In Brief
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The IMF has injected $250 billion into the global economy through a new allocation of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), an IMF reserve asset. The move, approved by the IMF’s Board of Governors on August 7, is designed to increase global liquidity by supplementing the Fund’s 186 member countries’ foreign exchange reserves.
The equivalent of nearly $100 billion of the allocation went to emerging markets and developing countries, of which low-income countries received more than $18 billion.
Low-income countries are also being helped by new IMF measures that have sharply increased the loan monies available to them. The resources—some of which will come from the planned sale of IMF gold—are expected to boost the Fund’s concessional lending to up to $17 billion through 2014, including to $8 billion over the next two years.
In addition, the IMF has announced zero interest payments through end-2011 on its concessional loans to help low-income countries cope with the global economic crisis.
World hunger is projected to reach a historic high in 2009, with more than 1 billion people going hungry every day, according to new estimates published by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
The increased hunger is a consequence of the world economic crisis and higher food prices, which has resulted in lower incomes and higher unemployment, the United Nations agency said. This year, the number of hungry people will grow by about 11 percent, the FAO projects.
In Asia and the Pacific, an estimated 642 million people are suffering from chronic hunger; in sub-Saharan Africa, 265 million; in Latin America and the Caribbean, 53 million; in the Near East and North Africa, 42 million; and in developed countries, 15 million.
By 2010, there will be over 3.5 billion mobile phone subscribers, 1 billion personal computers, and 2 billion televisions in use around the world, says a study by the International Energy Agency. Gadgets and Gigawatts finds that the benefits these devices bring are going not only to people in wealthier nations, but also to the developing world. In Africa, for example, one in nine people now has a mobile phone.
But without new policies, the energy consumed by information and communications technologies as...
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