Indonesia is still underrated globally. Why does the world not notice? One reason is particularly poor performance in sports and higher education, two areas that give countries a lot of international exposure.

Five years ago I went on my first professional trip to Indonesia.  I had just joined the World Bank’s Indonesia Country Team and also prepared for the relocation of my family later that year. My wife was very concerned moving to Jakarta. At that time, Indonesia was associated with the Bali and Marriott bombings, the beginning of bird flu, and memories of the political chaos after the departure of Soeharto were still present.

Today, my wife does not want to leave Indonesia anymore.  What happened?
 
Indonesia recovered – and it recovered strongly. However, I truly believe that Indonesia is still underrated globally. During the past decade, Indonesia has embarked on one of the most ambitious political and economic transitions ever witnessed in any large country in recent history. According to Freedom House, Indonesia is entering a year of multiple national elections – both legislative and presidential – as Southeast Asia’s strongest democracy.

For most of us, when a disaster happens in a far away place, we only get brief glimpses of the immediate aftermath and subsequent recovery efforts – often only through news media or occasionally close-by bloggers. During four years of reconstruction after the devastating tsunami that hit the Indonesian province of Aceh in 2004, few have seen the rebuilding process like those who are part of the recovery efforts.

The Multi-Donor Fund (MDF), which is managed by the World Bank with contributions and guidance from 15 other international donor partners, continues to work on the ground in Aceh and Nias. The reconstruction has been extremely successful, with more than 100,000 new houses constructed, more than 90,000 hectares of agricultural land restored and 2,500 kilometers of road built. In late 2008, the MDF held a photo competition for people involved with projects or agencies related to reconstruction. The resulting pictures are not professionally created, but they give a beautifully close and comprehensive view of the rebuilding of Aceh.

(Hover your mouse over "Notes" to see information about each photo)

Many of the pictures were featured in the Multi-Donor Fund 2008 Progress Report, which can be found at the MDF website. You can also see the photos at our Flickr page.

I'm in the north of Guangxi in southern China feeling privileged to be working in such a dramatic karst limestone landscape and part of another great project team. The conical and vertical towers of limestone jut out of the flat agricultural land, sometimes in single sentinels and sometimes in great families of jagged, pointed peaks, no two alike. At Mulun National Nature Reserve which abuts the Maolan World Heritage Site in Guizhou, there is nothing but these towers, and this is one of the sites getting detailed attention within our Integrated Forestry and Conservation Development Project. One sub-component of the project is directed at cave biodiversity. In that regard, we recently made some remarkable discoveries at Mulun.

As I have mentioned in an earlier blog post, cave biodiversity gets appallingly little attention relative to its significance. It is surely the most unknown of the terrestrial ecosystems, and it makes me drool to be close to places for which so little biological information is available.

A few days before the 2008 Olympic Games began last August, China blogger David Dollar noticed that Beijing's efforts to clean up its air seemed to be paying off. Well, it seems that after the officials took the worst polluting vehicles off the road, temporarily shut down some major polluting factories, and limited the amount of traffic, the city's air quality did indeed get better.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) yesterday released a report concluding that Olympic organizers successfully made efforts to improving the city's environment for an "eco-friendly mass spectator sporting event." The press release stated, "These achievements are all the more impressive given that the Games were held in a rapidly developing city in a country facing multiple development challenges in the first decade of the 21st century." You can download the full report here.

An interesting part of the report points to NASA data, which used satellite imagery to demonstrate that air quality over the city improved. Mongabay.com wrote about these findings in December:

If you are a visual learner like me, or you just happen to like nifty animated maps, a site called SHOW World may be worth spending an afternoon coffee/tea break or two to check out. Similar to the popular WorldMapper collection, this site displays a lot of data from a number of sources (including, apparently, the World Bank) in map form. On an Excel spreadsheet, the information would just look like numbers or a boring old graph. But this site, as SHOW World puts it, offers "a new way to look at the world by resizing countries on the map according to a series of global issues."

The site appears to be adding new datasets to compare, but as it stands you can compare countries on everything from urban populations and CO2 emissions to even Internet usage.

The embedded map below enlarges countries with higher gross domestic product, shrinking those with smaller GDP. Click the center of the map to resize it (or check it out here).

(hat tip information aesthetics)

I’m starting this on another long-haul flight to Beijing on my way to Mongolia. It’s at this early stage of another mission that I wonder why I do this: I leave family (this time for over six weeks), I assault my body with the stresses of jetlag and extreme tiredness, and try to combine the normal workload with days spent in morning-to-night meetings and field trips. To be sure, the World Bank allows me to fly business class, which eases the physical problems – but with more space and power sockets in the seat, my managers get their ‘pound of flesh’ from me and I get loads of emails written and read.

But is it hypocritical and “immoral” for a conservationist to be traveling like this?

I’ve been thinking about this question of morality after reading the editorial in the most recent issue of Oryx, the journal of Fauna and Flora International, a conservation NGO I’ve been a member of for nigh on 40 years. The editorial is by Bill Adams and is entitled ‘Conservation, carbon and transition to sustainability’(pdf).

Local meets global in Ulaanbataar: ice sculptures of Chinggis Khaan in front of the popular Grand Khaan Irish Pub.

It was more than 20 degrees below zero (centigrade) as we visited Ulaanbataar this week.  If you want to understand Mongolian culture and politics you have to visit this coldest of the world’s capitals in the dead of winter.  My wife joined me on this trip and provided some useful perspective since it was her first trip since summer 2005.  What struck her immediately was the absence of traditional Mongolian clothing, which had been prevalent four years before, and the explosive growth of cars and traffic, which had not.  Since 2005 Mongolia has undergone a mining boom as the price of its main export, copper, climbed from historical levels of about $2,000 per ton to a high of $8,685 in mid-2008. 

The commodity price boom meant that Mongolia earned far more dollars for roughly the same physical volume of exports.   This increased income reached a lot of the population through increased government spending and transfers and the real estate and construction booms.  People could afford a lot more imported products including cars, clothing, appliances, and an increasing share of their food. 

The global slowdown is hurting Cambodia's tourism industry, with fewer visitors in late 2008 than in the same period of 2007. Image credit: flydime at Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Cambodia was one of the few Asian countries saved from the December 2004 devastating tsunami. But, a few days ago, at the Cambodia Economic Forum, panelists suggested that the economic tsunami – or various synonyms – would not spare Cambodia.

It's been a couple of months since the World Bank prepared the "perfect storm" report on the recent economic developments in East Asia. Our view at the time was that the crisis would reveal some of Cambodia's economic vulnerabilities – i.e. its lack of export diversification and its extreme reliance on foreign investment for growth. I think that this is an important lesson from our recent analysis on growth in Cambodia (more on this later).

Our projections for 2009 at the time were just below 5 percent GDP growth. This is consistent with the projections of the Government, the IMF, the Asian Development Bank, and an International Labor Organization (ILO) report on the impact of the crisis released yesterday. The Economist Intelligence Unit has a more pessimistic projection of 1 percent.

So who is right?

Well, the bad news continues across the East Asia and Pacific region. The Financial Times just ran a long article on the "speed and ferocity of the region's economic downturn." The piece highlighted that the fast downturn was a result of Asia's over-reliance on export-led growth over the past decade. This follows the IMF's slashed growth forecasts for the large East Asian economies. It projected only 5.5 percent growth across developing Asia for 2009, which sounds great for most economies these days, but it is way off of the 7.8 percent posted last year.

The IMF is expecting only 6.7 percent growth in China, which is 1.8 percent less than what they forecast only in October. This contrasts sharply with the view of the World Bank's Chief Economist, Justin Lin, who just two weeks ago said he thought China could achieve the target rate of growth – 8 percent – this year because of fiscal stimulus spending.

Lately, I’ve noticed several bloggers and news sites have picked up on an interesting trend migration trend that many have dubbed "reverse brain drain" – the return of skilled immigrants to their home countries. With rising unemployment and an often-difficult U.S. immigration process, the notion of looking back at home for work has reportedly appealed to foreign nationals working in the United States for technology, finance and other industries.

World Bank economist Sonia Plaza writes on the People Move blog about the shift in terminology over the years caused by new trends.