I’ve got a piece up on the CGD blog about a new evaluation of budget support, which finds that budget support helps to improve capacity for financial management and accountability in developing countries.
I’ve been a long-time advocate of budget support, as I think it is a very important way to reduce some of the possible negative impacts of aid, such as undermining the systems of recipient governments, and reducing their accountability. It is good that the anecdotal evidence on which the policy is based has been backed up by this more comprehensive, rigorous and independent review.
I’m a bit surprised by the OECD press release about the evaluation (pdf) which is much more nuanced about the findings than the evaluation report itself (5Mb pdf here).
Hilary Benn, the UK development minister, was more effusive:
Mr Benn said Britain provided 25% of its aid directly to governments and, in addition to boosting health and education spending, there had been better management of public finances, greater transparency and more effective coordination between donors. …
The development secretary said he reserved the right to stop donating to governments that failed to meet expected standards of governance and human rights. Britain has cut off aid to Ethiopia and Uganda over alleged human rights abuses, and in Zimbabwe the UK is
prepared to back only specific projects, such as HIV/Aids assistance.
See also the BBC report here.
This caught my eye in the Number 10 morning press briefing from 4 May 2006
Asked if the Prime Minister had sanctioned a peerage to Peter Law, the PMOS said that it was not only a party matter, but also, as people knew, the PMOS did not talk about the nomination process for the House of Lords.
The House of Lords are our legislators, for chrissake. They make our laws. And the official spokesman of the person who chooses them is not allowed to talk about the process for putting them there?
Today’s Guardian (27 March) includes a roundup of what the bloggers are saying about Norman Kember. (I can’t find it online).
Except that I did not say what is attributed to me. The excellent Neil Hall said it, in the comments to my post.
Andrew Sullivan yesterday:
I’m aware of one person who clearly stated before the war that he believed that Saddam had no WMDs. That was Scott Ritter. This is not the same as saying that we didn’t know for sure, or should have waited some more; or that containment could have worked for a few months or years longer. I mean: an anti-war commentator, writer or speaker who clearly said that Saddam had no WMDs before we invaded and that therefore the war was illegitimate.
Robin Cook, in his resignation speech as Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom on 18 March 2003:
Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the
commonly understood sense of the term – namely a credible device
capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.
It isn’t just hindsight.
The WHO and UNICEF announced today that The Measles Initiative has halved measles deaths.
Global deaths due to measles fell by 48%, from 871 000 in 1999 to an estimated 454 000 in 2004, thanks to major national immunization activities and better access to routine childhood immunization …
The largest reduction occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the highest burden of the disease, where estimated measles cases and deaths dropped by 60%.
Tell that to people who say that aid does not work.
Anatole Kaletsky in The Times:
While America has been run by one of the most doltishly ineffectual governments in history, it has forged ever further ahead of Europe in terms of wealth, science, technology, artistic creativity and cultural dominance.Why does America’s prosperity and self-confidence seem to bear so little relationship to the competence of its government? The obvious answer is that America, founded on a libertarian theory of minimal government, has always had low expectations of politicians.
This much is true. But he completely fails to provide evidence to support his main conclusion:
American politicians may be incompetent and venal, even by European standards, but this is not true of the public realm as a whole. America has a host of public institutions, ranging from government bodies such as the Federal Reserve and the National Institutes of Health to charities such as the great universities, museums and hospitals, that are driven by a sense of public service that puts British and European bureaucracies to shame.The American system recognises that a capitalist economy has areas of market failure where incentives alone will not produce socially desirable results. But American public institutions try to maximise private activity and incentives, rather than rein them in, within their realms — whether it is universities encouraging professors to start businesses, or health administrators creating incentives for drugs companies to do medical research.
So is Kaletsky right that America has a quasi-public sector run on private sector principles and which produces better results than European nations?
Let’s look at his example of the National Institutes of Health. This is a public sector body in America, not a private sector body (unlike, say, the Wellcome Trust in the UK). Furthermore, the people who I know who work there say that it is like any other public sector bureaucracy. It is true that the US has more success in medical R&D than Europe, but then the US spend more than twice as much on R&D as Europeans (much more, in the case of medical R&D). Furthermore, it isn’t just the private sector that spends more: the US taxpayer spends twice as much on R&D as the OECD average for government spending, even as a share of GDP. The reason the NIH gets good results is that they have a budget of $29 billion a year – all of it taxpayer dollars.
So what does the NIH example prove? Not Kaletsky’s proposition that the US has successful, semi-private bodies providing public services. All this shows is that some public sector bodies can produce good results if you give them enough money.
More commonly, the trend in the US that Kaletsky describes of America’s reluctance to build effective public institutions has led to significant failures, which were brutally exposed by Hurrican Katrina. From health care to broadcasting, America’s distrust of institutions that are socially funded and managed by public servants who are accountable to government has left gaping holes in its social fabric. Not, as Kaletsky would have us believe, a system of genius.
I’ve been critical of Google’s decision to operate a censored search engine in China. Since then, there have been three important contributions to the debate, which I think are worthy of a reply, as they are all based on a false premise.
, Google’s Senior Policy Counsel, posted this explanation of their decision. He says that this was a difficult judgement, but that Google wanted to
provide the greatest access to information to the greatest number of people
and, crucially, that
Filtering
our search results clearly compromises our mission. Failing to offer
Google search at all to a fifth of the world’s population, however,
does so far more severely.
Second, my Dad, Brian Barder, posted this comment which argues for constructive engagement:
The best policy for dealing with authoritarian states which impose
censorship and other illiberal restrictions on their citizens is almost
always to encourage them to open up by maximising their contacts with
the outside world.
Finally, this debate was picked up by MatGB, who quotes my father’s argument and adds:
The more people in China are exposed to the rest of the world, the more likely that change will come
The premise which underlies all three of these arguments is that the result of Google’s decision to establish their google.cn service is to provide citizens of China with more access to information than they would have had otherwise, albeit censored according to rules set by the Chinese Government. Then, it is argued, the benefit to the Chinese people of the increased information might justify the collaboration with Chinese censorship that is required, because this greater openness encourages China to open up and maximise contacts with the outside world. Some contact, even if constrained, is better than none.
But the premise is false. The result of Google’s decision is not an increase in the amount of search information available in China. From inside China, it used to be possible to access the main Google search engine in Chinese at http://www.google.com/ig?hl=zh-CN It is true that some of those searches were blocked by the Great Firewall of China, and the user received an error if they searched on "Tianamen Square". Most searches were not blocked. Now that google.cn has been established, anyone trying to access google.com from a Chinese IP address is redirected to the censored search engine. So the effect of Google’s decision to establish google.cn has not been to increase the amount of information available to the Chinese people; it is merely that Google now does the work of the Chinese government by censoring the searches according to the same rules.
It is therefore a barefaced lie for Andrew McLaughlin to claim that the alternative to establishing google.cn was "Failing to offer
Google search at all to a fifth of the world’s population". As he knows, there was an alternative in place, namely a Chinese language search on Google’s US servers, sometimes filtered by the Chinese Government.
If it were true that the censored google.cn search engine provides more information than the old google.com searches as seen through the Great Firewall, then Google might be able to defend the justification that this is a form of constructive engagement. Even then, there would be a balancing act required to judge between the good of somewhat better access to search results against the harm of collaborating with Chinese censorship. But google.cn does not provide search to people who were otherwise denied it; it just makes the experience of having your internet searches censored a bit more slick and less obvious.
Google’s decision was not motivated by the hope that it would make China more open, because it won’t. It was a purely commercial decision, based on Google’s desire to curry favour with the Chinese authorities, the need to recruit China’s talented and cheap engineers in the future, and the fear that they will lag behind other, less principled companies in building market share in China unless they begin to build their brand and market share today.
What could Google have done instead? They could have supported and promoted anonymous web proxies outside China, such as Tor, so that users in China could have had uncensored search results.
I agree with Andrew Shieh at Stanford, that if Google is to continue to censor search results on behalf of the Chinese Government, and if their goal is more openness, then they should take the following steps:
- The minimum that Google must do is to show the "Local regulations prevent us from showing all the results" disclaimer on the top
of the search results, rather than hiding it away on the bottom.
Everyone who is receiving censored search results deserves to know that
the results are tainted.- In addition to the disclaimer, Google.cn could promote anonymous web browsing proxies such as Tor, so users in China can view the uncensored web rather than the filtered and often deceptive results that Google.cn displays.
could further expand the disclaimer, by describing precisely what
criteria are used to remove sites from the Google.cn search listings.
If Google is filtering sites based on government regulations, it
shouldn’t be afraid to show us the criteria it is using. I’d personally
like to see a list of sites that government regulations are forcing
Google to remove; it would be far more interesting than Wikipedia’s list of terms blocked by search engines in China.
should continue to allow users in China to access the Google.com site,
rather than forcing China IP addresses to be redirected to Google.cn.
Of course, they won’t do any of these, because despite the fine intentions attributed to them by my father and MatGB, and despite their own protestations, their goal is not to open China to more information, it is to build a closer relationship with the Chinese authorities to secure the future of their business there.
Executives from NBC in New York confirmed yesterday what many industry-watchers had been expecting and its admirers dreading. They intend pulling the plug on the programme for good when its current season – the seventh – ends in May.
I am enjoying BBC’s The Thick of It, a kind of a cross between Yes, Minister and The Office which has just transferred from digital to terrestial TV, but Hugh Abbot won’t take the place of President Bartlett.
It is almost enough to make me oppose term limits. At least for fictional presidents …
The US Senate is choking on the US-UK Extradition Treaty (full text pdf) because they are concerned that it might adversely affect civil liberties of people living in the United States. The irony is that the treaty protects those liberties much better than it protects the liberties of British citizens. But we have no Senate to protect us.
The proposed extradition treaty was signed on March 31, 2003 by US Attorney General, John Ashcroft, and the British Home Secretary David Blunkett. It was transmitted by the President to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in April 2004, and was considered by them on 15 November 2005. The Committee hearings were held in private and no transcript has been published, so we don’t know exactly what happened, but it appears that the Committee declined to vote on the treaty. This is a major problem for the passage of the treaty, as the the full Senate cannot consider the treaty until the Committee has approved it.
Opposition to the treaty in the US is based on fears that it removes the exception for political offences, allows for extradition even if no US law has been broken, removes any statute of limitations, applies retroactively, and allows the UK authorities to try a person for an offence other than that for which he or she was originally extradited. The failure of the Committee on Foreign Relations to vote on the treaty is the result of opposition from American Civil Liberties Union (which probably doesn’t matter the Republican-controlled Senate) and from the Ancient Order of Hibernians and other Irish-American organisations (which probably does matter).
If the treaty removes liberties from US citizens it do so even more from people under the jurisdiction of the UK. Under the existing 1972 treaty, the US has to produce evidence sufficient to make a case to answer under UK law, whilst the UK has to satisfy a “probable cause” test for extradition from the US. (These are broadly similar in effect: the requirement for prima facie evidence is probably a little more onerous than the requirement to show probable cause.) Under the new treaty American prosecutors no longer have to provide prima facie evidence in order to extradite a citizen from the United Kingdom. Article 8 of the treaty only requires the US to provide a statement of the facts of the offence only. By contrast, Article 8.3(c) of the treaty requires UK prosecutors to supply information in an extradition request providing a “reasonable basis to believe that the person sought committed the offence for which extradition is requested”.
We went to see Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour on Saturday, live here on Berkeley in the Zellerbach Hall.
Youssou N’Dour became well-known outside Senegal after his collaboration with Peter Gabriel, formerly of Genesis, in the mid 1980s. He had popular success in Europe with "Seven Seconds", a big hit in 1994 with Neneh Cherry.
He has faced some criticism in recent years that his career has moved too far from its West African roots, and pandered too heavily to pop tastes in rich countries. The fast and furious mbalax (Wolof word for rhythm) rhythms that made him famous with his first album, Immigrés, have been less and less in evidence in his recent work.
N’Dour recorded his latest album, Egypt, more than five years ago; but it has only just been released (delayed, in part, by the events of September 11, 2001.) The album is a homage to the caliphs and saints of Senegal’s mystical ‘Sufi’ version of Islam. The music draws from the largely Arab and middle Eastern tones of the streets of Cairo. He worked with Egyptian musician Fathy Salama. On the album he does not sing a single work in English, though he did one song in English during the concert.
Egypt is an amazing combination of N’Dour’s voice with the drones of Egyptian reed instruments, the sweeping violins, cello and bass, and twittering African flutes. All the music is performed accoustically. The power of N’Dour’s voice, with its enormous range, is much in evidence, and he demonstrates a more subtle touch than his earlier work.
You would be disappointed if you were expecting the foot-tapping, hip swaying mbalax rhythms of N’Dour’s youth. But it is music to bring the world together, combining Arab melodies, North African rhythms and West African vocals.
One admirable feature of Youssou N’Dour’s work, and part of the reason for his enduring popularity in Africa, is that he continues to make cassettes and albums specifically packaged and targeted at the African market.
It is a great pleasure to see an argument full of hot air punctured with by a the cold, hard, stiletto steel of logic.
Tim Worstall argued at the Adam Smith Institute blog that:
… British Airways allows passengers, for a modest sum, to offset the carbon emissions from their flight. Roughly 1 in 200 actually do so, which would, on a strict reading of people’s preferences, mean that 0.5% of the flying population are prepared to pay more to avert climate change. … There really is a large difference between how much extra people say they would like to pay for things and how much extra they actually will pay. Probably has something to do with why taxes are usually mandatory rather than voluntary I suppose.
And in the comments, Patrick Hubble wields the intellectual stiletto that punctures Tim’s bubble:
Surely if asked the question, ‘would I rather pay more tax / pay more to save the environment / etc,’ a ‘yes’ answer means ‘yes, if everyone else does’, not ‘yes, I’m prepared to be a mug whilst everyone else freeloads on my generosity (stupidity)’.
That whistling sound you hear is a bag of hot air deflating.
What the hard line libertarians don’t get is that some choices only make sense if we make them collectively. Individually we would – rationally – make choices that lead to outcomes that are irrational for us collectively; and that is why we establish systems to enable us to make choices together. Government is such a system. The fact that people would choose differently if they were making an individual choice is not an argument against government, it is precisely the reason why we need it.
In an amazing announcement, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has announced today that it will donate $258 million to research on malaria, which kills 2,000 African children each day.
See more at my Vaccines for Development blog.
Harriet Miers has withdrawn as a nominee for the Supreme Court.
It was clear that, whatever her merits as a person, Harriet Miers was not suitable for a lifetime appointment to a Court for which qualifications include a sharp legal mind, intellectual rigour, and an ability not only to make decisions but communicate the reasons for them.
In the United States, the process of Senate approval can weed out unsuitable nominees. Admittedly it doesn’t always correct the Administration’s mistakes, but the fact that the system exists, and that it is not toothless (a Republican-led Senate having refused to approve the appointment by a Republican White House of John Boulton, and leading to the withdrawal of Ms Miers) forces the Administration to think considerably harder about who it is going to nominate.
In the UK, we don’t have proper scrutiny of the thousands of appointments made by the Government, generally by the Prime Minister under Crown prerogative. We should.
However, the reason the Miers nomination failed was not only that she was not suited for the job, but because the appointment failed to secure the support of the conservative base, by virtue of whose support President Bush governs. In his current difficulties I suspect that he will be tempted to throw them some red meat, by the nomination of a conservative. We may yet wish that Harriet Miers had been confirmed.
My father, Brian Barder was on Radio 4′s Broadcasting House this morning, to talk about diplomatic immunity. The US Embassy in London has apparently decided that it should not pay the congestion charge.
I assume the aim was to bring on a crusty retired diplomat to make a fool of himself by arguing for the absolute necessity of diplomatic immunity to enable diplomats to park with impunity, drink and drive, molest small children and so on. If so, they failed. Though I am admittedly biased, I thought he did very well explaining why diplomatic immunity makes sense, how it is limited (by the ability to expel a diplomat who flouts it) and why the US Embassy in London is wrong to try to avoid the congestion charge.
But don’t take my word for it: here is an MP3 file (2.9Mb) which you can download and play on your computer (or iPod) with the interview. Alternatively, for the rest of the week (only) you can hear the whole programme here.
Update: See Brian Barder’s blog entry for details of why diplomats, even American ones, should pay the congestion charge.
One of the more significant risks of running on trails in Northern California is that there are Mountain Lions. You hardly ever see them; but they do occasionally attack, kill and eat joggers, so they are best avoided if possible.
So we were somewhat alarmed to stumble across a mountain lion on a remote trail in Harbin, near Calistoga, on Saturday.
The guidebooks say you should look it in the eye, make yourself appear as big as you can (for example, by opening your jacket and waving your arms), make a loud noise (“holler”, as they say here) and generally try to intimidate the poor creature. Apparently if you turn your back, crouch, or run away, you will be deemed weak and you are likely to end up as cat food.
Fortunately, we didn’t need to do any of those. The lion saw us long before we saw it, and decided to head away from the trail. Which is just as well, because it was much bigger than I expected, and I would not have enjoyed looking it in the eye and yelling. What would you say to it?
This will interest you if you have an unusually geeky interest in the institutional arrangements for the UK’s development assistance programme. (It might also help with severe cases of insomnia.)
Over at the Center for Global Development, I’ve published a new Working Paper, entitled “Reforming Development Assistance: Lessons from the UK Experience”.
It is actually more interesting than it sounds. Here is the abstract:
The establishment of the UK Department for International Development in 1997, and the evolution of the UK’s foreign aid policies, has provoked international interest as a possible model for other countries to follow.
The UK now combines in a single government department not only the delivery of all overseas aid, but also responsibility for analyzing the impact on developing countries of other government policies, such as trade, environment and prevention of conflict. The department is led by a Cabinet-level minister. It has a remit to articulate the UK’s longterm security, economic and political interests in helping to build a more stable and prosperous world, and to ensure that this long-term goal is considered alongside the more immediately pressing concerns of political, security and commercial interests. It has benefited from a sharp focus on its long-term mission to reduce poverty overseas.
Within a few years, the new Department has established a reputation for itself, and for the UK Government, as a leader in development thinking and practice.
This paper describes the institutional changes in more detail, and considers how they came about. It also considers the steps that will be needed to consolidate its early success.
On August 18th, I argued here that Sir Ian Blair should not be forced to resign because of the comments he made at a press conference which turned out to be incorrect. I noted, however,
that Sir Ian Blair may have sought to prevent an enquiry into the circumstances of the shooting of Mr Menezes. If this turns out to be true, then this would indeed be a resigning matter, consistent with my dictum that it is always the cover-up that does you.
Now the Curious Hamster has looked carefully at the letter that Sir Ian Blair wrote that day to Sir John Gieve, the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office. Curious Hamster notes that the letter reveals that Sir Ian Blair gave an order that the Independent Police Complaints Commission should be barred the scene of the killing, despite knowing that, by law, he was required to supply all information that the IPCC might require. This seems to me rather an important fact.
Remember, it is always the cover up that does you.
Patti Waldmeir in today’s Financial Times (subscription required) about the death of William Rehnquist, who died on Saturday night:
a Supreme Court spokeswoman said at the weekend that his health had declined.
Yep, you could say that.
President Bush made this statement on the elections in Iran:
Iran is ruled by men who suppress liberty at home and spread terror across the world. Power is in the hands of an unelected few who have retained power through an electoral process that ignores the basic requirements of democracy. The June 17th presidential elections are sadly consistent with this oppressive record. Iran’s rulers denied more than a thousand people who put themselves forward as candidates, including popular reformers and women who have done so much for the cause of freedom and democracy in Iran.
I welcome this plain talking about the need for democracy. But I would like to see it applied consistently. Where are the strong denouncements about lack of democracy and human rights in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan? (And, even less likely, Israel?) This inconsistency matters because it is difficult to take these criticisms seriously as a principled stand for democracy and human rights when the US ignores similar or worse lack of democracy in countries that it find strategically useful. They just seem to want to pick a fight with Iran.
The Overseas Development Institute has set up a blog on 2005. They are independent, well-informed and always interesting.
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