G and I are going trekking in North Africa for a couple of weeks. (Note to American readers: In Europe we have these arrangements called "holidays" during which we stop work for a few weeks and enjoy ourselves instead. You should try it.)
We will be offline so there will be no blogging or emails. This will be our longest period away from email and the internet since our cycling holiday in Ethiopia.
See you all in a few weeks.
Nick Kristof has a review in the current New York Review of Books of recent books by Jeff Sachs, Bill Easterly, Ruth Levine, Robert Calderisi, David Leonard & Scott Straus about the effectiveness of aid.
Coincidentally, G and I went to a presentation by Bill Easterly this morning, here in London to promote his new book.
I agree with Easterly that:
- we need a range of entrepreneurial, small-scale activities to innovate and test new ideas;
- we need more thorough and independent evaluation of aid; (see here for an analysis of the evaluation gap)
- aid should be more accountable to the people it is intended to help;
- we should stop interventions which do not work;
- and we should scale up interventions which do.
But I also fundamentally disagree with Easterly:
- there is abundant evidence that more aid is positively correlated with growth in developing countries; Easterly cites a misleading sample of technically inadequate papers to the contrary;
- we need planners as well as searchers: once good ideas have been developed and tested, they should be scaled up and this requires coordinated plans;
- the country-led approach which Easterly derides has not yet been fully tested, but early indications are positive. The forty years of failure which he criticizes were years in which donors pursued aid interventions much more like those he advocates than the policies they pursue now.
Finally, none of the books that Kristof reviews does justice to the role of the private sector in development. We need to understand better the range of policies and interventions that would help to foster private sector development, and not stifle it.
A new study has found that aid channeled into vaccination has had a significant effect on improving childhood vaccination rates in the poorest countries.
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.
The Gates Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation joined forces yesterday to fund the development of a green revolution in Africa (see washingtonpost.com)
The Africa program will begin with a relatively small Gates contribution of $100 million over five years, plus $50 million from Rockefeller, to fund development of more robust disease- and drought-resistant seeds for primary African foodstuffs, enhanced distribution networks for seed and fertilizer, and university-level training for African crop scientists.
The green revolution in Asia in the 1960s and 1970s – building on research started in the 1940s – transformed food production, incomes and kick started the industrialization of Asian economies. That too was the result of an investment by the Rockefeller Foundation, who commissioned Norman Borlaug to work on developing new wheat varieties and managing education campaigns to get the new varieties to farmers. Since 1970, wheat yields in India and Pakistan have grown ten-fold.
If the Rockefeller Foundation and Gates Foundation can repeat that success, it could make a very significant contribution to Africa’s future economic development and industrialisation.
Via: Pienso. More via the Gates
and Rockefeller
foundations
Ruth Levine at the Global Health Policy Blog rightly points out that the emergence of Extreme Drug Resistant TB is a further example of the way that our interests, in rich countries, are increasingly intertwined with the interests of poor countries.
Recent reports about the emergence of Extreme Drug-Resistant TB in South Africa are disquieting reminders of fundamental concerns in international public health: fragile health systems in developing countries, stretched to the breaking point as they struggle to respond to health needs today, have the potential to incubate infectious diseases that are tomorrow's global threat. While the new strains of TB that are untreatable with any of current medications affect only small numbers at the moment, the insurgent microbes cannot be ignored.
As George Bush said in another context, we have to fight it over there so we don't have to fight it over here.
See also Christine Gorman at the Time Global Health blog
Have a look at The Filter on Trade, and at Jim's response.
Jim says:
My bottom line is that I’ll support just about anything that tilts the system in favour of the poor. In so far as selective trade protection does that, I’m in favour of it. In so far as it doesn’t, I’m not.
I agree with Jim's objective, but I take a more sceptical view than him that selective trade protection is ever likely to benefit of the poor.
As I said in thecomments in his post:
…when I said “every country” should liberalize unilaterally, I had in mind the richer countries. I think it is generally also true of poor countries, but I am not in the business of lecturing them about what they do differently when there is so much that we in the industrialized world can and should do differently. When we have our own house in order we can then think about telling others what to do …
Take a look at Don Beaudroux at Cafe Hayek explaining why the logic of protectionism is wrong:
a machine were discovered that, with only water combined with dried leaves or dirt or animal manure, could at the mere flip of a switch produce almost unlimited quantities of high-quality automobiles, household furniture, life-saving pharmaceuticals, personal computers, cell phones, clothing, and chia pets, would humankind suffer from this discovery? Would people generally be made worse off by putting this machine to work?
The Darfur peace agreement is on the verge of collapse with fresh fighting displacing tens of thousands of people and violent attacks on relief workers forcing aid agencies to consider pulling out.Clashes involving government forces, allied militia and guerrilla factions have forced more than 50,000 people from their homes since the deal was signed three months ago, aid workers said. Most have ended up in overcrowded refugee camps, which are becoming increasingly difficult for aid agencies to reach.
The United Nations is rightly putting together a UN peacekeeping force urgently for the Lebanon, three weeks after that conflict began. So why is that the international community is still unable to summon the will to send a UN force to relieve the 7,000 Africa Union troops in Darfur a full three years after the genocide in Sudan began?
Could it be because the victims are, you know, African?
Niall Kennedy is leaving Microsoft after four months:
I was able to borrow resources here and there, but there was no team being built around the platform in the foreseeable future. I could have stayed at Microsoft, waited for the other 85% of the company to ship their products, and then hope support for my group might be back on track again, but I didn’t want to sit around doing little to nothing until Vista, Office, and Exchange ship. It’s easier to get funding outside Microsoft than inside at the moment, so I am stepping out and doing my own thing.
This sounds to me like a company in decline: if Windows, Office and Exchange are such a drag on the company that they prevent the business from working at the leading edge of technology then Microsoft has no future.
Jackie Ashley is good in the Guardian today:
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.
Much of the literature about the effectiveness (or otherwise) of aid revolves around whether aid accelerates economic growth.
But there is another purpose to giving aid: to redistribute income and consumption from rich to poor. If aid is taken from people who are quite well off, and used to put food in the bellies of people who would otherwise go to bed hungry, it might have no lasting or measurable impact on the economy, but the world would be a better place as a result of this redistribution.
A new paper by World Bank economists Francois Borguignon, Victoria Levin and David Rosenblatt looks at the impact of aid on global inequality (ignoring, for these purposes, any dynamic effects on growth). The paper finds that aid does indeed reduce global inequality; and that while it is extremely small in terms of changes in standard inequality measures, it is of some importance for the lowest decile of the world's income distribution. The authors also find that some of this impact is counteracted by trade barriers imposed by high-income countries.
They make this interesting observation:
Although this paper is about international inequality, we know that the actual level of global inequality of income is extremely high with a Gini coefficient between 0.64 (Milanovic 2005) and 0.66 (Bourguignon and Morrisson 2002). If this level of inequality were to exist within a single country, that country would probably experience substantial social strife. That this does not happen in the world simply means that, as of today, there is nothing like a global community.
When writers such as Charles Dickens wrote about the lives of the poor in England and other newly industrialised countries, they made it impossible for society to continue tolerate or sustain the inequality and poverty in their midst. We desperately need that same realisation for the world.
Hat tip: PSD blog
Bruce Bartlett blames the US in general, and George Bush in particular, for “the death of Doha”:
Last week, the Doha Round of trade talks collapsed. Future historians may well conclude that of all the Bush administration’s economic mistakes, this one was the biggest. That is because we may have just seen the end of the free-trade consensus that has been at the core of U.S. international economic policy for both parties since World War II. The result may be a new era of protectionism that could be extraordinarily costly and painful.
I am not so sure. Measured by the amount of protectionism they were giving up, the US offer was more stingy than the Europeans. But measured by the tariffs, quotas and subsidies they would still have in place after the deal, the US would have been less protectionist than the Europeans, as they are now. It was incumbent on Europe to make the most concessions; and had we done so, the US might well have felt obliged to match them.
Of course, every country should abolish all tariffs, quotas and subsidies, unilaterally and immediately, in their own interests as well as everyone else’s. But in the Alice-in-Wonderland world of trade negotiations, we still talk about changes which would be in our own interest as “concessions”.
In the meantime, Alan Beattie, in the FT (behind firewall, but reproduced in full here) reckons that the WTO should not try to be a development institution. I don’t agree: I think it is entirely reasonable for the members of the WTO to want to give priority to changes in trade rules that will tend to promote economic development in the poorest countries.
In Ghana, the primary school gross enrolment rate has risen steadily from 80% in 2002 to 92% in 2005.
The abolition of user fees in 2005 – which the government could afford because of debt relief and additional aid – is estimated to have boosted the primary gross enrolment rate by 14 percentage points.
Even so, there are about 700,000 children in Ghana aged 6-11 who do not go to school. The Accra Mail reports the announcement last week of additional UK funding to help Ghana to reach the target of getting every kid to school:
DFID will disburse £10m each year until 2015, subject to satisfactory performance on agreed sector outputs and MDG targets.
In all our clever intellectual discussions about how we can improve the way we give aid, it is worth remembering the most obvious and practical truths. When we give aid to governments that use money well, it can make a huge difference to the lives of the poor.
Santigie Kamara writing in allAfrica.com yesterday may be overstating the case, but only a little:
Reports reaching this press indicate that the consultant at the Ministry of Agriculture is a "square peg in a round whole" and yet still he is there, receiving thousands of dollars while our brothers and sisters who are more qualified are earn less than a million leones per month.
The objectives of technical assistance are noble; the execution is dismal. Even before Elliot Berg's landmark report in 1993 we have known that the expert-counterpart model of long term ex-patriate technical assistance is generally neither effective nor good value for money. In no other walk of life do we try to train people by parachuting in an expert to do their job for a couple of years. You do not learn skills by watching over someone's shoulder: you learn through a combination of on-the-job training, coaching, mentoring, and formal structured training courses. So why is that not the way we should provide technical assistance?
A fifth of all aid – some $20 billion a year – is currently spent on technical cooperation of various kinds (though much of it may not be spent on this sort of technical assistance). About 40% of US aid is spent this way. Some – perhaps a lot – of this money is wasted. We know that this approach to technical assistance is not generally effective, and yet we go on doing it, presumably because the development-industrial complex is too powerful for us stop.
The transfer and sharing of knowledge and skills is a very high priority for development. Technical cooperation has an important role to play. But we need to do it much better.
Full disclosure: I myself was an ex-pat technical adviser in an African country for two years. I know of what I speak.
The Times of India reports that the Human Resources Department of the Indian Government is opposed to the proposed $100 laptop
HRD contends that spending Rs 450 crore on digital empowerment can be better spent on primary and secondary education. "It is quite obvious that the financial expenditure to be made on the scheme will be out of public funds.It would be impossible to justify an expenditure of this scale on a debatable scheme when public funds continue to be in inadequate supply for well-established needs listed in different policy documents," the ministry said.
And The Register reports that the education ministry is far from convinced that this is a good use of funds:
The Indian Ministry of Education dismissed the laptop as "paedagogically suspect". Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee said: "We cannot visualise a situation for decades when we can go beyone the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools."
The Indian Government is asking the right questions: Is this really the best use of $100 per child? Why is this right for developing countries, but not being rolled out in industrialized countries?
Like many others, I am perplexed by the determination of Nicholas Negroponte, whom I admire, to make this new laptop only available to large-scale government purchasers.
Google hails 'impressive' growth
Google more than doubled its profits in the second quarter, beating the expectations of analysts. The search giant generated net income of $721m (£390m) in the three months to the end of June, compared with $342m for the corresponding period last year. Google said the "impressive" result was driven by the launch of new products and services across various markets.
Meanwhile, according to the respected human rights organisation, Amnesty International:
Google is aiding the repression of freedom of information and expression in China. Under threat is the right to freedom of information and the free flow of ideas across borders, guaranteed by international human rights law.
I would not bother to comment on a company putting profits before human rights if it wasn't for their hypocritical cant about "don't be evil". I reckon being named and shamed in an Amnesty International report is pretty close to being evil.
I was amazed by the statistic in the BBC report that Google has only 44% of the US search market. Is that all? What other search engines are people using and why?.
The benefits of free trade are hard to explain. Here is a characteristically clear and concise explanation from Chris over at Stumbling and Mumbling.
From the Center for Global Development website:
Donor countries have committed themselves to increase aid to developing countries by 60 percent over the next five years; and larger increases would be needed to meet the Millennium Development Goals. But there are concerns that there may be a limit on the amount of aid that developing countries can absorb and use effectively — and that large aid flows might even be harmful. Could a large increase in aid be “too much of a good thing?”In this essay, CGD Senior Program Associate Owen Barder disentangles the seven possible reasons why additional aid might not be effective. These include microeconomic effects (e.g. transactions costs), macroeconomic effects (e.g. ‘Dutch Disease’) and the impact on political economy (e.g. the ‘Resource Curse’). The paper looks at each possible constraint in turn.
The paper finds that there are indeed serious obstacles to effective use of increased aid, but than none is immutable. All of the constraints which limit the effective use of additional aid can be addressed by a relatively small set of practical improvements in the way that aid is provided and used. Donors have already committed themselves to a significant program of aid reform. If the measures to which donors are committed were consistently implemented, the seven constraints to effective aid absorption could be relaxed.
The paper concludes that, provided that increased aid is accompanied by reforms to the way aid is delivered, the capacity of developing countries to absorb and use aid should not be presented as a barrier to the increases in aid which would be needed to meet the Millennium Development Goals.
The US Congress is currently discussing an issue which sounds rather technical and dull but which could have profound implications for the future of the internet. If you care about whether the internet remains innovative, vibrant and open you should pay attention to the obscure-sounding question of net neutrality.
The issue is simple: should internet service providers be under an obligation to carry all network traffic without discrimination? Those in favour of net neutrality say that such a requirement is needed to protect the open, innovative nature of the net. Those against net neutrality say that market forces will ensure continued innovation and that legislating this requirement will stifle investment in new broadband services.
The war in Uganda has displaced millions of people, including thousands of youths kidnapped by rebel forces. Many of these amazing young men and women have terrible
stories and are striving for a better life.
If you want to help them fulfil their potential, please make a small donation by clicking here.
Chris Blattman and Jeannie Annan, who are raising money for these young people, lead an amazing program of research on war-affected youth. This provides the first and only systematic information about how the war in northern Uganda has affected young people and the most effective programs to help them return to a normal life.
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