The future is in our hands. We are not hapless bystanders. We can influence whether we have a planet of peace, social justice, equity, and growth or a planet of unbridgeable differences between peoples, wasted resources, corruption, and terror.

What we need to do is increase the totality of money that is given to the poorest areas and then we can do more on prevention but we have crucial needs at the moment just to get people out of poverty and to get the eight hundred million people that go to bed at night hungry, give them some food and some hope.

Today, you have 20 percent of the world controlling 80 percent of the Gross Domestic Product; you've got a $30 trillion (US) world economy, and $24 trillion of it is in the developed countries... These inequities can't exist. So if you are talking about systemic breakdown, I think you have to look in terms of social breakdown.

Too many of the conflicts which are caused today are caused by the problems that emerge from people who are in poverty.

I was told 20% of the kids in Kosovo didn't know where their parents were. This is a dreadful problem. A woman that I was with, a doctor, had seen her house destroyed and her uncle, who was a professor, taken out and shot. She's there, anxious now, trying to build relations with the Serbs, and said that she was trying to do this, but she was underlying how difficult it is with these images in your mind. And I think that is what has caused this terrible bloodshed that occurred just days ago in relation to the Serbs that were shot. I think that there is a need for a period of healing.

Well the specific role of the World Bank is to be ready with financial assistance immediately after this emergency takes place because you need to reconnect water, you need to reconnect power, you need roads, you need bridges, and that has to be done urgently.

We have three billion people, half the world's population today, living on less than two dollars a day.