Africa growth to outpace world average; More bad news for India economy; An SOS from UN agencies; Clash of ideologies in Bangladesh

1 Africa growth to outpace world average (BBC) Economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa should significantly outpace the global average over the next three years, according to the World Bank. Higher commodities, increasing investment and a general pick-up in the world economy should all boost the continent's growth to more than 5%. But the World Bank added that African governments had to do more to ensure that this growth reduced poverty. Global GDP was forecast to grow by an average of 2.4% this year.

Foreign direct investment is forecast to reach record levels in the coming years, hitting $54bn a year by 2015, the Bank said. The report said strong economic growth in Africa had significantly reduced the extent of poverty in Africa over the past decade or so. The Bank's provisional figures showed that the proportion of Africans living on less than $1.25 a day fell from 58% to 48.5% between 1996 and 2010.

But the Bank added that poverty reduction was being held back by income inequality and a reliance on mineral and mining exports in some African countries. Resource-rich countries such as Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria and Gabon were singled out as making less progress in combating poverty than other African countries with fewer natural resources. The Bank said infrastructure development was critical to ensure the strong pace of economic growth.

2 More bad news for India economy (Anant Vijay Kala in The Wall Street Journal) The Indian economy is stuck in the woods. The International Monetary Fund has lowered its forecast on India’s economic growth to 5.7% for 2013, down from its January estimate of 5.9%. No doubt the economy is going through a gloomy period. Growth is estimated to have slowed to a decade-low of about 5% last fiscal year through March. Adding to the pain is the knowledge that the economy was growing at more than 9% just a couple of years ago.

The IMF revision follows last week’s release by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that said India will lag as growth in the world’s largest economies picks up in the coming months. Also last week, the Asian Development Bank said India needs to address infrastructure and policy bottlenecks if it wants to return to growth of 8% or more. It said India’s economic growth would likely rise to 6% this fiscal year.

 “The issue is broader and most obvious in economies where supply factors, such as infrastructure or labor-market bottlenecks, and domestic policy factors, such as policy uncertainty and regulatory obstacles, have contributed to the recent stalling of investment,” it said, also citing Brazil and Russia as examples. Many economists say hurdles to growth stem from the government’s slow pace of policy reforms as well as the country’s crumbling infrastructure and layers of red-tape.

India’s economic troubles are reflected in its gaping fiscal deficit, persistently high inflation and pessimism among businesses and consumers. This has driven down investments and demand. On the bright side, the IMF did say that India’s economic slowdown appears to have bottomed out. It expects the government’s recent reform measures, improving external demand and a better monsoon season to boost economic activity. The IMF also said India’s banks are well capitalized, but remain vulnerable to long-term risks due to deteriorating asset quality.

3 An SOS from UN agencies (Khaleej Times) The United Nations aid agencies have stated the obvious. Unable to find a way out of the mess in Syria, in terms of insufficient funds and the lack of political will from world leaders, the world body’s subsidiary organisations have said in a joint statement that catastrophe looms large if nothing is done to stall the decaying state of affairs. The heads of five major UN agencies — the WHO, Unicef, Ocha, WFP and UNHCR — in a rare joint appeal to the international community have called for making efforts to ending ‘cruelty and carnage’ in the war-torn country.

The fact that they went out of their jurisdictional ambits to invoke an issue in a pure political language, in an endeavour to address world conscience, speaks of the urgency at hand. In no simple words, they said that they are asking for more than monetary assistance, and were categorical in saying that until and unless world leaders used their personal influence and intervened in a passionate manner, the crisis will keep on multiplying manifold. The UN says at least 70,000 people have been killed and more than a million displaced since the conflict began two years ago. 

4 Clash of ideologies in Bangladesh (Jason Burke in The Guardian) Protests and clashes in Dhaka and elsewhere in the country have diminished in recent weeks but with about 100 dead and thousands injured, tensions remain high. The battle pits religious conservatives against more moderate, progressive voices in a fight to determine the future direction of the country – the world's eighth most populous – 40 years after it won independence from Pakistan in a brutal war.

The most recent development is the emergence of a radical conservative Muslim party, Hefazat-e-Islam, as the standard bearer of the religious right. Earlier this month, at a huge rally in Dhaka attended by more than 100,000 according to police, the party issued 13 demands. They included the introduction of measures to stop "alien culture" making inroads in Bangladesh, the reinstatement of the line "absolute trust and faith in the Almighty Allah" in the nation's constitution, which is largely secular, and a ban on new statues in public places.

But it was Hefazat-e-Islam's demand that men and women do not mix in public – seen by many as a bid to stop women working outside the home – that is worrying female labourers in Bangladesh's booming garment industry. Hefazat-e-Islam's demand is opposed by employers too. "There are women in media, defence, and development. There cannot be development [by] keeping half of a population ineffective," Mushrefa Mishu, president of the Garment Workers' Unity Forum, said.

But beyond the issue of women working are much larger questions. "Although Bangladesh is a Muslim-majority country, it is a people's republic, not a Muslim country," said Mishu. The unrest was initially provoked by the first verdicts passed by the international war crimes tribunal, set up by Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister and daughter of the wartime leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, to investigate atrocities committed during the 1971 conflict. Elections are due in Bangladesh later this year or early in 2014.