Guest Speaker Reflection

Angelica Silvero is our guest speaker from World Bank Speaker’s Bureau. Her role in Speaker’s Bureau is to educate and inform us audience about World Bank group. She suggested and encouraged that we get a job in World bank and spend couple of months learning if we really want to know everything about World Bank. It is a really huge organization working with over 188 countries all over the world. It is a global bank, and that is why lots of development issue are important to them. Her presentation first explained how the world looks like today. We have conflicts going on, climates shocks, and we are going through the worse refugee crisis after the second WW. Hunger in certain parts of Africa as well as in the Yemen. At the same time, we have major accelerations in technology, which is great, but it will definitely have impact in jobs. So we have to rethink how we are going to deal with, especially with young people, so they can be prepared for better jobs.

The world has never been as rich as it is today, however, not everybody took advantage of the economic growth. We still have 770 million people living in extreme poverty, and the way that the bank measures extreme poverty is to purchase parity power of less than 1.90 dollars a day, which is basically zero. Extreme poor today live in rural area, rely on agriculture, have lots of children and die young and poorly educated as well. Some of the reason why people are poor are corruption, civil unrest, natural disasters and so on. From the videos that our professor posted online, I have known about the past of the World Bank and IMF. The World Bank was created in 1944 at the end of WW2. Angelica said at that time, we had economic depression between two wars and international partner countries decided to create organizations like the UN, WTO, and IMF. In IMF, their job would be to work on issues like balance of payment, budget, financial crisis. I was impressed by the word “money doctors” to describe the role of IMF. The World Bank was created as the international bank for reconstruction and development. So it was a infrastructure band, and still is, but their job is to finance programs like rebuilding power system or electricity. As time goes by, they started working in other economic and development issues such as health, education, environment, and data. Angelica elaborated that they work in the public and private sector. Developing countries get money from the world bank. She explained in detail about where these money come from, which I learned for the first time. They lend money by selling bonds(good interest rate), and give a loan to low-income countries. Also, another sector that they are looking at right now is private sector. Why not get the private sector money that are trillions of dollar sitting in bank account and raising negative interest to build partnership with the government? Everybody wins!