US Presidential hopeful John Edwards has set out a plan for fighting global poverty:
As president, John Edwards will fundamentally transform America’s approach to the world. As part of his $5 billion initiative, he will bring high-level attention to help people in three priority areas: primary education, preventive health, and greater economic and political opportunity.
He proposes a Cabinet level post to tackle global poverty (which the UK introduced in 1997) and promises a new Global Development Act to consolidate and simplify the US foreign assistance system.
Comment: It would be good news for development if this becomes an issue in the US Presidential elections.
More at CGD.
Chris McGreal has a piece in the Guardian today about DFID's work in Africa. (Disclosure: I work for DFID). Chris McGreal says:
The result, say DFID officials in Africa, is that they are able to direct large amounts of money to areas of greatest need, including putting millions of pounds directly into government budgets. Speaking on a visit to Malawi, Mr Benn added that routing aid through African governments makes them more accountable to those it is supposed to benefit.
Tim Worstall agrees in part. He likes the direct payment to the poor, but dislikes paymens through government budgets:
Given my views on governments, this doesn't strike me as all that good an idea. Most especially given my view that most poor countires are in fact poor because they have grasping, venal and incompetent governments, this really doesn't strike me as a good idea. But I'm aware that there are those who hold different opinions on this matter.
There are indeed those who hold a different opinion on this. The main reasons that we give money in the form of Budget support are:
- all countries, rich and poor, need governments that are accountable, capable and responsive to their people. If services such as education and health are provided directly by other agencies – such as international donors – then there is no accountability of the providers to the intended beneficiaries; the results will be weak and marginalized governments, and unresponsive services;
- though there are short-term needs to get essential services to people, the only long run, sustainable solution for these countries is to run the services themselves; if we set up parallel systems that hire the trained people away from government, we delay, rather than accelerate, the day when these countries can build sufficiently strong and effective systems for themselves;
- the services can only be delivered cost-effectively as part of a joined-up system; you don't want an AIDS clinic separate from a vaccination centre in the same town: you want a single health centre; if you are building schools then you need to train teachers or procure text books. So a bunch of separate initiatives to provide specific services in particular places will be very inefficient compared to building an effective, joined up service.
- in the past, we have ignored and bypassed poor financial management (or even corruption) in governments in poor countries because we can work around them; we cannot do that if we are going to put British taxpayers' money into those systems, so giving budget support forces us – and everyone else – to tackle one of the long-term causes of poor government.
My view is not just speculation or ideology. Here is an independent, international review of Budget Support. There is a lot of evidence gathered there. The summary says:
when a developing country’s government has the political will to reduce poverty, budget support can be an effective way for donors to deliver aid. Overall, it has helped to strengthen the relationship between donors and developing country governments, and encouraged better coordination between different donors. It has helped to strengthen planning and budget systems, making them more transparent and therefore accountable. It has also helped to prioritise areas of expenditure that target the poor like health and education.The team of evaluators found no clear evidence that budget support funds were, in practice, more affected by corruption than other forms of aid.
The ODI blog uses the debate about BAE in Tanzania as a hook for the broader issue known in Whitehall as "Policy Coherence for Development" – that is, the extent to which our policies on issues other than aid – such as trade, arms exports, financial stability, corruption, climate change, migration, intellectual property – either support, or perhaps undermine, the prospects for developing countries.
In my view, getting these issues right is at least as important as aid for providing the circumstance in which poor countries can lift themselves out of poverty.
DFID will be publishing its first annual report to Parliament on policy coherence, following Tom Watson's Tom Clarke's Private Members Bill (International Development (Reporting and Transparency) Bill). This should help to build awareness across Government of the importance of these issues for promoting international development, which is in all our interests in the long run.
[Thanks to Richard for spotting that I had the wrong Tom]
Very interesting paper by James Harrigan and Geoffrey Barrows at NBER which quantifies the benefit to the United States of ending the Multi Fiber Agreement (which had regulated the global textile trade), and which was ended as part of the Uruguay Round.
The paper finds that this change in trade policy was worth approximately $12 billion a year to American consumers.
That is in addition to the benefits to many people in China, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, who are now better able to earn a living producing and exporting goods to to the United States. (The paper does not seek to quantify these benefits).
Via Trade Diversion
The UK Government is today hosting a conference on the proposed Arms Trade Treaty. The treaty is being promoted by Argentina, Australia, Costa Rica, Japan, Kenya and the UK and it would create a framework to regulate the arms trade so that all countries adopt similar standards.While the treaty is not perfect, it would be a significant step forward in the control of the proliferation of weapons. Ambassadors from more than 50 nations will meet to discuss the proposal, which the UK aims to take to the UN General Assembly later this year.
Alex Singleton at the Globalisation Institute reports that all is not well, in at least some fair trade cooperatives
Sadly, for too many farmers in poor countries today, they are trapped in not terribly voluntary co-operatives. Out in rural Kenya last week, I found that there was some scepticism towards the traditional view the co-operatives are always forces for good. In fact, in Kenya, the coffee co-operatives have suffered from significant mismanagement, with individual farmers often exploited by the leaders of the co-operatives. In fairness, Kenya has been trying to help rebalance the situation, for example introducing six year term limits on co-operative leaders. I do worry that spokespeople for the Fairtrade movement suffer from a myopic romantic vision of the coffee farmer in a co-operative, which the truth such an existence is backbreaking and mired in exploitation.
It would be a cruel irony if the fairtrade movement itself became a new form of expoitation. The principle of fair trade – that people should be able to spend more buying products that they know to have been produced without exploitation – is a good one. But the recent articles in the FT and Alex's report from Kenya suggest that more needs to be done to ensure that the fair trade certificate means what it says.
See also today's FT leader.
Update: the Fair Trade Foundation replies here.
Enjoy this cartoon book about the development relationship from Survival International.
HT: Curious.
Senator Lieberman says he is going to run as an independent, having lost the Democratic Party nomination in Connecticut.
I don't know much about how party discipline works in the US, but in the UK running against an official party candidate would lead to automatic expulsion from the party.
As far as I know, Senator Lieberman is currently the ranking Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security committee, and he sits on the Armed Services, Small Business, and Environment Committees. According to the BBC:
Meanwhile Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Sen Chuck Schumer of New York – the chairman of the party's Senate campaign committee – have pledged their full support for Mr Lamont.
I wonder if Senator Reid's support for Mr Lamont includes removing Senator Lieberman from his committee posts?
This week's Economist asks why there is an invisible hand on the keyboard:
Not all economics bloggers toil entirely for nothing. Mr Mankiw frequently plugs his textbook. Brad Setser, of Roubini Global Economics, an economic-analysis website, is paid to spend two to three hours or so each day blogging as a part of his job. His blog, rgemonitor.com/blog/setser, often concentrates on macroeconomic topics, notably China. Each week, 3,000 people read it—more than bought his last book. “I certainly have not found a comparable way to get my ideas out. It allows me to have a voice I would not otherwise get,” Mr Setser says. Blogs have enabled economists to turn their microphones into megaphones. In this model, the value of influence is priceless.
Not up to the usual high standard of The Economist.
Economists blog because most of us believe that information and knowledge are more valuable shared than kept secret. As knowledge workers, we are valued by the information we share, not the secrets we keep. Blogging is a hugely efficient way of sharing some kinds of information.
Santigie Kamara writing in allAfrica.com yesterday may be overstating the case, but only a little:
Reports reaching this press indicate that the consultant at the Ministry of Agriculture is a "square peg in a round whole" and yet still he is there, receiving thousands of dollars while our brothers and sisters who are more qualified are earn less than a million leones per month.
The objectives of technical assistance are noble; the execution is dismal. Even before Elliot Berg's landmark report in 1993 we have known that the expert-counterpart model of long term ex-patriate technical assistance is generally neither effective nor good value for money. In no other walk of life do we try to train people by parachuting in an expert to do their job for a couple of years. You do not learn skills by watching over someone's shoulder: you learn through a combination of on-the-job training, coaching, mentoring, and formal structured training courses. So why is that not the way we should provide technical assistance?
A fifth of all aid – some $20 billion a year – is currently spent on technical cooperation of various kinds (though much of it may not be spent on this sort of technical assistance). About 40% of US aid is spent this way. Some – perhaps a lot – of this money is wasted. We know that this approach to technical assistance is not generally effective, and yet we go on doing it, presumably because the development-industrial complex is too powerful for us stop.
The transfer and sharing of knowledge and skills is a very high priority for development. Technical cooperation has an important role to play. But we need to do it much better.
Full disclosure: I myself was an ex-pat technical adviser in an African country for two years. I know of what I speak.
<geek>
You may not have heard of service oriented architecture yet; and if you have have, you may think it is just a lot of hype.
But if you believe in SOA, you will have noticed that it could be the foundation of a solution to the UK Government's woes in the use of information technology. I have written before here about the potential for a service-oriented architecture to enable government to deliver the benefits of integrated information systems while limiting the civil liberties risks of a large identity database. And in a chapter in a new IBM book about transformation of government services, Capability, Capacity and Reform, I argue that instead of the government's vision of data processing warehouses, the way to create more efficient and customer-oriented public services is to build smaller and more flexible shared service modules based on a common, cross-government IT architecture.
So I was interested to see that Accenture has bet $450 million of its own money over the next three years in developing new service-oriented architecture functionality. That suggests that Accenture agrees that this is more than just hype.
Hat tip: Enterprise Web 2.0
</geek>
The Wasington Post reports on a federal program to support cattle farmers:
At first, livestock owners were required to be in a county officially suffering a drought to collect the money. But ranchers who weren't eligible complained to their representatives in Washington, and in 2003 Congress dropped that requirement. Ranchers could then get payments for any type of federally declared "disaster." In some cases, USDA administrators prodded employees in the agency's county offices to find qualifying disasters, even if they were two years old or had nothing to do with ranching or farming.
If this were happening in an African country, there would be all kinds of complaints about corruption and poor governance. There would be demands that we cut off aid until this kind of corruption be ended.
Contrary to popular belief, agricultural subsidies in OECD countries are not the most damaging part of the rigged international market for agriculture – that honour goes to import tariffs. But they are a colossal waste of taxpayer money, and they contribute to the difficulties faced by agricultural producers in poor countries to make a living. It is hard to understand why voters in developed countries put up with it.
G and I went to see An Inconvenient Truth, which is a documentary about Al Gore's efforts to increase awareness of the threat of climate change.
I thought that I was pretty well informed about climate change, and frankly expected to be a bit bored. I did not really see how a film of somebody giving a powerpoint presentation was going to be all that interesting. Boy, was that wrong. I found the film informative, gripping, even entertaining in places. I learned a lot, and the film increased my (inexpert) opinion that climate change is one of the most serious challenges facing the planet.
The film is more than just a presentation of charts and figures. It cleverly weaves in Al Gore's personal narrative: the journey he made, as a student, as a Congressman, a Senator, as Vice President and as a Presidential candidate. He comes across as smart, funny, likeable and utterly sincere. His story, and his insights into how public opinion gradually understands serious social challenges of this sort, give the film a liveliness, pace and emotion, instead of just a worthy-but-dull recital of the science.
The film finishes with an upbeat message: there is much that we can and should do to address global warming but we are fast running out of time.
Even if you think you know all about climate change, and are already committed to doing something about it, please go to see this film. Take a friend. You will enjoy it much more than you expect, and you will learn something.
Human Rights Watch says that the G8 must act on Darfur:
“For the third year in a row, Darfur will be on the agenda at the G8 meeting,” said Peter Takirambudde, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “This year, the G8 must make a decisive public statement. As the killings continue, G8 leaders need to tell Khartoum that it has no alternative but to accept the deployment of a U.N. force in Darfur.”
Take a look at this BBC photoset to see what life is like in a camp in Darfur.
Syd Barrett, one of the founders of Pink Floyd, has died.
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Pink Floyd's first album, must rank as one of the finest debut albums of all time, and it is a testament to Barrett's genius.
As Barrett became more unreliable, possibly because of his use of drugs, the group hired Dave Gilmour so that there would be somebody playing the guitar when Barrett stopped.
When Barrett left the band (they simply decided not to pick him up in the tour bus on the way to a gig in Southampton), he had a wholly unsuccessful solo career, and ended up a recluse, living with his mother in Cambridge.
Shine On You Crazy Diamond was recorded by Pink Floyd in 1975, on the album Wish You Were Here, as a tribute to their lost friend, Syd Barrett.
Remember when you were young
You shone like the sun
Shine on you crazy diamond
Now there's a look in your eyes
Like black holes in the sky
Shine on you crazy diamond
You were caught on the crossfire of childhood and stardom
blown on the steel breeze
Come you target for faraway laughter
Come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine!
Coincidentally Barrett made an unannounced appearance at the recording studio while the band was recording this track. They didn't even recognise him.
Tim Worstall’s weekly roundup
of the best of British Blogs is up.
With my sister Virginia visiting from Brighton, England, we have been touring the California wine region, which is an hour north of here.
Here is a photo of me and my sister drinking champagne at the Korbel cellars at 10am in the morning, at the start of a hard day’s tasting. Grethe made the ultimate sacrifice of being the designated driver.
That’s a heading I never thought I would write.
The Cato Institute – a right-wing libertarian think-tank in Washington – has published an analysis of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act:
The DMCA is anti-competitive. It gives copyright holders—and the technology companies that distribute their content—the legal power to create closed technology platforms and exclude competitors from interoperating with them. Worst of all, DRM technologies are clumsy and ineffective; they inconvenience legitimate users but do little to stop pirates.
Most papers from the Cato Institute are either obvious, or wrong, or (usually) both. This paper is neither – full of interesting insights into why digital rights management is in the interests of neither the companies nor consumers. It explains how digital rights management undermines the very characteristics we need for progress: interoperable products, consumer choice and competition.
As well as sharing these general concerns about digital rights management, I have a particular concern, which the paper touches on but does not discuss in detail. I mainly use open source software: I am writing this using Firefox on a computer running Linux, with no proprietary or closed-source software. Open source computing already provides much of the infrastructure of the internet (from email systems to the majority of web-servers) and is likely to play an increasingly important role for consumers over the coming years. But there is a fundamental inconsistency between using digital rights management to restrict what you can do with media files and open source applications. With open source software, any user can change the line that says "do not allow file to be copied" to "allow file to be copied" – so DRM relies on the existence and widespread use of proprietary software. And that is not acceptable to me.
G and I saw Capote last night.
Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Truman Capote, a writer (author of Breakfast at Tiffanys and writer for the New Yorker) who becomes obsessed with the murder of a family in Kansas, and forms a bond with one of the men accused of the murder, Perry Smith (top row of photos). Through his friendship with Smith, Capote researches material for his book, In Cold Blood, which is published to critical acclaim.
Philip Seymour Hoffman is astonishing as Capote – capturing not only the mannerisms and speech of Capote, but also manages to convey some of the turmoil and contradictions of the man who both sympathises (perhaps even loves) the accused men, and yet exploits their predicament. Hoffman must be a candidate for Best Actor.
Definitely recommended.
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