International Growth Centre (IGC), a think tank set up by the UK government on the lines of 1930s ‘brain trust’ made up of professors from Columbia University which helped President Roosevelt shape the policies of the First New Deal to deal with the great depression, was launched here this month with the specific aim to help growth in developing countries and improve their ability to cope with the effects of the economic downturn.

The IGC brings together a Nobel Prize winning economist with development experts from the London School of Economics (LSE) and University of Oxford. The centre will also provide innovative research on growth.

The IGC will be a unique resource giving developing countries a hotline to the advice of world-class experts - for example on finance, agricultural yields, the energy sector or policies for the economy as a whole.

As many as 80 million more people are being forced, it is feared, to live in extreme poverty as a result of the global financial crisis. This figure is more than double what was previously feared.

The IGC is said to be a part of the international action aimed at heading off this looming “human crisis”.

Department for International Development (DfID) intends to make the IGC serve as a ‘global brain trust’ - making some of the world’s finest economists available to the governments of developing countries, as the New Deal did for America in the 1930s.

The centre will include some of the biggest names in economics around the world: from Oxford Paul Collier, from the London School of Economics Nick Stern and Tim Besley - also a member of the UK’s Monetary Policy Committee. From Stanford in the US the Nobel Laureate Mike Spence, and from Harvard the former Chief Economist of the IMF, Kenneth Rogoff.

The IGC will: provide a systematic link between international research and on the ground delivery of policy and programme change around growth; be able to provide both whole economy analysis drilling down into specific sectors; provide a mixture of short and longer-term technical support; be free in its advice from the constraints and preoccupations around aid and loan programmes common to many international agencies.

The IGC has three core components: policy engagement, networking and research. LSE and Oxford University will form the Hub - taking primary responsibility for the research and policy interface. The hub will forge partnerships with a range of individuals, networks and institutions to create an International Growth Network (IGN).

The IGN will engage with policy makers, researchers, private sector and civil society representatives in developing countries seeking advice on growth.

The centre will provide technical support to countries to see through policy and growth changes and programmes including through long-term engagement of country teams.

It will focus on translating academic research into on-the-ground policy delivery. Effective engagement with the private sector will be essential to ensuring that research leads to advice and policies that are practical and likely to be implemented successfully.

It will provide independent advice and policy input. The independence of the IGC will ensure that policy advice is based on the best available evidence and up-to-date research.

At the launch, Secretary of State for International Development Douglas Alexander pointed out that the financial crisis had shown the world that in an increasingly globalised world, seemingly distant crises can spread quickly across the globe, “and as governments come under growing economic pressure they will be less able to invest in infrastructure, education and health care - the services their citizens so desperately need.”

He further said that as the economic climate threatened to force people into poverty,” we need even greater political leadership than we have seen in the last decade to ensure that the progress we have made is not reversed. We need a coordinated global response to this crisis to ensure that the next few years do not become the ‘lost years’ in the global fight against poverty.”

The Executive Director of the IGC, Gobind Nankani has extensive experience in the global development policy. Co-Directors are Professor Paul Collier from Oxford University and Professor Robin Burgess from the LSE, both world-leading experts in the study of development economics.

For Professor Paul Collier the IGC is a realisation of a long held aspiration to put good quality research at the disposal of governments that face the most difficult development challenges on earth.

“Oxford and LSE a have a successful record of research partnership and the IGC will allow us to build on that relationship even further, not only sustaining our work but also giving us scope to scale up,” he said.

According to Professor Robin Burgess the IGC will leverage frontier research into concrete policies to promote and sustain growth in the developing world, “It is a radically different approach from past efforts in three significant ways. Never before have two of the leading economics departments in the UK offered the services of their best economists to bring research into policy.”

The economic downturn will hit the Internet economy hard in 2009, according to the latest available OECD estimates.

The IT Outlook 2008 says that the IT industry is likely to have grown by four per cent at most in 2008 compared to the previous year. But with the outlook for the global economy worsening and business and consumer confidence plummeting, growth will remain flat or decline in 2009.

Some sectors are expected to weather the storm better than others. Spending on software and IT services, including outsourcing, by governments and business, is likely to continue. Internet-related sales and investments in infrastructure, driven by demand for high-speed Internet from consumers and business, will remain solid although some infrastructure investments may be held over due to the credit crisis.

But the semiconductor industry is set to fall nearly six per cent in 2009, after weak growth of 2.2 per cent in 2008. And semiconductor manufacturing equipment sales - a leading indicator for the sector and for ICT goods – have plunged. Many other IT sectors will also struggle, having invested heavily in growing their business in emerging markets and in new goods and services to boost margins in weakening OECD markets in 2008.

Major corporate customers in sectors hard hit by the downturn, such as banking, insurance and retail, are also cutting back spending plans in 2009.

The IT Outlook also analyses ICT trends and developments. Global restructuring of the industry continued in 2007 and 2008. Asia, Eastern Europe and Mexico are becoming increasingly important as both producers and new growth markets as manufacturers seek to lower their assembly costs of IT goods.