My new working paper, Beyond Planning: Markets and Networks for Better Aid is on the Center for Global Development website in the innovations in aid series.
In the paper I argue that more planning and coordiation among donors will not overcome the political constraints that prevent better aid. The aid system is in a political equilibrium which we need to try to change; we won’t solve aid’s problems by trying to move away from the equilibrium. This means making more use of market and network mechanisms to change incentives within the aid system. We need to stop thinking of grand new designs of the aid system and start putting in place mechanisms that force evolution in the right direction.
I’ve listed a set of measures, from the commonplace (untying aid, for example) to the unusual (tradable missions permits, or a tax on proliferation pollution) to illustrate the ideas.
I’ll be discussing the paper at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) on Friday, and on a forthcoming episode of Development Drums.
I’m looking forward to comments and feedback.
I was on the BBC World Business Report yesterday, talking about proposals for a Tobin Tax (a tax on financial market transactions with the revenues allocated to poverty reduction). David Hillman from Stamp Out Poverty discussed the issue with me. I said I could not see the logic of linking measures to reduce capital market volatility with financing aid.
The World Business Report podcast is here. The discussion about the Tobin Tax was in the edition for October 7th, 2009 – it will be there for a few days. Alternatively you can download just the relevant part of the programme here.
The presenter, Mike Johnson, introduces the discussion by saying that James Tobin (a Nobel prize winning economist) proposed the tax as a way to finance efforts to combat poverty and disease. That isn’t true: James Tobin proposed the tax as a possible way to reduce speculative transactions. The idea of linking the tax to development spending is a subsequent embellishment by campaigners against global poverty. James Tobin said in an interview in Der Spiegel in 2001:
Ich habe nicht das Geringste gemein mit diesen Anti-Globalisierungs-Revoluzzern.
(My translation: “I have nothing at all in common with these anti-globalisation revolutionaries.”)
The UK Department for International Development is to be commended for encouraging some of its staff to maintain a blog to explain to the public what they do.
In Bangladesh, Adam Jackson has posted some interesting reflections on his visit to a health programme (in which DFID supports the government) and a Chars Livelihood Progamme.
Our health review team visited a District hospital where mothers who would never normally have access to safe delivery facilities had very recently given birth thanks to a voucher scheme funded by DFID and a number of other donors. Fifty miles away in the Chars I and the other workshop participants visited a village and met a number of women – some of the most vulnerable people on the planet – who had been given assets of their choice (typically a pair of cows) and had their homes raised on clay plinths above the seasonal flood level, as well as a range of other support to enable them to become self-sufficient. … Both of these programmes contribute to the Millennium Development Goals, and produce results that few people interested in the welfare of the poorest would argue with.
Adam makes the excellent point that both programmes work, albeit to achieve different kinds of objectives. Working through Government may be slower and more uncertain, but in the long run it is an investment in Government systems which, in the end, Bangladesh will need as it becomes more prosperous and no long relies on foreign aid. The Chars programme reaches people more quickly, but does not contribute to building lasting institutions. Clearly, both programmes have an important place, and donors need to be better at understanding that we are working towards multiple objectives and need many different types of instrument.
We need to understand better than we do: (a) how much immediate development benefit do we give up, if any, and how much institutional improvement do we gain, by working through governments? and (b) can providing services through parallel channels such as NGOs actually do harm to the long-run evolution of national institutions, for example by hiring away skilled staff, or by reducing the focus on and accountability of government institutions which should, in the long run, be playing those roles?
Adam’s call for rigorous, transparent evaluation is welcome. I would add that it should be independent and more focused on impact and less on process than current evaluation.
We predicted a “quadruple whammy” for developing countries in the financial crisis. The value of existing aid commitments will fall; donors are less likely to meet those commitments; financing needs of developing countries have increased; and non-aid finance (such as investment and remittances) will fall.
The Irish Government is first up with aid cuts:
Taoiseeach Brian Cowen announced the cuts in the Dáil today as part of a plan to secure €2 billion in savings to the Exchequer. The Overseas Development Aid budget will be cut from €891 million to €796 million.
… Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin and Minister of State for Overseas Development Peter Power defended the “difficult” decision. They said that despite the cuts, Ireland remains the sixth most generous donor internationally in per capita terms.
“The size of our aid programme is linked to our own economy, and specifically to GNP growth,” the ministers said in a joint statement.
The only thing that can be said in favour of Ireland’s announcement is that they are at least being open about their failure to meet their obligations. Other countries – namely: Italy, Germany, Portugal, Greece and France – will not meet their international commitments either but have not had the guts to say so.
And CAFOD have estimated that the financial crisis will reduce UK aid by $41bn over 7 years. (There is no sign of the paper on their website, so here is a copy.)
Here is a very interesting article by Minouche Shafik, the Permanent Secretary at the UK Department for International Development. (For our cousins elsewhere, a Permanent Secretary is the most senior civil servant in a government department, ranking somewhere just below a Minister).
Minouche makes two key points: first, social protection schemes seem to be working quite well; and second, that poor people suffer much more from volatility and shocks than others – and there is growing evidence of the permanent harm that they suffer following a temporary shock. That makes a pretty compelling case for widespread use of social protection to put a safety net under people so that temporary shocks do not reduce a family to poverty for not just one but sometimes two generations.
There is a new paper by John Page and Jorge Saba Arbache (here) which finds that child mortality, for instance, goes up when growth is low, but doesn’t come back down when growth accelerates agan. Primary school completion rates and life expectancy similarly go down when growth is low but don’t recover in periods of high growth. The paper also finds that aid goes down during decelerations, adding to the volatility.
Minouche also says something I agree with and something I don’t agree with.
Here is what I think is dead right:
… attempts to orchestrate a tailored response to protect the most vulnerable will almost always lag behind the need.
This suggests the need for an automatic safety net response so that social protection kicks in automatically in the face of a shock. I would like to see social protection schemes become “demand led” – that is, donors would agree the entitlement criteria with governments, and if, in the face of an economic shock, there are more people who fall below that threshold, then the amount of funding from donors should automatically increase. This would help to make aid counter-cyclical, instead of pro-cyclical.
Here is what I don’t agree with:
DFID does not see the money we have committed to social protection as a welfare programme, although clearly for some households it will provide this function.
Why not? I think there is a strong case for having a permanent welfare programme, which transfers money from the rich to the poor. We should see aid not as a matter of temporary charity but the beginnings of a global system of social justice. (I wonder if Minouche’s choice of words – attributing this view to “DFID” rather than herself, suggests that she secretly agrees?)
Last month the OECD published aid data from donors for the period up to and including 2007. With my colleagues at Development Initiatives, we have done an analysis of the figures for the House of Commons International Development Committee. The full memorandum (as .pdf) is here.
Here are some key points:
- Donors promised to increase aid by 2010. Half way to that target, if donors had been increasing aid at a constant rate to meet their commitments:
- Global aid in 2007 would have been $18.4 billion higher
- Over the last three years donors would have spent an additional $29.5 billion
- This would have lifted approximately an extra 15 million people permanently out of poverty. - The G7 also promised in 2005 to double aid to Africa. Half way to that target:
- G7 aid to Africa has increased by only $3.3 billion, less than a sixth of the promised increase.
- If aid had been increased at a constant rate towards the target, aid to Africa would have been more than $6 billion higher in 2007. - It is becoming clear that Italy, Germany, Portugal, Greece and France are not going to meet their promises
- The financial crisis is a potential “quadruple whammy” for developing countries. The value of the existing aid commitments has fallen (because they are expressed as a share of GDP), donors are increasingly unikely to meet those commitments, the financing needs of developing countries have been increased by the downturn, and there will be be substantial declines in non-aid flows to developing countries such as foreign direct investment, remittances, and equity investment.
In industrialised countries the fiscal “automatic stabilisers” tend to increase spending in recession, which both dampens the macroeconomic effects of the downturn and channels additional funding to services that face additional costs. By contrast the institutional arrangements for providing finance to developing countries tend to mean that finance is reduced just as needs are increasing, which amplifies the economic downturn, increases economic instability and jeopardises poverty reduction and service delivery.
There is still no news of Robert Fowler, the UN special envoy to Niger:
The Niger government is still without news of the top UN official in the country, Canadian Robert Fowler, who disappeared three days ago west of the capital, the government spokesman said Wednesday.
I met Bob Fowler when he was the representative of Canda’s Prime Minister preparing for G-8 summits (the so-called “Sherpa”); and subsequently the personal representative for Africa (“APR” in the jargon). The Kananaskis G-8 summit, which he helped to prepare (in which I was much more marginally involved) adopted the G-8 Africa Action Plan, which was a breakthrough in raising the commitment of the richest countries to doing more for Africa.
Bob Fowler is a remarkable man with a profound commitment to the people of Africa. He is always willing to push the boundaries – he played a pivotal role in negotiating the end of “blood diamond” sales which financed the civil war in Angola, and so helped bring about the end of that war.
I don’t know who is holding Bob now, or what they want. But he deserves to be a hero in Africa, not a kidnap victim. Fingers crossed for his early and safe release.
Jean Michel Severino likes the idea of “Cash on Delivery Aid“.
I think it could be the basis of a new consensus – linking a (broadly European) agenda of giving governments in developing countries more freedom to choose their own approaches to development with a (broadly North American) agenda of ensuring that aid is more firmly linked to results.
There are, as JMS rightly says, some issues that need to be resolved: how to define the outputs exactly, and what to do about countries that are unable to make progress towards results. As he says, the first can be solved. The second is of course a problem common with any system of payment by results: it defeats the point of results-based-aid if you get the aid irrespective of whether you deliver the results. My answer is that if (and when) we want to give aid to countries that are not able to produce results (and there will be occasions when we do) then we should devise a separate mechanism for doing so, with its own criteria. That is not a critique of Cash on Delivery Aid, but a case for ensuring that it is not the only system for providing aid.
Ross Coggins wrote about The Development Set back in 1976 (poem below). More than thirty years later, his critique still feels very contemporary (though were he writing today, I am sure that white landcruisers, satellite phones and blackberries would feature somewhere).
I’m just back from the Doha Financing for Development Conference (about which more later, when I have time). One topic that occupied the negotiators for hours was whether the UN, or another body such as the G-20, should host the next meeting about the financial crisis. (“Thus guaranteeing continued good eating / By showing the need for another meeting.”) I estimated that the Financing for Development meeting cost about $60 million.
I have made myself a personal promise. I do not want to travel around the world telling poor countries what they should do and how they should change. I will concentrate on trying to persuade rich countries to change the policies and behaviours that make it difficult for the world’s poor to share that prosperity.
The Development Set
by Ross CogginsExcuse me, friends, I must catch my jet
I’m off to join the Development Set;
My bags are packed, and I’ve had all my shots
I have traveller’s checks and pills for the trots!The Development Set is bright and noble
Our thoughts are deep and our vision global;
Although we move with the better classes
Our thoughts are always with the masses.In Sheraton Hotels in scattered nations
We damn multi-national corporations;
injustice seems easy to protest
In such seething hotbeds of social rest.We discuss malnutrition over steaks
And plan hunger talks during coffee breaks.
Whether Asian floods or African drought,
We face each issue with open mouth.We bring in consultants whose circumlocution
Raises difficulties for every solution –
Thus guaranteeing continued good eating
By showing the need for another meeting.The language of the Development Set
Stretches the English alphabet;
We use swell words like “epigenetic”
“Micro”, “macro”, and “logarithmetic”It pleasures us to be esoteric –
It’s so intellectually atmospheric!
And although establishments may be unmoved,
Our vocabularies are much improved.When the talk gets deep and you’re feeling numb,
You can keep your shame to a minimum:
To show that you, too, are intelligent
Smugly ask, “Is it really development?”Or say, “That’s fine in practice, but don’t you see:
It doesn’t work out in theory!”
A few may find this incomprehensible,
But most will admire you as deep and sensible.Development set homes are extremely chic,
Full of carvings, curios, and draped with batik.
Eye-level photographs subtly assure
That your host is at home with the great and the poor.Enough of these verses – on with the mission!
Our task is as broad as the human condition!
Just pray god the biblical promise is true:
The poor ye shall always have with you.“Adult Education and Development” September 1976
In a very thought-provoking post, Alanna Shaikh lists four ways that an NGO can unintentionally do harm to the community it’s trying to serve.
1) You can waste the time and effort of a community by initiating projects which have little chance of success. It’s hard to identify a good project for a small community. Community buy-in is no guarantee of success; possessing deep local knowledge doesn’t make a person omniscient. Projects that have little chance of success include vocational training in sewing and handicrafts, beekeeping, and raising chickens. If you waste a year of the community’s time on a broiler chicken project that never makes a profit, that’s a year of time and effort which could have gone to real income generation or looking after children.
2) You can leave communities convinced that they need outsiders to solve their problems. If you raise $3000 for a backhoe to clear irrigation ditches, then what happens next time the ditches silt up? The farmers’ cooperative will never realize they could have cleared it with hand shovels, or raised the money by charging a membership fee.
3) You can damage beneficial community structures, or solidify harmful structures. Your choice of community intermediary elevates that person or group, by putting them in control (real or perceived control) of valuable assets. If you work with existing power structures, you can support and entrench inequalities, such as sexism or racism, which are already present. If you chose partners who are not part of the current elite, you can destabilize delicate community balances, and erode resilience.
4) You can construct a building and then not provide funds for maintenance or staffing. A school needs a teacher. A clinic needs a doctor or nurse. All buildings need upkeep – painting and repairs at the very least. A building with not funds for maintenance is a drain on community resources in perpetuity, or an eyesore.
Those are all serious risks. I can think of two more:
5) You hire good people to deliver the best service you can. But those people would otherwise have been working for government or another local organisation. The good they could have done in government might far exceed the good they can do in your organisation. There are donors here in Addis Ababa who pay their drivers more than twice what an experienced doctor will get paid in a government hospital. Where do you think the doctors want to work? Reckless hiring by donors can create skills shortages in key institutions and drive up wages so that provision of services becomes less affordable.
6) You establish yourself as an influential player in the sector you work in; you become friendly with Ministers and senior officials; you are invited to key meetings. This is good: you can help to push things in the right direction. But the people you are influencing should be accountable to their own citizens, not to you. And there are three more like you, all pushing in slightly different directions, making it very difficult for any government to maintain a common sense of purpose. And who are you accountable to? With the aim of doing the right thing, you are undermining the legitimate accountability of the system you are influencing.
These risks apply to official government donors and multilateral organistions as much as they do to NGOs.
An enquiry has been demanded into the way some UK aid is given directly to the governments of some countries. According to the Daily Telegraph
Figures from the Department for International Development show that over the past five years the UK has handed £1.6 billion to 15 of the world’s poorest countries. But research from campaigning group Transparency International shows that many of these rank highly in its corruption index of 180 countries.
There are several points to make about this:
- There is no evidence that aid has been subject to corruption
Transparency International does not claim (pdf) to have found any evidence of corruption in the use of UK aid. The Daily Telegraph report says that that some countries to which the UK gives budget support score poorly on the TI corruption index. But it does not follow that any of that aid is being corrupted and there is no evidence in the TI report that it is. - Budget support is no more likely to be subject to corruption than other forms of aid
A major, multi-donor review of budget support found“Corruption is a serious problem in all the study countries, but the country study teams found no clear evidence that budget support funds were, in practice, more affected by corruption than other forms of aid.
Indeed, the Conservative Party policy review on Globalisation and Global Poverty notes:
Many oppose Programme Support, and particularly General Budget Support, because of worries about corruption. However, other modes of delivering aid are also prone to corruption.
The same TI report hightlights extensive corruption in conflict, reconstruction and post-conflict contexts (which are not typically the places to which the UK gives budget support). The report highlights the risk of corruption in tied aid and the risk of bidder collusion in aid tenders (both of which are reduced by budget support). In other words, in countries in which corruption is high, all aid will be at risk of corruption. Moving aid from budget support to other forms of aid does not reduce that risk.
- Giving budget support enables donors to tackle corruption
Corruption is very bad for a country, especially for the poor. If donors are serious about corruption, they should be trying to reduce corruption as a whole, and not just protecting their own money. Experience suggests that when donors bypass a country’s budget, procument and auditing processes they are less likely to take an interest in tackling broader corruption. When they are interested, they have no basis on which to get involved, since none of their money is at stake. If donors want to help to reduce corruption they have to engage with the country’s processes. Budget support not only forces donors to do so, it turns them into legitimate stakeholders in helping to improve those systems. This engagement helps address corruption in the whole of the government budget, and not just that part financed by foreign aid. - Using other forms of aid is a less effective way to reduce corruption
Again in the same report, Transparency International say that making aid more accountable to donors is less effective at reducing corruption than steps to increase domestic accountability:Upward accountability by recipient countries to donors has demonstrated its serious limitations in terms of relevance as well as in its ability to detect corruption. Rather strengthening the accountability of aid toward intended beneficiaries is the most effective way of limiting abuses.
In other words, Transparency International itself does not believe that replacing aid that is locally accountable with aid that is accountable to donors is a good way to reduce corruption.
- Budget support improves local accountability and so tackles the broader problem of corruption and financial management
The Conservative Party policy review observes:“if aid is channelled through the government budget and is accompanied by steps to strengthen public financial management, the handling not only of donor funds but of tax revenues is improved. In addition, Budget and Programme Support make it easier for parliaments, the media and electorates to hold government accountable for how aid money alongside tax revenues are spent.”
Because budget support provides donors with an opportunity to engage in reform of the public finances as a whole, and because it increases rather than reduces local accountability, it is likely that budget support will result in less corruption in the long run than alternative forms of aid.
- There is a cost to switching away from budget support
Switching aid away from budget support to other forms of aid comes at a cost: on balance it reduces the effectiveness of that aid, so reducing the the overall impact on development; and it may reduce the ability of the country concerned to tackle the very problem of corruption that we profess to be concerned about. The Conservative Party policy review said that:
When donors create parallel structures to deliver aid they can undermine both government ownership of policy and its ability to deliver (by recruiting scarce talent). So where aid can be effectively delivered through government or departmental budgets that is desirable.
In conclusion: donors are right to be concerned about corruption, but there is no reason to think that corruption is reduced, either in aid or in the country as a whole, if donors switch their aid from budget support to other forms of aid. On the other hand there are costs to doing so – in the form of reduced aid effectiveness, which means more people dying, as well as slower progress towards systems that are more accountable and less susceptible to corruption in the future.
So it does not follow that because some countries perform badly on the TI corruption perceptions index, that it is a bad idea to give those countries aid in the form of budget support. Perhaps that is why the TI report itself explicitly counsels against that kind of reasoning:
Some governments have sought to use corruption scores to determine which countries receive aid and which do not. TI does not encourage the use of the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) in this way.
Jean Michel Severino says something you don’t often hear:
What is at stake with the MDGs is the creation on a global scale of the same sort of public redistribution mechanisms that were progressively established in the world’s richest societies over the course of the twentieth century. As most of today’s financial, environmental, or sanitary crises are unpredictable and ignore borders, it is in everyone’s interest to create a global “social safety net” that will span an indefinite period of time. If we accept the logic behind the more pragmatic and ambitious philosophy of international aid that underpins the United Nations’ “Millennium Declaration,” we must quickly adapt our instruments to ensure more sustainable and predictable modes of financing.
As I argued the other day,it has become conventional to say that aid is temporary and transformational. There is political resistance to saying that transfers from rich countries to poor will be, and should be, a permanent part of a global society.
Foreign assistance is the modern equivalent of Victorian charity, as documented by Charles Dickens. It is given at the discretion of the rich to causes they consider worthy, surrounded by rhetoric about giving a helping hand. Over time, it must evolve into a framework for global social justice and solidarity – provided as of right from those that hath, to those who hath not.
Severino’s view, which I agree with, has profound implications for how we conceive of foreign assistance, in terms of how we think about success, how we design activities and, as he says, how we make arrangements to pay for it.
Alanna Shaikk writes about the good and bad of working in international development. Here is a big part of the bad:
… You’re a bureaucrat. An awful lot of every expat’s job involves paperwork. Most people picture international work as feeding hungry people, providing health care to refugees, or building schools. In reality, it makes no sense to pay an expatriate to do that. Instead, we do what cannot be hired locally: English-language paperwork. We write reports to HQ and donors, proposals, and program guidelines. We write even more reports. We can go days without seeing anybody who is helped by our work.
This is a very acute observation, and it is confirmed by what I see here in Addis every day.
It seems to me that we must de-escalate the amount of paperwork involved in international development.
There has to be some record-keeping to enable us to account to the people whose money we are spending. But the bureaucracy involved in designing and getting funding for projects, for hiring people, and for monitoring and reporting, has become an industry in itself.
Akvo is promoting “Really Simple Reporting (RSR)” which is intended to simplify reporting.
The Skoll Foundation is also apparently working on a common reporting format to simplify the paperwork for grantees of US foundations. (I can’t find anything about this project online.)
I think the time has come for all donors – government agencies, international organisations, private foundations, and NGOs – to adopt a common reporting format for their grantees, so that each organisation can provide information about finances and performance in a single report – possibly provided online – on which all their funders can rely.
The people whose money we are spending – taxpayers and individual givers – don’t want to pay people to fill in forms; and the people who work in development don’t want to do it either. A common reporting format would also make the information more comparable and useful.
Ray Fisman writing in Slate asks whether falling commodities prices cause civil wars in commodity-rich countries:
To reduce violence in Colombia and other commodities-rich countries, care has to be taken to recognize how fluctuating prices actually affect the situation on the ground. If lower coffee prices drive poor farmers to desperation, we need to do something to cushion the blow to their incomes. One recent suggestion from University of California, Berkeley, economist Edward Miguel and myself is to shift some amount of international development assistance away from long-term investment and toward short-term emergency aid for countries hard-hit by a collapse in prices of labor-intensive commodities. (Countries would similarly get aid if pummeled by weather shocks like drought.) This aid would kick in as soon as prices headed south, before famine or war broke out. So we’d channel aid to Colombia’s farmers when coffee prices fell (or if the Colombian rain gods failed to nurture their crops). These emergency funds would be scaled back when prices stabilized—as they did in 2001—or the rains returned.
I must say, I’m now a bit confused about whether we think the main problem facing developing countries is rising commodity prices or falling commodity prices. Of course part of the answer is that both rising and falling commodity prices can hit people in poor countries hard (namely different people in different countries), and either way, these are people least able to cushion the effect through savings, insurance, borrowing or changing jobs.
As Fisman and Miguel say in Economic Gangsters, we need a more flexible channel of large scale development assistance which can be deployed quickly to smooth the impact of the financial crisis on developing countries. Preventing the outbreak of conflict or famine will be much cheaper than coping with the consequences, quite aside from the human tragedy that will follow from failure to act quickly.
The Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network has a new website. This is a coalition of American thinkers who are campaigning for change in the way that US foreign assistance is provided. They are asking for the following changes:
Core Principles for Modernizing U.S. Foreign Assistance:
- Elevate global development as a national interest priority in actions as well as in rhetoric;
- Align foreign assistance policies, operations, budgets and statutory authorities;
- Rebuild and rationalize organizational structures;
- Commit sufficient and flexible resources with accountability for results; and,
- Partner with others to produce results.
Priority Actions for Modernizing U.S. Foreign Assistance:
- Develop a national strategy for global development;
- Reach a “grand bargain” between the Executive branch and Congress on management authorities and plan, design and enact a new Foreign Assistance Act;
- Streamline the organizational structure and improve organizational capacity by creating a Cabinet-level Department for Global Development, by rebuilding human resource capacity and by strengthening monitoring and evaluation; and,
- Increase funding for and accountability of foreign assistance.
The US is the world’s largest donor, in absolute terms (though not as a share of US income) and it would be a huge step forward if these changes were made by the incoming US administration following the election.
Barack Obama and John McCain have both given commitments to reform of foreign assistance. There is a risk, however, that this will not be given the priority it deserves following an election, so it is very valuable to have a bipartisan campaign of this kind.
Because everyone is so concerned with the financial situation, little attention has been paid to the other aspects of the World Bank and IMF meetings last weekend.
The Development Committee Communique says:
An additional Board seat for sub Saharan Africa on the Bank’s Board will be created. DTC voting shares in IBRD and IDA will increase, giving special emphasis to small members. … There is considerable agreement on the importance of a selection process for the President of the Bank that is merit-based and transparent, with nominations open to all Board members and transparent Board consideration of all candidates.
These are very welcome steps towards making the World Bank more accountable; but they are small steps so it encouraging that the communique refers to further reforms to come. (Bank President Zoellick has established a new High Level Commission chaired by Ernesto Zedillo to look at improvements to governance.)
I suspect that there is an inwardness to the phrase “there is considerable agreement on the importance of …”. This looks to me like a carefully-chosen form of words that masks a failure to agree stronger language that would firmly commit the Bank’s shareholders – particularly the United States – to an open competition for the Bank’s President in future. Nonetheless, it is a step forward.
There has been a lot of discussion about the debate between the candidates for Vice President, Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, focusing on the lack of a train smash. But there was one important policy adjustment which has had very little attention. Joe Biden gave this answer:
IFILL: … I want to get — try to get you both to answer a question that neither of your principals quite answered when my colleague, Jim Lehrer, asked it last week, starting with you, Sen. Biden. What promises — given the events of the week, the bailout plan, all of this, what promises have you and your campaigns made to the American people that you’re not going to be able to keep?BIDEN: Well, the one thing we might have to slow down is a commitment we made to double foreign assistance. We’ll probably have to slow that down. We also are going to make sure that we do not go forward with the tax cut proposals of the administration — of John McCain …
So “the one thing” that can be put on hold is Obama’s previous commitment to double foreign aid?
It isn’t clear how this fits with Obama’s sponsorship of the Global Poverty Act, which would require the next President of the United States:
to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the U.S. foreign policy objective of promoting the reduction of global poverty, the elimination of extreme global poverty and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people worldwide between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 per day.”
According to Obama’s website:
With billions of people living on just dollars a day around the world, global poverty remains one of the greatest challenges and tragedies the international community faces,” said Senator Obama. “It must be a priority of American foreign policy to commit to eliminating extreme poverty and ensuring every child has food, shelter, and clean drinking water. As we strive to rebuild America’s standing in the world, this important bill will demonstrate our promise and commitment to those in the developing world. Our commitment to the global economy must extend beyond trade agreements that are more about increasing corporate profits than about helping workers and small farmers everywhere
I’ve written about last week’s Accra meeting on the aidinfo blog and discussed it with Simon Maxwell in this week’s Development Drums.
I’ve posted about the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness on our aidinfo blog.
The ever-excellent Chris Dillow asks:
2. The National Gallery of Scotland wants the tax-payer to buy some paintings from the Duke of Sutherland. Why don’t we apply Nice-style cost-benefit analysis here? Would £100m spent on art really produce £100m worth of increases in quality-adjusted life years (by improving the quality of life, not length of course)? And if we don’t apply such reasoning, why not? Why is the restrictive CBA of Nice only applied to drugs, rather than to all public spending?
Exactly right. And, in particular, why don’t we apply this form of cost-benefit analysis to international development spending?
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