Global Employment Trends 2005
Despite robust economic growth, the global employment situation improved only slightly in 2004, with employment increasing and unemployment down marginally, the International Labour Office (ILO) said in its annual Global Employment Trends. While unemployment worldwide declined from 6.3 per cent to 6.1 per cent, or from 185.2 million in 2003 to 184.7 million 2004, unemployment in Europe and Central Asia remained unchanged at 35 million, according to the ILO report.
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The future of the WTO: Addressing institutional challenges in the new millennium is the report by the Consultative Board to the Director-General Supachai Panitchpakdi

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The State of the World’s Children 2005
Poverty, conflict and HIV/AIDS are the biggest threats to children's lives in developing countries, says a new Unicef report "State of Children 2005".
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The World Employment Report 2004-2005 is the fifth in a series of ILO reports that offer a global perspective on current employment issues. The World Employment Report 2004-05 examines the interrelationship between employment creation, productivity growth, and poverty reduction, exploring key issues relevant to the debate. It investigates whether gains in productivity lead to employment losses and, if so, the conditions under which this might occur. Given that productivity growth assumes a certain amount of flexibility of the labour force, this Report also examines how a particular degree of employment stability can be maintained without sacrificing long-term growth. Here, social dialogue plays a central role in maintaining the balance between economic and social objectives.

The report shows that bridging the "global productivity divide", particularly in parts of the economy where the majority of people work – such as in agriculture, small scale-enterprises or the urban informal economy - is essential for fighting poverty and stimulating growth in both output and "decent and productive" employment. Decent work has many components; the fundamentally economic one of an income adequate enough to escape from poverty, ultimately must come from growth – growth in output, growth in productivity, and growth in jobs.

View individual sections of the report: (Documents are in PDF format)
 » Preface, Acknowledgments and Contents
 » Overview and main policy messages
 » Chapter 1. Global trends in employment, productivity and poverty
 » Chapter 2. Does productivity help or harm employment growth?
 » Chapter 3. Why agriculture still matters
 » Chapter 4. A stable workplace? A mobile workforce? — What is best for increasing productivity?
 » Chapter 5. Small-scale activities and the productivity divide

Global Economic Prospects 2005: Trade, Regionalism, and Development addresses two questions:

The proliferation of regional trade agreements is fundamentally altering the world trade landscape. The number of agreements in force surpasses 200 and has risen eight-fold in two decades. Today as much as 40 percent of global trade takes place among countries that have some form of reciprocal regional trade agreement.

The report argues that agreements leading to open regionalism—that is, deeper integration of trade as a result of low external tariffs, increased services competition, and efforts to reduce cross-border and customs delays costs—are effective as part of a larger trade strategy to promote growth. Such regional agreements can complement a strategy that, on the one hand, includes autonomous liberalization to promote productivity gains and, on the other hand, leverages domestic reforms to enhance market access.
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World Development Report for 2005: A better investment climate for everyone
Accelerating growth and poverty reduction requires governments to reduce the policy risks, costs, and barriers to competition facing firms of all types - from farmers and micro-entrepreneurs to local manufacturing companies and multinationals - concludes the World Bank's annual World Development Report for 2005, launched in Washington D.C., September 28, 2004
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Doing Business in 2005: Removing Obstacles to Growth
Slovakia and Colombia were the world's most successful investment climate reformers over the past year, creating electronic one-stop shops for new businesses, shrinking regulatory delays by weeks, improving credit registries, and increasing the flexibility of labor laws, according to a new report from the World Bank Group.

The Doing Business in 2005: Removing Obstacles to Growth report, co-sponsored by the World Bank and International Finance Corporation, the private sector lending arm of the World Bank Group, finds that successful regulatory reforms, while often simple, can help create job opportunities for women and young people, encourage businesses to move into the formal economy, and promote economic growth.

The report, however, which benchmarks regulatory performance and reforms in 145 nations, finds that poor nations, through administrative procedures, still make it two times harder than rich nations for entrepreneurs to start, operate, or close a business, and businesses in poor nations have less than half the property rights protections available to businesses in rich countries.
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Global Economic Prospects 2004 - Realizing the Development Promise of the Doha Agenda
The Doha Development Agenda of the Fourth Ministerial Conference of the WTO opened many contentious and important questions. Global Economic Prospects 2004: Realizing the Development Promise of the Doha Agenda analyzes the most critical multilateral trade issues and suggests policy options that would raise living standards in developing countries and reduce global poverty.

Global Economic Prospects 2004 provides essential information for those concerned with developments shaping today's global economy.
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The World Economic Outlook 2004
The Global Demographic Transition presents the IMF staff's analysis and projections of economic developments at the global level, in major country groups (classified by region, stage of development, etc.), and in many individual countries. It focuses on major economic policy issues as well as on the analysis of economic developments and prospects. It is usually prepared twice a year, as documentation for meetings of the International Monetary and Financial Committee, and forms the main instrument of the IMF's global surveillance activities.
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World Economic Situation and Prospects 2004
The report provides an outlook on the global and regional development situations and trends. It shows that both global and regional economic prospects are improving. International trade and finance have also improved. It indicates that the economic recovery, driven mainly by the United States, is expected to strengthen and broaden further. By contrast, Western Europe has been a source of the weakness throughout almost the whole 2003. However, the strength of the current recovery remains heavily dependent on the policy stimuli of low interest rates and expansionary fiscal measures.
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The Global Financial Stability Report 2004
Market Developments and Issues provides semiannual assessments of global financial markets and addresses emerging market financing in a global contex
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World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work For Poor People
Broad improvements in human welfare will not occur unless poor people receive wider access to affordable, better quality services in health, education, water, sanitation, and electricity. Without such improvements in services, freedom from illness and freedom from illiteracy - two of the most important ways poor people can escape poverty - will remain elusive to many. The World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work for Poor People says that too often, key services fail poor people - in access, in quantity, in quality. This imperils a set of development targets known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which call for a halving of the global incidence of poverty, and broad improvements in human development by 2015.

The report provides powerful examples of where services do work, showing how governments and citizens can do better. There have been spectacular successes and miserable failures in the efforts by developing countries to make services work. The main difference between success and failure is the degree to which poor people themselves are involved in determining the quality and the quantity of the services which they receive.
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UNCTAD World Investment Report 2004: The Shift Towards Services
"This year´s Report focuses on the latest trends in foreign direct investment and explores the shift towards services, with a special analysis of offshoring service activities".
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2004 World Development Indicators (selected chapters)
The report reviews progress toward the major development goals in 2004. It illustrates that the global poverty rates continue to fall and fewer people live in the extreme poverty. In countries that have laid a good foundation for growth, indicators of social development are improving. However, it is still too early to conclude that the world as a whole is on track to achieve MDGs.
Introduction
Table 1.1 Size of the economy
Table 1.6 Key indicators for other economies

Global monitoring report 2004: Policies and actions for achieving the Millennium Development Goals and related outcomes
The turn of the century was marked by some significant and promising events for world development. The Millennium Declaration - signed by 189 countries in September 2000 - led to the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals, which set clear targets for eradicating poverty and other sources of human deprivation. Following other major international meetings came broad agreement on the goals and strategies to achieve them. The task now is implementation - to translate vision into action. Drawing attention to priorities for action and related accountabilities, this Report provides an integrated assessment of the policies and actions needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Produced in cooperation with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other international partners, the Report assesses how the various parties-developing countries, developed countries, and international financial institutions-are playing their part under the agreed development partnership and highlights progress on the development policy agenda.
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WORLD TRADE REPORT 2004
Benefits from good trade policy may be attenuated or even undermined if governments pursue deficient policies in other areas of economic activity, according to the 2004 World Trade Report published by the WTO Secretariat.
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A FAIR GLOBALIZATION - Creating opportunities for all
The report of the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization, an independent body, established by the International Labour Organization (ILO) in February 2002, studies various aspects of globalization, the diversity of public perceptions of the process, and its implications for economic and social progress. It has searched for innovative ways of combining economic, social and environmental objectives, based on worldwide expertise. It has made its recommendations seeking to build upon a broad consensus among all key actors. The Commission's final report has been released on 24 February 2004.
World Commission Report on Fair Globalization (English)     (French)     (Spanish)

Economic Development in Africa: Debt Sustainability: Oasis or Mirage?
Debt sustainability is basically a relative concept. The questions that beg for a response are: what level of debt is sustainable for countries in which the vast majority of the population lives on under $1 a day per person? Have debt sustainability criteria been based on internationally recognized benchmarks such as those of the MDGs, or on objectively and theoretically verifiable criteria? What is the relationship between Africa´s total external debt stocks and the actual amount of debt serviced? Is complete debt write-off a moral hazard or a "moral imperative"?
The current study tries to put these and other related issues in perspective and makes a number of recommendations on how to deal with Africa´s debt overhang, either through the adoption of new approaches or a major revision and improvement of present debt relief policies
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Reducing Disaster Risk: A Challenge for Development
Around 75 percent of the world’s population lives in areas affected at least once by earthquake, tropical cyclone, flood or drought between 1980 and 2000. 11 percent of the people exposed to natural hazards live in countries classified as low human development, but they account for more than 53 percent of the total recorded deaths. The report argues that disaster risk is not inevitable and offers examples of good practice in disaster risk reduction that can be built into ongoing development planning policy.
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2004 Human Development Report
In a wide-ranging analysis of identity issues in scores of communities and nations, the Human Development Report 2004 looks at many different policy approaches to multicultural nations and communities, from bilingual education and affirmative action plans to innovative systems of proportional representation and federalism. The authors argue that all people have the right to maintain their ethnic, linguistic, and religious identities. They further contend that the adoption of policies that recognize and protect these identities is the only sustainable approach to development in diverse societies.
Economic globalization cannot succeed unless cultural freedoms are also respected and protected, they say — and xenophobic resistance to cultural diversity should be addressed and overcome. The UNDP Administrator, Mr Mark Malloch Brown, says in the foreword to the Report, “If the world is to reach the Millennium Development Goals and ultimately eradicate poverty, it must first successfully confront the challenge of how to build inclusive, culturally diverse societies.”
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2004 UNCTAD Report on the Least Developed Countries: Linking International Trade with Poverty Reduction - The Report argues that international trade can play a major positive role in reducing poverty in the LDCs. However, in practice this is not happening in many of them. In some this is due to a weak trade performance. But most of the LDCs achieved much higher rates of export growth in 1990s than in the 1980s. The failure of trade expansion to lead to poverty reduction has been related to weaker linkages between trade and economic growth than in the more advanced developing countries. Moreover, there is a tendency for export expansion in very poor economies with mass poverty and few surplus financial resources to be associated with an exclusionary rather than inclusive form of economic growth. Civil conflicts in some of the LDCs have also been associated with immiserizing trade.
The Report shows that most LDCs undertook deep trade liberalization in the 1990s. They also received some degree of preferential market access from developed and developing countries. But trade liberalization plus enhanced market access does not necessarily equal poverty reduction. Many LDCs are in the paradoxical situation that they are the ones needing the multilateral trading system the most, but they find it hardest to derive benefits from the application of its central general economic principles: liberalization and equal treatment for all its members.
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2002 UNCTAD Report on the Least Developed Countries: Escaping the Poverty Trap
The least developed countries (LDCs) are a group of 49 countries that have been identified by the UN as “least developed” in terms of their low GDP per capita, their weak human assets and their high degree of economic vulnerability. This Report is the first international comparative analysis of poverty in the LDCs. It is based on a new set of poverty estimates constructed specifically for the Report. The new estimates enable empirically based analysis of the relationship between poverty, development and globalization, and thereby the elaboration of more effective national and international policies to reduce poverty in the LDCs. The Report shows that extreme poverty is pervasive and persistent in most LDCs, and that the incidence of extreme poverty is highest in those LDCs that are dependent on primary commodity exports. The incidence of poverty is so high because most of the LDCs are caught in an international poverty trap. Pervasive poverty within LDCs has effects at the national level that cause poverty to persist and even to increase, and international trade and finance relationships are reinforcing the cycle of economic stagnation and poverty. The Report argues that the current form of globalization is tightening the poverty trap. [...]
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2004 OECD Annual Report
The report provides latest information on the status of economic growth, employment and social cohesion, environment, international trade and investment, governance, statistics and communications in OECD countries. It also provides information on the development of non-member economies.
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Unleashing Entrepreneurship: Making business work for the poor
In this report to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the Commission focuses on how business can create domestic employment and wealth, free local entrepreneurial energies, and help achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

Foreword, Highlights and other introductory pages
Chapter 1: Why the private sector is important in alleviating poverty
Chapter 2: Contraints on the private sector in developing countries
Chapter 3: Unleashing the potential of the private sector
Chapter 4: Engaging the private sector in development
Chapter 5: Recommended actions, bibliographic information
Full report, in one big file

Press kit: Press release, highlights, framework

2004 Status of World Population
This year’s report 2004 Status of World Population. The Cairo Consensus at Ten: Population, Reproductive Health and the Global Effort to End Poverty, examines countries’ achievements and constraints in implementing the Cairo consensus, including efforts to improve the quality and reach of reproductive health programmes, promote women’s rights, improve maternal and child health and strengthen HIV prevention efforts. UNFPA’s report makes the case that mobilizing political will and increased funding by the international community is crucial if countries are to maintain and build on the gains of the past decade.
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2004 WHO/UNICEF report "Meeting the MDGs drinking water and sanitation targets"
The combination of safe drinking water and hygienic sanitation facilities is a precondition for health and for success in the fight against poverty, hunger, child deaths and gender inequality. It is also central to the human rights and personal dignity of every woman, man and child on earth. Yet 2.6 billion people – half the developing world – lack even a simple ‘improved’ latrine. One person in six – more than 1 billion of our fellow human beings – has little choice but to use potentially harmful sources of water. The consequences of our collective failure to tackle this problem are dimmed prospects for the billions of people locked in a cycle of poverty and disease.

In adopting the Millennium Development Goals, the countries of the world pledged to reduce by half the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. The results so far are mixed. With the exception of sub-Saharan Africa, the world is well on its way to meeting the drinking water target by 2015, but progress in sanitation is stalled in many developing regions.

This report, produced by the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme on Water Supply and Sanitation (JMP), provides the latest estimates and trends on where we stand today. The JMP’s estimates are critical for calculating rates of progress towards national goals and for highlighting priorities, especially those that target the underserved.
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2004 UNIDO report
Industrialization, Environment and the Millennium Development Goals in Sub-Saharan Africa, while continuing and updating industrial performance benchmarking, addresses the challenges faced by Sub-Saharan African countries, a mandated priority area for UNIDO, in furthering their efforts towards poverty reduction. Hence it features a special focus on the dynamic processes of productivity growth, wealth creation and social advance in Sub-Saharan Africa in the context of the internationally agreed development goals and targets of the Millennium Declaration and the national poverty reduction strategies.
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2004 UNAIDS Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic
The report indicates that there has been a resurgence of energy and commitment in responding to the AIDS epidemic. Increase of finance, cheaper antiretroviral medicines and concerted efforts have enabled to extend treatment to millions of infected people. However, more efforts are required to halt and reverse the epidemic by 2015.
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Trade and Development Report 2003
The Trade and Development Report 2003 offers a distinct perspective on global economic trends and prospects. With the leading industrial countries still not pulling in the same direction, prospects for much of the developing world are clouded by tensions in the trading system, volatility in the currency market and deflationary pressures. This year´s Report traces the difficulties back to the pattern of global trade and financial flows in the 1990s. But the Report also asks whether market-led reforms adopted in many developing countries after the debt crisis of the early 1980s have strengthened these countries´ ability to withstand external shocks. The Report looks for clues in what has been happening to their investment climate, their patterns of industrial development and their international competitiveness. The focus of this analysis is Latin America, where reforms have gone furthest, but where initially observed successes have not endured. As the UN Secretary-General notes in his Foreword, "The Report provides explanations that may challenge conventional points of view, and calls for new thinking on development strategies".
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