Atlas of Global Development: A Visual Guide to the World's Greatest Challenges

by World Bank Group

Published in association with Harper Collins, the completely revised and updated third edition of the Atlas of Global Development vividly illustrates the key development challenges facing our world today. 'This is an excellent, up-to-date source book which will be invaluable for students of, and staff teaching, higher levels of geography .... a clear, concise, easily-accessible and well-illustrated volume.' - Geographical Association, United Kingdom

144 pages, Paperback

First published February 26, 2007

About the author

The World Bank Group (WBG) is a family of five international organizations that make leveraged loans to developing countries. It is the largest and most famous development bank in the world and is an observer at the United Nations Development Group. The bank is based in Washington, D.C. and provided around $61 billion in loans and assistance to "developing" and transition countries in the 2014 fiscal year. The bank's stated mission is to achieve the twin goals of ending extreme poverty and building shared prosperity. Its five organizations are the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the International Development Association (IDA), the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) and the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).

The World Bank's (the IBRD and IDA's) activities are focused on developing countries, in fields such as human development (e.g. education, health), agriculture and rural development (e.g. irrigation and rural services), environmental protection (e.g. pollution reduction, establishing and enforcing regulations), infrastructure (e.g. roads, urban regeneration, and electricity), large industrial construction projects, and governance (e.g. anti-corruption, legal institutions development). The IBRD and IDA provide loans at preferential rates to member countries, as well as grants to the poorest countries. Loans or grants for specific projects are often linked to wider policy changes in the sector or the country's economy as a whole. For example, a loan to improve coastal environmental management may be linked to development of new environmental institutions at national and local levels and the implementation of new regulations to limit pollution, or not, such as in the World Bank financed constructions of paper mills along the Rio Uruguay in 2006.

Reviews

[Ariadna73 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Atlas of global development is a very neat and very beautiful report of the state of the art in world development in 2007. It is a great book to look at some data visualization examples; and the way con can use colors and shapes to make your point. It shows development in five different aspects: education; health; economy and relationship with the environment. It also devotes a chapter to statistics and their importance in these kinds of reports. To show the results it defines development as the increase in the output; the welfare of the people; the efficiency of the dealing with scare resources and the balance between humans and the environment. It states that development is a process that never ends (which I doubt because there always has to be a roof to touch... hasn't it?). It has a lot of graphics but it also has a bunch of compelling photographs of poor children in nations that are on the path of destitution. It shows; for example a beautiful and healthy looking kid from Bhutan whose life expectation is a maximum of 35! and on the other hand; it shows very worrying data of longer-living population that are reproducing themselves way too fast and how the human population as grown from 1.6 to 6.1 billion in only 100 years; more likely because of the endless advances in science to save lives and prevent children from dying. This leads to gigantic pollution problems; and scarce of energy supplies.

[for-much-deliberation ...]

"Atlas of Global Development: A Visual Guide to the World's Greatest Challenges"

see World Bank Group website: http://publications.worldbank.org/ind...


"A visual guide to global issues - easy-to-read graphical presentation with every topic presented by colorful world maps, tables, graphs, and photographs
Topics that are shaping our world - key development indicators, from poverty, population growth, and food production to climate change, foreign direct investment, and international trade
The latest, authoritative statistics - from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators database "