Malini Mehra and Alex Evans discuss the big development challenges of the 21st Century in Development Drums 25

Alex Evans and I recently took part in a discussion of the big development issues with a committee of Members of Parliament in the British House of Commons. Alex kicked off that meeting with a magisterial and somewhat pessimistic presentation which set out ten key issues for development, and we took his presentation as our agenda for this discussion on Development Drums.

Malina and Alex are interesting and knowledgeable on a dauntingly wide range of issues, and the podcast covers a lot of ground: the changing distribution of global poverty; demographic change; the financial crisis; oil prices; food prices; feeding the 9 billion; climate change; trade; the changing face of conflict; the global governance deficit; and the implications for UK development policy. Each of these issues really needs an entire episode of Development Drums to be discussed properly, but I thought it was interesting to bring them all together to draw out common issues and ideas.

The following thoughts struck me from the discussion:

First – the importance of resilience which cropped up again and again in the discussion. I think this is possibly the Next Big Thing in development thinking (as if we need more Big Things). The idea is that we should be helping to develop the institutions and assets that ensures that people are resilient to shocks, of which there seem to be likely to be more.

Second – treating shocks as opportunities as well as risks.  As Alex points out in the podcast, there was a narrow window after the collapse of Lehman Brothers during which we could have remade the global financial system: but nobody had a plan ready to go. There are going to be more shocks: will the progressive development community be ready to seize the opportunities these represent?

Third – the almost complete failure of global governance. All the issues we discuss relate in some way to the failure to put in place effective global processes and institutions to solve collective action problems  such as on trade, climate change, or food supply. As Malini says, we are living in an era not of the G-8 but of G-0.  Alex provides an interesting analysis of the problems in the podcast: on the face of it, to my mind, the problems don’t sound insurmountable.

Fourth – the optimism and energy coming from emerging countries such as India and China. Malina both describes and embodies this.  But it’s also clear that on many issues – notably trade and climate change – the interests of these increasingly powerful countries are now diverging from those of the less developed countries, and we need to think hard about ensure the interests of the poorest countries are not left behind a grand bargain between the old and new rich countries.

Fifth – development policy isn’t mainly about aid.  In a discussion which surveys the big development challenges confronting us, aid hardly gets a mention. Yet most of the development agencies in the world spend most of their time thinking about aid.

How to listen to development drums

You can listen to Development Drums on your computer straight from the website (http://developmentdrums.org) or download any episode (from here) to your MP3 player or computer. Alternatively, you can subscribe to Development Drums on iTunes free of charge (search for “Development Drums” in the iTunes store).

As is the Development Drums custom, the podcast plays out with a slightly relevant song.  See if you can guess before you get to the end what it’s going to be (there’s a clue hidden in the title of the podcast, Episode 25: Global Development Challenges).

Other development podcasts

I find podcasts a convenient way to keep up to date, especially when I’ve got long plane flights or trips by road; and lots of people listen to them when running on the treadmill in the gym or during their commute.

If you enjoy Development Drums, you may also enjoy the Center for Global Development’s Global Prosperity Wonkcasts, which are a bit shorter than Development Drums.  As with Development Drums, you can listen online, subscribe to the feed or subscribe free on iTunes.

The Guardian has also recently started a monthly development podcast.  The most recent editions are about “securitisation of aid” (that is, greater focus of aid on fragile states) and on so-called “Land Grabs“.  Again, you can subscribe to the feed directly, or get it free on iTunes.

Here’s a complete list of development podcasts:

• Development Drums
• The Center for Global Development Prosperity Wonkcast
• The Guardian Focus Podcast
• Think Before You Give
• BBC Africa Today
• Peterson Perspectives
• PRI: Global Health and Development
• The World Bank Podcasts
• Philanthropy This Week
• PRI: The Changing World

Other economics podcasts

Tim Harford (author, and FT leader writer) has just compiled a list of the best economics podcasts.

Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health, writing in the current edition of The Lancet (pdf), have analyzed how funding provided by aid donors through the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization has raised the percentage of children receiving the combined diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccine between 1995 and 2004.

This independent assessment of the effect of GAVI on DTP3 coverage shows that GAVI has contributed to increased DTP3 coverage in countries with baseline DTP3 coverage of 65% or less at their first approval for GAVI funding. We estimate the cost to GAVI to be about $8·40–20 per additional child immunised. This estimate is close to the proposed cost to GAVI of $20 per additional immunised child.

Once again, immunization has been shown to be one of the most cost-effective interventions in development. 

To be a liberal does not mean shrugging your shoulders at those who loathe you and hoping that somehow everyone will get on. A world divided between Christian bible-belt fundamentalists, powered by US military and oil interests, and Islamist Qur'an-belt fundamentalists, ruled by misogynistic mullahs, is a bad world, period.

Quite so.  But let's be clear: the battle of ideas is not between Christian and Islamic religions and cultures. The real battle of ideas is between rational, reality-based thought and religions of all kinds.

Foreign Policy: Africa’s China Card

In essence, China and its African partners have figured out a way to circumvent the patchwork system of accountability for foreign aid. It’s a maneuver that is causing unease in Western capitals, and particularly in the United States. If there is an upside to China’s scruples free investment, it may be that the competition for allies and resources will force the West to reconsider its own neglect of the continent.

openDemocracy – Chris Melville and Olly Owen

In 2000, a new China-Africa cooperation forum agreed a joint economic and social programme, one that lent a developmental and commercial slant to the “five principles”. China has subsequently been well in advance of the G8 by cancelling $10 billion of the debt it is owed by African states; at the second Sino-Africa business conference in December 2003, China offered further debt relief to thirty-one African countries, as well as opening the prospect of zero-tariff trade.

Jewels in the Jungle: China in Africa: The CNOOC Nigerian Oil Deal

the genocide and ethnic cleansing we see taking place in Darfur and parts of southern Sudan today can be directly linked to China. The Chinese government and so-called Chinese private investors supply the regime of Omar al-Bashir with weapons (helicopter gunships and aircraft, heavy-duty automatic weapons, landmines, mortars and rockets, etc.), the Chinese military personell needed to train the Sudanese military and police how to use them, and loads of money in the form of revenues from oil exports and generous Chinese bank loans. The various peoples of the Sudan don’t see any benefits or at best little from the money earned by oil exports to China and elsewhere by the way.

ComingAnarchy.com Handicapped by Values: The West v.s. China in Africa

The US wants to reduce reliance on the Middle East for energy supplies, meaning a new quest for hydrocarbons in places like Africa. But as the competition for energy heats up, the West is finding that our feel-good finger-wagging over human rights and corruption means most African governments find China a more cooperative partner. Our moral high-mindedness and ham-fistedness is both hurting the national interest and ultimately hurting the cause of human rights in Africa as well.

the concoction: East-West pull on Africa

Are we, by the way, going to see Cold War style East – West pull on Africa? Oh boy! Perhaps it can be called the Warm War because China-America relationship is cosier than it was during the Cold War and this one is all about money.

Washington Post

In its quest for energy, China has shown a willingness to do business with regimes shunned as pariahs by much of the rest of the world for human rights abuses. Two years ago, Beijing signed a $70 billion energy deal with Iran at a time when the United States and Europe were debating whether and how to sanction the country for pursuing a nuclear weapons program. China National Petroleum is the single largest partner in a consortium that is extracting oil with the government of Sudan, a regime that has been accused of perpetrating genocide in its western region of Darfur.

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.  

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.

Here are some Danish products you might want to add to your shopping basket this week, as a way to stand up and be counted:

• Lurpak butter
• Anything sold by Arla Foods
• Tuborg beer, or Carlsberg beer if you must (either is 8 times better than Budweiser)
• Danish movies (I don’t recommend Lars Von Trier if you want to stay happy)
• Aalborg Aquavit (that’s schnapps to you and me)
• Havarti cheese (excellent on a bagel – try the dill or cumin ones)
• Toms chocolate and Royal Dansk biscuits
• That Bang & Olufsen hifi or TV you always wanted
• Some new H2O clothes
• Ecco shoes
• Some Bodum kitchenware – give up bad design for good 
• Lego for the kids
• A poster of Helena Christensen – every house needs one.

Full disclosure: my partner comes from a family of Danish dairy farmers whose livelihoods are threatened by this boycott.

Update: See also:

• Danish.com
• Danish Food Shop
• Danish Deli
• Danelink.com

Mr Kennedy’s statement was triggered by the intelligence that ITV News chief political reporter, Daisy McAndrew, planned to report the story on the ITV evening news.

So who is Daisy McAndrew?  In the 1990s, as Daisy Sampson, she was a freelance journalist, scraping a living by hanging around the House of Commons doing tedious profiles for the (unreadable) House Magazine. 

Her big break came in November 1999, when she became Press Secretary to none other than  Charles Kennedy.  In a gushing piece of self-praise, her (self authored) profile on the BBC website says:

Kennedy was widely credited as having by far the best
campaign of the 2001 General Election – in no small part down to
Daisy’s handling of his press and image.

Since the 2001 Election, Ms McAndrew has risen fairly rapidly, though without distinction, first co-presenting The Daily Politics with Andrew Neil (is it possible that Mr Neil chooses his co-hosts on the basis of something other than the size of their intelligence?) and then presenting the LBC evening radio programme.

At ITN, Ms McAndrew’s reporting has been pedestrian at best, and she has not broken any major stories. Her editors must have been beginning to wonder why they had appointed her.  Her ‘scoop’ yesterday, reporting the worst-kept secret in Westminster – may have lifted her reputation in the news industry.

I hope it does not.  This is not journalism, it is betrayal of confidence of a former employer.  In my view, there is little or no public interest in reporting the details of Mr Kennedy’s private medical condition. But even if there were, it was not the story that Ms McAndrew should have broken. Ms McAndrew owes a duty of confidentiality to Mr Kennedy, with whom she worked closely at a personal level.  Her career in journalism was given a significant boost by her two years working as his Press Secretary – indeed, if it were not for him, she would probably still be labouring over profiles in the House Magazine.  Now she has decided to give her career a further lift by spilling the beans on the man who gave her her first real break and whose trust she has now betrayed.

I am writing this by the fire inside this restaurant, having hiked here from Granada.

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.

Norm’s profile this week is of Chris Dillow, the author of Stumbling and Mumbling. Chris manages to combine passion and righteous indignation with a sometimes deadpan delivery (today’s entry considering whether suicide bombers are rational is a case in point).

Here is a sample:

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate? > ‘The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.’ – John Stuart Mill

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat? > Managerialism.

I am full of admiration for Chris, which is why I am blushing furiously at having been named by him as one of his favourite bloggers. The feeling is mutual.

See more at my Vaccines for Development blog. 

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.

Shriver says that as we have become richer, we have become less interested in having children, choosing instead to do other things with our lives.  I certainly recognize some of myself in some of these thoughts:

We are less concerned with leading a good life than the good life. We are less likely than our predecessors to ask ourselves whether we serve a greater social purpose; we are more likely to ask if we are happy. We shun values such as self-sacrifice and duty as the pitfalls of suckers. We give little thought to the perpetuation of lineage, culture or nation; we take our heritage for granted. We are ahistorical. We measure the value of our lives within the brackets of our own births and deaths, and don’t especially care what happens once we’re dead. As we age – oh, so reluctantly! – we are apt to look back on our pasts and ask not ‘Did I serve family, God and country?’ but ‘Did I ever get to Cuba, or run a marathon? Did I take up landscape painting? Was I fat?’ We will assess the success of our lives in accordance not with whether they were righteous, but with whether they were interesting and fun. … In deciding what in times past was never a choice, we don’t consider the importance of raising another generation of our own people, however we might choose to define them. The question is whether kids will make us happy.

But Shriver is completely off beam with her suggestion that there is something virtuous about having children.   She talks of her decision, and that of her thinly disguised pseudonymous friends not to have children as an "economic, cultural and moral disaster".  She describes a decision to be childless as "the contemporary absorption with our own lives as the be-all and end-all" which "ultimately hails from an insidious misanthropy", and concludes:

When Islamic fundamentalists accuse the west of being decadent, degenerate and debauched, you have to wonder if maybe they’ve got a point.

So Shriver apparently believes that people who have children are selflessly perpetuating the human race, while those of us who choose not to have children are selfishly living for today, putting our own enjoyment before the well-being of the planet and the spieces.

This is complete balderdash.  I have nothing against people choosing to have children: for many people it is a very fulfilling and important part of their lives.  Furthermore, I would generally support people’s right to have children. But it is not a selfless sacrifice on their behalf for which I should be expected to express gratitude.  Parents choose to follow the strong instinct to propagate their own genes, and they enter into parenthood anticipating an enormous pleasure resulting from bringing up children.  In some countries, parents also see children as an investment in their own future.  Few people have children out of a sense of the social good of doing so; and if that were their motive, they would have made a miscalcuation about where the greater social good lies.  Increasing the number of people with whom we have to share the earth’s finite resources does not make us, or future generations, better off.  So while I am happy to tolerate the decision of people to have children, I do not accept that those who have children are selflessly acting in the interests of humanity.

Conversely, it is true that some people have chosen to remain childless because they think that children are would interfere with their trekking holidays or marathon training.  But there are also many people who feel that the contribution they can make to the world is much greater if they do not spend their time and money raising children.  Many such people are are sacrificing the chance to have their own children in order to create a better world, including for the children of others.

All of which makes it particularly galling that those of us who choose to remain childless should be required to subsidise so heavily those who choose to propagate their DNA. 

None of this is meant to argue for, or against, having children.  Make up your own mind, and do what you prefer.  But don’t give me any moralistic lectures about the sacrifices that parents make, or the selfishness of choosing to remain childless.  And don’t expect me to pay for the expensive choice that you have made.

He offers:

1. Macro markets to enable workers to insure against falling demand.
2. A citizens basic income.
3. Asset redistribution, including through inheritance taxes
4. Dismantling the corporate welfare state – the DTI and CAP.

An excellent start. I would propose the following policies as part of a left wing economic policy agenda:

5. Overhaul competition policy – strengthen the Office of Fair Trading by increasing its powers and resources, crack down on cartels, price fixing, monopoly and oligopolies; break up market dominant companies.
6. Broaden the base of income tax to remove allowances and tax breaks, including equality of taxes for earned and un-earned income, no separate allowance for capital gains, taxation of capital gains on primary residence, taxation of trust incomes and non-domiciles; and lower income tax rates accordingly
7. Abolish all tariffs, quotas and other trade barriers
8. Introduce a carbon energy tax
9. Relax immigration controls for both skilled and unskilled labour (I would favour completely open borders) – which would benefit both UK citizens and the poor internationally

As Jim points out, these very simple purported relationships tell us almost nothing.  Proper statistical analysis of the relationship between aid and growth finds a robust positive relationship.

It is with a mixture of pleasure and surprise that I can report that his article today on trade is, in my humble opinion, not bad at all.  Tim rightly draws attention to the connection between the consumption of physical and natural capital and the level of poverty (ie poor countries tend to have to run down their natural endowments more rapidly than do the rich). However,  the relationship between poverty and trade is more complex than he suggests: free trade is certainly an important component in development, but it is not the only determinant of how quickly countries will lift themselves from poverty.  Nonetheless, I share his hope that rich countries will accelerate progress to free trade at the WTO Ministerial Meeting in December, in the interests both of rich and poor countries.

As an aside, I cannot resist drawing attention to his choice of TechCentralStation as a platform for his writings. TechCentralStation is a right-wing, corporate lobbying front. I personally wouldn’t want my articles sandwiched between articles advocating Intelligent Design. I know Tim has got to earn a living somehow, but this isn’t an organization whose money I would be happy to take.

Tim has edited an anthology of the best of British bloggers in 2005, 2005 Blogged, which will be coming out later this year.  You can order it here from Amazon (buying it after clicking that link will give me a small commission).

Read about it here in my "day job" blog over at the Center for Global Development. 

Update: 12 September – see this intelligent post at Stumbling and Mumbling on this topic. 

Between 2000 and June, 2003, 82·1 million children were targeted for vaccination during initial SIA [supplemental immunisation activities - ie campaigns] in 12 countries and follow-up SIA in seven countries. The average decline in the number of reported measles cases was 91%. In 17 of the 19 countries, measles case-based surveillance confirmed that transmission of measles virus, and therefore measles deaths, had been reduced to low or very low rates. The total estimated number of deaths averted in the year 2003 was 90 043. Between 2000 and 2003 in the African Region as a whole, we estimated that the percentage decline in annual measles deaths was around 20% (90 043 of 454 000).

Source: M Otten, R Kezaala, , A Fall, B Masresha, , R Martin, L Cairns, R Eggers, R Biellik, M Grabowsky, P Strebel, J-M Okwo-Bele and D Nshimirimana, "Public-health impact of accelerated measles control in the WHO African Region 2000–03". The Lancet Volume 366, Number 9488, 3 September 2005

Overall, the Measles Initiative has mobilized more than US $144 million and has helped 33 African countries to vaccinate more than 150 million children, saving more than 500,000 lives. It costs less than a dollar to vaccinate a child against measles.

Jeff Sachs’s introduction says: 

This remarkable exhibition of photographs on behalf of the Millennium Development Goals brilliantly highlights our common humanity. We look at photos of people living in extreme poverty but see first and foremost their humanity and spirit and dedication, even in the midst of extreme deprivation. Their eyes don’t call for our pity but for our camaraderie and partnership and empathy.

Around 1 billion people on the planet struggle for their very survival each day, and thousands lose that struggle, succumbing to hunger, illness, and natural hazards simply because they are too poor to stay alive.

There is no reason for this kind of suffering in the 21st century. The people we see are fully capable of becoming highly productive and secure members of the world community, if they are just given a helping hand.

KANSAS CITY, KS—As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

"Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, ‘God’ if you will, is pushing them down," said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.

Burdett added: "Gravity—which is taught to our children as a law—is founded on great gaps in understanding. The laws predict the mutual force between all bodies of mass, but they cannot explain that force. Isaac Newton himself said, ‘I suspect that my theories may all depend upon a force for which philosophers have searched all of nature in vain.’ Of course, he is alluding to a higher power."

Hat tip: Brad De Long

Thanks to the Private Sector Development blog at the World Bank for publicising this discussion. 

changed the process by which public and other governmental inquiries are convened, conducted and, ultimately, reported on, not a single one of which serves the public interest. It does this by taking away from the independent chair of such an enquiry and from Parliament itself, a whole series of rights which have been in place since the 1920′s, rights which the government has now, through its ministers, reserved solely and exclusive to itself.

One of New Labour’s weaknesses, in my opinion, is that they are insufficiently interested in establishing and sustaining institutions that nurture and protect the rights and values that they espouse, preferring wherever possible to grant themselves discretion to act as they choose. This is a myopia that we will come to regret in time.

She says:

Traveling with a partner is safer, two people together can afford nicer accommodations than if they travel alone, and I *really* don’t want to be celibate for a long period of time nor am I interested in "hooking up" with random strangers I meet along the road.

It all seems so matter-of-fact (is romance so dead?). And I would have thought that it would be enticing to weirdos.  But I wish Jacqueline well in her hunt for a full service travelling companion.

One concern about increasing aid is that there might be adverse macroeconomic effects from large aid inflows, broadly comparable to the Dutch Disease effects associated with export earnings from natural resources.  These resource inflows lead to an appreciation of the exchange rate, which can make domestic industries internationally uncompetitive.  Recently, some literature has focused on the negative impact that large external resource flows might have on governance and accountability. If there are small benefits from additional aid, then it is possible that these negative effects might outweigh the benefit of marginal extra aid dollars.

In a very interesting new paper, Is Aid Oil?, Paul Collier compares the impact on African countries of aid inflows with the impact of revenues from natural resources.  Collier finds that the way in which aid is given makes it vastly better than resource rents as a source of finance.

Aid evidently has very different effects from resource rents. Indeed, when aid is introduced alongside resource rents in the Collier-Hoeffler growth regressions described above, the hypothesis that they have the same effect can be decisively rejected. This suggests that the superior average results of aid are not simply due to better allocation among countries: within a given county aid and resource rents have distinctive effects. In turn, this tells us that the in-country modalities of aid have made an important difference. 

Aid agencies are adding value to the transfers that they administer, and indeed doing so to a very considerable degree. The evidence of oil implies that aid agencies face an intrinsic problem: the baseline effect of resource transfers is negative and the agencies have to offset this by purposive allocation and complementary inputs. Nevertheless, such an activity need not be forlorn: an analogy with the effects of hospitals might help to clarify the point. The baseline for hospital activity is also significantly negative. By bringing patients with a variety of illnesses together in a single building, a hospital transmits disease. Even in well-run hospitals, many people contract illnesses from others while there, and spread these illnesses when they leave. Nevertheless, societies rightly see hospitals as vital: the value-added of a well-run hospital far offsets this negative baseline effect. This seems to be the story with aid agencies. The radical critics of aid are correct in the sense that the effects they point to are adverse and important, as demonstrated by oil. But their overall assessment is as wrong as would be a proposal to close hospitals. Indeed, their critique would be far more usefully directed to reforming the governance of oil revenues: the task of making oil work more like aid is far more promising than thetask of making aid work better.

Full disclosure: the author is an official of the UK Department for International Development, currently on unpaid leave to work at the Center for Global Development.

Over the last four years, the United States has stood squarely with reformers in Africa on the side of prosperity and progress. We’ve tripled our aid to Africa; we plan to double it once again.

The figures show that from FY 2000 to FY 2005 (estimated), U.S. aid to Africa will have increased by 78% in real terms or 93% in nominal dollars – not quite a doubling, much less a “tripling” of aid. Of this increase, 50% consists of emergency food aid (PL 480 Title II). You can see the full figures here. Second, it isn’t true that aid is only effective when given to good governments. President Bush said yesterday:

Over the decades, we’ve learned that without economic and social freedom, without the rule of law and effective, honest government, international aid has little impact or value. But where there’s freedom and the rule of law, every dollar of aid, trade, charitable giving, and foreign and local investment can rapidly improve people’s lives. (Applause.)

This sounds plausible; but none of the aid-growth regressions find that aid is completely ineffective in poor policy environments, and many of them find that the quality of the policy environment makes little or no difference to the effectiveness of aid. I have no objection to donors choosing to channel their aid to better governments where possible, but they should not mislead themselves or the public into thinking that this is justified by evidence that shows that aid is not effective in badly governed countries, or that it is substantially more effective where policy is good.

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.

Don’t let all the recent criticism get you down. There is widespread understanding among the American public that the liberation was undertaken for the noble cause of helping the Iraqis, as well as legitimate national interests of the U.S. and U.K. – Oregon, USA

P.S. On a lighter note: My wife has shifted her home decorating tastes from French Country to English Country in the aftermath of the war. – California USA

You turned one of the darkest chapters of modern history and brought light to the Middle East. Thank God for you. – Australia

I thought Thatcher was good. You’re gooder. – Arizona, USA

To truly win this war, a revolution needs to occur in the Islamic world to bring them out of the dark ages. A free and democratic Iraq is a great starting place. Your courage in doing what is right, instead of what is politically expedient, places you in the pantheon of great leaders like Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. Arizona, USA

I will be looking at David Blunkett across the Despatch Box and holding him to account on behalf of the country.

Behavioral inertia is a tricky thing, but once overcome, large changes can happen at once. They draw an analogy to smoking–in the 1950′s, 70% of Brits smoked, but after a few decades of this four-pronged approach the figure is down to 28% and no-smoking-in-public-places laws are being considered in many locations, which would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defence shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.

If the elections go well, we should be pleased that something has gone right, at last, for the people of Iraq; but our governments should not for a minute think that it absolves them from responsibility and accountability for their misjudgement.