The revamped and expanded website of the World Bank Office, Beijing offers the most extensive collection of Bank publications and research on-line in any language besides English. It includes studies, books, and other documents. Many are newly translated, others were previously available in Chinese but only as printed books.

Chinese officials have encouraged the Bank to provide wider access to Bank publications and research papers, so that the global reach of the Bank's analytical work could be more easily available to government organizations and policymakers, research institutes and students in China.

"We welcome this opportunity and hope that the new website will enable us to reach many more people in China with useful knowledge about development and poverty reduction, as well as increasing their understanding of the Bank's work," says Yukon Huang, Director of the World Bank's China Program.

The new website was developed by the Bank's office in Beijing in collaboration with the Development Economics Vice Presidency (DEC) which includes the research, data and economic forecasting departments. The Bank's publications department and publishers in China who had previously published World Bank books in Chinese provided translations to the site.

"It is ideas, and Keynes argued so convincingly, that change the policies that change the world. China's great achievements show this clearly," says Nicholas Stern, World Bank Chief Economist and Senior Vice President for Development Economics. "I hope that the World Bank's research and publications can contribute to China's continuing efforts to use the best of international knowledge and the best of local knowledge to further China's development."

The expanded website offers economic and sector reports produced under the World Bank's China Program, East Asia regional studies, analytical work generated by several units within the World Bank, and global reports such as World Development Report, Global Development Finance and Global Economic Prospects. In addition, the site provides access to major speeches of senior staff and the proceedings of conferences sponsored by the World Bank in China.

It also provides access to short abstracts of hundreds of recent research working papers, along with links to the full papers in English. New abstracts in Chinese will be added regularly as the new papers appear, along with full translations of selected papers. The World Bank staff produce about 200 working papers each year on a wide range of development topics, such as finance, rural development, infrastructure, and the environment.

The World Bank lending portfolio in China includes about 90 ongoing projects, and six to eight new projects are added each year. The site provides easy access to information about these projects and major operational documents such as project appraisal documents and environmental and resettlements assessments. The site also provides information about the Bank's lending instruments, project cycle, guidelines for procurement and for selection and employment of consultants, and operational and safeguard policies in Chinese.

The site also gives information about investments of the International Finance Corporation, guarantee contracts of MIGA, and projects supported by the Global Environmental Facility and Montreal Protocol in China.

The new website has a section for civil society organizations and provides information about how the World Bank works with civil society, the Small Grants Program that supports civic engagement activities, and an evolving on-line database of Chinese translations of NGO-related laws worldwide to facilitate the development of an enabling environment for civil society through information sharing.

The site can be accessed at http://www.worldbank.org.cn.

(China.org.cn July 10, 2003)