

Unsurprisingly-though quite rightly-the International Development Committee’s response to all this is to insist on the importance of maintaining ongoing aid commitments, as agreed at the G20 summit in July.

Aside from that, the issue of tax havens is highlighted and it would seem that the British government is increasingly committed to making progress in this respect. Gordon Brown in particular has been forthright on this issue, but his government seems somewhat hamstrung at present and we shall have to await developments.

In the wake of the London Summit, institutional reform is back on the agenda. The need to overhaul the IMF and World Bank, particularly in regard to apportionment of votes within those organisations needs to be a priority for the post-crisis politics of global governance. Indeed, reform has been presented as a condition for the boost to IMF funding that the G20 agreed upon earlier this year. Broader questions of operational versatility are also important. In these respects, the Committee’s report is strong on good ideas and analysis, but light on suggestions for how Britain can help bring about the desired changes. For that perhaps we need to wait for the DFID White Paper due later in the summer.

On a seemingly superficial note, the Committee proposes that DFID’s name be changed and puts forward ‘British Aid’ and ‘DFID UK’ as possibilities. The intention, it seems is to increase the ‘visibility’ of UK international development spending. Of course, DFID does a lot more than aid, so I think we can immediately dismiss the first suggestion. As a reserved Brit, the idea of being so brash as to use ‘UK’ on international development work is too reminiscent of the US tendency to splash the Stars and Stripes on aid parcels. It seems… immodest, somehow. But it might be a good idea all the same – US aid is part of its soft power and in the same way, the work of the Department for International Development has the potential to be a significant contributor to British attempts to win ‘hearts and minds’, particularly in countries like Afghanistan. After all, the Committee’s report points out that DFID is the largest donor to the World Bank’s International Development Association. Maybe blowing our national trumpet more boldly isn’t such a bad idea. Though one wonders if there isn’t a snappier name out there somewhere – suggestions welcome, of course.

reports how Nigerian officials charged $2,200 for 18 cups of tea and snacks at a roadside stall under a World Bank loan (and got away with it). A project office with eight staff in the same country charged a switchboard for 60 telephones, 48 air conditioners, 14 shredders and 12 refrigerators to the operating expenses of another Bank project – all at prices well above the going market rates. They also claimed expenses for television and video sets at 249,999 Naira apiece – more than ten times the equipment’s street value, but just one Naira less than the amount which triggers stricter controls.

Few will be surprised to hear about World Bank money disappearing – Berkman quotes an internal report which found that ‘stealing from Bank funds is the rule, not the exception’. But all the same (and perhaps I’m being naïve), one would have thought that World Bank employees would have enough problems with the endemic low-level fraud that their organisation is known for, without contributing to it themselves. Of course, unlike British parliamentarians, World Bank officials aren’t politicians and being insulated by their institution, will never have to face the wrath of the public.

Whether or not that’s right (and like Willem Buiter, Martin Wolf is also a good deal more downcast than the Lex team), it’s interesting to compare today’s Lex column with what they had to say about capital flows to emerging markets just a couple of days ago.  Here’s the bit that made me sit up:

Take Brazil and India, the globe’s ninth and 12th biggest economies, according to the International Monetary Fund’s latest estimates. While the developed world is expected to shrink by 2 per cent this year, the IMF reckons Brazil will grow by 2 per cent, and India by 5 per cent. Why? One answer is that they have stable banks, relatively closed economies, and large internal markets. This has insulated them from much of the global turmoil.

The contrast with East Asia is stark. Singapore’s economy shrank at an annualised 17 per cent rate at the end of last year, South Korea by some 20 per cent. Yet this is not for lack of capital. Asian economies, after all, are global creditors. Their economies have shrunk instead because they are heavily oriented towards collapsing international trade. Meanwhile, their local markets are undeveloped and weak. Asia’s challenge is how to best deploy its accumulated surpluses to boost domestic demand.

None of that amounts to a rationale for protectionism as a response to the crisis, of course; Buy America is still a stupid plan.  But the data does seem to me to put a question mark over a core plank of current orthodoxy in international development thinking.

For one thing that everyone agrees on in the development world is that integration in the global economy is a central route out of poverty.  (The disagreements have been about the extent to which such integration necessarily implies trade or financial liberalisation, not the more basic point about integration per se – hence the old argument over protection of infant export industries a la China or South Korea, where the subject of dispute is ‘how’, not ‘whether’).

There’s a kind of parallel here with last summer’s panic over export restrictions on food, when import-dependent countries that had placed their trust in the reliability of liquid international markets for food (like the Philippines) suddenly felt very burned when export restrictions appeared in over 30 countries.

In both examples, the underlying analytical issue is the apparent trade-off between growth and profitability in the good times and resilience when the shocks and stresses start to pile up.  Unfortunately, for countries that lack the benefit of Brazil and India’s insulation, it’s probably too late to think about putting buffers in place.  (If you wait until the panic buying is already underway before you start assembling a stash of canned food under the stairs, then you’re just making the problem worse…)

Thanks to Flickr user Oliver Ingrouille

Prepare to heave at this New York Times screed on how tough life is for bankers these days.

“Nobody in the investment banking world is expecting pity, or even a sympathetic ear, these days,” the article begins, before quoting banker after banker who not only feels  ”unfairly singled out“, but wants destitute home owners to accept the lion’s share of the blame:

Financiers tell their not-for-attribution account of the mortgage crisis like this: Americans undersaved and overspent for decades, relying on rising property values to bankroll their lifestyles.

But nobody on Wall Street forced United States homeowners to take out loans on houses they couldn’t afford, or refinance mortgages to spend money on cars they shouldn’t have bought.

Of course, others are at fault too. Ratings agencies failed to warn innocent financiers of the risks they were taking, while regulators… well, they should be ashamed of their many failings. Bankers did just one thing wrong. They trusted us too much – and we let them down.

Now they are spat on as they cross the sidewalk from their limousines and are too embarrassed to admit what they do at champagne receptions. “I’d almost rather say I’m a pornographer,” says one poor soul. “At least that’s a business that people understand.”

Then there’s the last devasting blow – having their bonuses cut:

“Fact is that this is a terrible way to make a living — except for the money,” Ken Miller, a former vice chairman at Credit Suisse First Boston and now a private investor, said. “The lifestyle is terrible — the hours, the sucking up. These guys must feel like they’re the victims of a capricious god.”

Yes indeed, Ken, it seems they do.

I’ve interviewed Lebedev in Moscow. He is a strange man. Not your typical Russian oligarch at all. He’s something of an outsider in Putin’s government, despite having worked as a spy abroad (he was based here in London during the 1980s, and his job was to monitor capital flows from the USSR).

He’s much closer to Gorbachev, and the two own one of Russia’s few independent newspapers, Novaya Gazeta. People were worried Novaya Gazeta would lose its teeth when a KGB man bought it, but no, it still seems full of brave journalists -  one of which was gunned down in Moscow in mid-January, while walking with a human rights lawyer.

The thing that struck me about Lebedev was how wowed he was by British society. He enthused about a dinner he was at in London, where he sat between Tom Stoppard and Tom Wolfe. His son Evgeny is even more of a butterfly, and he could be the one in the driving seat at the Standard.

What will be interesting is how the paper will report UK-Russian relations, next time Russia is in the news for some aggressive action (shouldn’t be long now), particularly if it took place in London, like the Litvinenko killing. I don’t think Lebedev would sit by and let the Standard slag off the Kremlin, as one previous editor, Max Hastings, is fond of doing – he referred in passing to Putin as ‘Russia’s chief Mafia capo’ in a Mail article last week. Not sure that would wash with the new proprietor of the Standard.