In the hope that it will help other people to be happy runners like me, I’ve published online the full text of my 2002 book, Running for Fitness.  The book includes lots of advice for beginners, so if you are considering making a New Year’s Resolution to take up running, you may want to browse through it.

To get you started, here are seven tips for new runners:

1. Take it easy
   Running for Fitness includes a training programme for beginners which begins with walking only for the first three weeks.  This helps your body to adapt and avoids injury.  Once you start to run, make sure you don’t go too fast.  Lots of new runners have a vague memory of sprinting at school, and think that when they run they should be completely out of breath. A good rule of thumb for new runners is the “talk test”: if you can’t speak to your running buddy in complete sentences, you are running too fast.
2. Get a running buddy
   Running with someone else is more fun, and if you have committed to meet someone it will be harder for you to change your mind or decide that you are too busy. (You might also want to join a running club, which is not as scary as it sounds.) You are much more likely to enjoy running, and keep at it, if you run with a friend or as part of a group.
3. Give it three or four weeks
   Many people find exercise a bit of a grind when they first start; but generally after about 3 weeks, something clicks into place. After that, many people are hooked; and often they wonder why it took them so long to start.  So give it three or four weeks.  If you don’t like running after that, find something else that you do like.
4. Get the right shoes and a bra that fits
   Please doon’t run in a pair of old plimsolls, or trainers you bought when they were fashionable: you’ll get injured in no time.  There is no “good” brand or model of running shoe: the only good running shoes are the ones that suit your particular running gait.  There is more detail about shoes here, but the best advice is to go to a specialist running store, if you can, and get them to watch you run and help you pick out shoes that will keep you running injury-free. If you are a woman, you also need a running bra that fits you well. (There is advice on bras here.)
5. Set a sensible goal and keep a log
   Many people find it motivating and rewarding to have a goal, such as taking part in a 5km charity run, or losing 3kg; and most people find it motivating to keep a log of their progress towards it.   Set yourself a goal that is achievable.  (Please don’t try to run a marathon – at least not until you’ve been running for at least six months.) Tell your friends about your goal, so you can’t wriggle out of it; and perhaps you’ll inspire one of them to join you.   Become geek-chic and start a running log. Make a note of how many minutes you run each day, how far you have gone, and which route you did.  Here is more advice about goals and training logs.
6. Don’t diet when you start to exercise
   Let’s face it: lots of people start running to lose weight.  But it is not a good idea to increase the demands on your body and at the same time to deprive it of the nutrition it needs to cope with those demands.  One you run regularly, your metabolic rate will rise, you’ll burn more calories running, and you’ll find you shed the pounds naturally.  There is lots more advice on running and losing weight here. If you find yourself constantly worrying about what you eat, and never really enjoying food, please talk it through with a family member or your doctor, as you may be on the edge of an eating disorder.
7. Be safe
   Some people – such as people who have heart disease – should see a doctor before starting to exercise. Here is a checklist of who should see a doctor.  Carry a card or runner’s id with your name and contact details.   If you run in the dark, don’t run alone and wear a bright, fluorescent or reflective shirt.  Don’t run with headphones in the city.  If it is sunny, wear sunblock and a hat, and keep your shirt on.

Once you get started, I hope you’ll find the Running for Fitness website a good resource to help you continue to enjoy your running, and – if it is something you want to do – to improve. The website includes various online calculators, which help you design training programmes, adjust your running times for your age, and improve your nutrition.

If you have other suggestions or tips for people starting to run, please put them in the comments.

Koreni Jelila and Tilahun Regassa won the women’s and men’s races respectively, both with new course records.

The world record holders for the marathon, Paula Radcliffe and Haile Gebreselassie started the race and gave the awards. (For Ethiopians, that’s like saying that David Beckham was there with Pele).

Thirty four thousand Ethiopians enjoyed their national sport, running, jogging and walking the 10km route through the nation’s capital. Bands played, and fire hoses provided welcome relief from the warm sun.

Several hundred foreign runners came especially for the event, many of them raising thousands of dollars for Ethiopian charities and causes.  There were more than 70 runners from Ireland, raising money for Orbis, and runners from Leipzig (which is twinned with Addis Ababa) and from our own Serpentine Running Club in London, raising money for the prevention and treatment of Mossy Foot.

And G and I managed to get our photo taken with Haile Gebreselassie.

Here is a picture of G chatting with Paula.

The Great Ethiopian Run is Africa’s largest road race – 33 thousand official entrants (plus a couple of thousand more!) will be taking part in a this 10km race at 2,500 metres above sea level. G and I ran it in 2002 and again in 2008.

Great remark (h/t @Michael_Keizer on Twitter) – a British athlete was asked after the 2004 Great Ethiopian Run how he had found the atmosphere.  His reply: “it’s thin”.

Today I’ve changed one of the calculations because I made a mistake when I programmed the “Cameron Formula” (which is one way to predict how much more slowly you might run as the distance increases.)

The formula, which was proposed by Dave Cameron in 1993 and described in this email, was correctly listed in the website’s help pages, but I am sorry to say it was incorrectly calculated by the website.

I’m very grateful to Chris McCarton who checked the calculation and contacted me when he could not reproduce the answer given by the website.  As a result, I have now fixed the calculation.

I’ve also mended the switch between metric and imperial measures, which had stopped working.

Today G and I were running down a dirt track through a small village and a small girl, about 4 years old, saw us running past.   She shouted,

China! China!

I heard the other day that there were two old men sitting on a hillside in north Wello, watching the Chinese labourers building a new road.   They were old-timers, who had fought against the Italians in 1935, and then watched the Italians build the first roads across the Blue Nile gorge and up to Eritrea. (“What have the Romans ever done for us?”)  As these men watched the Chinese roll out the tarmac, one of them said to the other:

The Italians are back. Only now they have narrower eyes.

• a leopard, crossing the path about 20 metres in front of us
• about 15 hyenas sunning themselves on rocks
• women and girls carrying firewood up the kill
• herds of donkeys, sheep and goats
• the sun

These are not things we used to see much running in Richmond Park.

Gebrselassie wins wet Dubai Marathon (Reuters)

DUBAI- Haile Gebrselassie produced a classic performance to win the rain-hit Dubai Marathon on Friday, though well outside his own world best time.

The Ethiopian missed out on a million dollar jackpot for breaking the world record, finishing in two hours, five minutes and 29 seconds.

Gebrselassie set the world’s quickest time of 2:03:59 in Berlin last year after opting out of the Beijing Olympics but wet conditions ruined any hopes of a repeat.

He earned $250,000 for his latest victory, leading an Ethiopian sweep of the podium with Deressa Chimsa (2:07:54) and Eshetu Wendimu Tsige (2:08:41) trailing him in Dubai.

“That’s one of the best races I’ve run in such weather conditions,” Gebrselassie told reporters after retaining his Dubai title. “I was doing pretty well until the 30km mark.

“But then things became a little bit difficult because of the rain and that made the difference. But it was wonderful to clock this time in such conditions.”
Dubai Marathon results

Leading results from Friday’s Dubai Marathon: Men

1.   Haile Gebrselassie, Ethiopia, 2 hours, 5 minutes, 29 seconds.

2.   Deressa Edae Chimsa, Ethiopia, 2:07:54.

3.   Eshetu Wendimu Tsige, Ethiopia, 2:08:41.

4.   Gashaw Melese Asfaw, Ethiopia, 2:10:59.

5.   Dereje Tesfaye Gebrehiwot, Ethiopia, 2:11:42.

6.   David Kemboi Murkomen, Kenya, 2:12:14.

7.   Mesfin Admasu Abebe, Ethiopia, 2:12:.23.

8.   Tesfaye Tola, Ethiopia, 2:12:56.

9.   Asnake Fikadu Roro, Ethiopia, 2:15:01.

10.  Nephat Ngotho Kinyanjui, Kenya, 2:15:23.

Women

1.   Bezunesh Bekele Sertsu, Ethiopia, 2:24:02.

2.   Atsede Habtamu Besuye, Ethiopia, 2:25:17.

3.   Helena Loshanyang Kirop, Kenya, 2:25:35.

4.   Tatyana Petrova, Russia, 2:25:53.

5.   Genet Getaneh Wendimagegnehu, Ethiopia, 2:26:37.

6.   Eyerusalem Kuma Mutal, Ethiopia, 2:26:51.

7.   Berhane Adere Debela, Ethiopia, 2:27:47.

8.   Shuru Diriba Dulume, Ethiopia, 2:28:26.

9.   Atsede Baysa Tesema, Ethiopia, 2:29:13.

10.  Mulu Seboka Seyfu, Ethiopia, 2:30:10.

Tom (second from the left) visiting from the UK ran for the first time at altitude (his usual run is along the waterfront in Ayr).

More photos here.

Here’s the elevation graph:

We ran ten miles this morning at the top of Entoto with a great group of runners.  The Entoto national park is a beautiful place to run, with views across Addis Ababa.

As the elevation chart below shows (full size), it is at over 10,000 feet, so you feel the lack of oxygen.

All the photos from this morning are here, or as a slideshow. If you have been running somewhere more beautiful this morning, I’d like to hear about it.

Yesterday was New Year’s Day here in Ethiopia – it was the first day of 2001 on the Ethiopian Calendar. Grethe and I celebrated by going for a run in the hills overlooking the city.

At the Asia Regional Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Manila.

Shocking fact – Afghanistan received 1,657 donor missions last year. That’s more than 4 a day, 365 days a year. How is a government supposed to govern properly if it has its face pointing towards the donors and its rear end facing its own citizens?

This matters because the exit strategy from high poverty and dependence on aid is economic growth, and that growth must come from the private sector.  As I as I reported last year, there is a strong correlation between a poor business environment and high levels of poverty. 

It is heartening to see from this report that good Africa is making progress.  South Africa, Mauritius, Namibia and Botswana now rank among the best 50 countries in the world.  But sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 27 out of 35 of the least business-friendly countries, and it is not surprising that these are among the poorest countries in the world.

There is also a an optimistic report in this week's Economist. It quotes Michael Klein, who is the vice-president for private-sector development at the World Bank and Chief Economist at the IFC, as saying that if  governments in Africa continue to reform, GDP growth could reach 9% a year over the next decade.  That would be very good news indeed, as growth rates of that scale are needed to achieve the internationally agreed goal of halving the proportion of people living in poverty by 2015.

Reforms which improve the environment for business are frequently not very expensive, though they can be made difficult by the need to challenge vested interests.  African governments should be commended for the progress they have made, and be supported in going much further to create an environment in which private businesses can prosper.  As well as investing in health and education, creating an environment for faster economic growth is an essential component for economic development. 

• PSD Blog
• Report in the FT
• Business in Africa survey in this week's Economist
• Pienso
• Truck and Barter
• Greg Mankiw
• New Economist

In the ID world according to Gordon, on the other hand, ID management will proceed down pretty much the path laid out by the architects of the ID scheme. It won't consider more decentralised and secure approaches that tailor levels of security to need, and although such matters will surely have to be considered by Brown's ID management task force (otherwise, what does it have to investigate?), Brown himself seems to be already pre-empting its report. Government ID management will however incur the vast levels of expense and complexity associated with the original ID scheme, and will, if Brown persists with the notion of expanding it to the private sector, collapse in even greater costs and complexities.

My views on all this are here and here.  In short – we need a decentralized and secure approach. They are building government cathedrals: we need bazaars.

Now that it is in the news again, I want to to be very clear about the problem with this treaty. The problem is not that the US Senate has not ratified the treaty, nor is that the treaty lacks reciprocity.  Those are both red herrings.

The problem with this treaty – whether or not the Senate ratifies it – is that it allows a person to be extradited from the UK without presentation of prima facie evidence against them. 

The reason that the treaty cannot be reciprocal is that American courts, quite rightly, would not permit their citizens to be treated this way.  It would breach the US Bill of Rights to extradite citizens without evidence.

So the problem will not be solved by having the treaty ratified by the Senate, as the UK Government seems to think.  Even if it were ratified, it would still not be symmetrical. Nor is the lack of reciprocity the problem in itself, though it is a clue to what is wrong. The problem is that the treaty obliges the UK government to violate a person's rights without the presentation of evidence against them.  Even if the US Government could reciprocally abrogate the rights of its citizens in the same way – and we should be thankful that they cannot – it would still be wrong.

(Full disclosure: I am the author of the chapter of the report which describes the British model which the group recommends.)

The book, Security by Other Means, will be published shortly. The near final version is online here.  This from the website for the project:

In a world transformed by globalization and challenged by terrorism, foreign aid has assumed renewed importance as a foreign policy tool. While the results of more than forty years of development assistance show some successes, foreign aid is currently dispersed between many agencies and branches of government in a manner that inhibits formulation and implementation of a coherent, effective strategy.

The current political climate is receptive to a transition toward greater accountability and effectiveness in development aid. Because this transition is clearly an imperative but has not yet been comprehensively addressed, the Brookings Institution and the Center for Strategic and International Studies have conducted a joint study that both assesses the current structures of foreign assistance and makes recommendations for efficient coordination.

Drawing on expertise from the full range of agencies whose policies affect foreign aid, Security by Other Means examines foreign assistance across four categories reflecting the interests that aid furthers: security, economic, humanitarian, and political.

One of the great problems in the field of development is that there are too many players. Each developed country has its own programmes in the poorest countries, and so do a large number of UN agencies and NGOs. Each has a bank account, reporting requirements and missions that take up the time and energy of government ministers, who spend more time accounting to the donors than to their own electorates.

As we try to shift from unsustainable projects to an investment fund for helping countries improve their own institutions, it is the World Bank that makes the best long-term analysis and provides a framework around which other donors can co-ordinate.
Considerable progress was made under James Wolfensohn. There is more to be done, but weakening the bank would reinvent development as a mere series of charitable projects to make donor governments popular with NGOs and the wider public.

I could not agree more.   It is not the World Bank that should have to justify its existence (a justification made through its positive impact every day) but the proliferation of bilateral aid agencies and NGOs.  I remain to be convinced that the benefits of diversity and competition between aid agencies outweigh the costs of proliferation.

If so this is perhaps the first scalp for UK bloggers, who I believe first identified the dangers of this Bill, analysis which was subsequently picked up in the mainstream media. 

And it is good news for parliamentary democracy.

You run 25 continuous laps of a 400 metre track (that is, 10km in total), alternating between your 5km pace and your marathon pace.  (If you don’t know these, you can use my pace calculator at www.runningforfitness.org to estimate them from a recent race or training run.)  There are no rests between laps. 

This tough session can substitute in your programme for a tempo session; it will help improve your ability to run aerobically. Frank reckons it is one of the most effective workouts for runners who need to get fit quickly – for example to pass a fitness test or to get ready for a race after a lay-off. 

This morning I ran 83 seconds for the fast laps and 94 seconds for the marathon-pace laps – giving me a total for 10km of a fraction under 37 minutes – which is about my 10km race pace.  (I started with a marathon pace lap.)

If you are not able to sustain the paces, don’t do the session slower. When can’t make the lap times, stop and walk a lap to recover, and then pick up where you left off. 

As well as being a great fitness booster, this session gives you a feel for running at different paces, and helps you to get used to your marathon pace as an “easy” recovery pace. 

You won’t find a better way to pack a lot of benefit into a 40 minute work-out.   

This seems to me to do most of what  I would have wanted from Flock.

It is shameful that, with the honourable exception of Nicholas Kristof, these unfolding disasters have had almost no media attention.
 

I’ve written a paper which looks at the advantages and disadvantages of conditionality.   Unlike many critics of conditionality, I am broadly supportive of the policy reforms that donors recommend.  But I am not at all convinced that aid conditionality is the right way to get those reforms implemented.

There are three possible arguments for conditionality:

(a) Conditions on aid might increase incentives for policy reform by developing country governments.

(b) Allocating aid to countries with good policy environments might increase the impact of aid spending.

(c) Aid conditions might increase our ability to account for how the money was used and what effects it had.

Alongside these advantages, we should consider the possible disadvantages of aid conditionality.

(a) The conditions increase transactions costs, for both the donor and especially for the recipient.

(b) Conditions may reduce predictability, which in turn reduces the effectiveness with which aid is used.

(c) There is a possibility that some of the policy prescriptions are incorrect, either because they reflect donor interests or because some of the international experts have given poor advice.

(d) The conditions may undermine internal government systems for prioritising, allocating, managing and accounting for public spending.

(e) The imposition of external conditions may contribute to poor accountability of developing country governments to their own citizens.

As set out in detail in the longer note, the arguments for conditionality are not very persuasive; but the possible adverse consequences are alarming.  I conclude that aid  should take the form of long-term, predictable commitments, focused on countries that are pursuing policies that are likely to benefit the poor. I support aid “selectivity” linked to long-term outcomes, which is a far cry from the current system.

You can read the full note here.

To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Irish Famine, Boston’s Irish community unveiled a memorial park on June 28,1998.  The park is in downtown Boston, along the city’s Freedom Trail. The text on the plaque reads: 

Lest we forget. The commemmoration of the Great Hunger allows people everywhere to reflect upon a terrible episode that forever changed Ireland. The conditions that produced the Irish famine – crop failure, absentee landlordism, colonialism and weak political leadership – still exist around the world today. Famines continue to decimate suffering populations. The lessons of the Irish famine need to be constantly learned and applied until history finally ceases to repeat itself.

The picture to the right is a screenshot I took of a jackal (I think) drinking at dawn this morning (it is not a publicity shot). 

I find just having the sound in the background – the cicadas at night, the dawn chorus in the morning – very theraputic.

I am beginning to understand what people see in Big Brother …

Peak viewing time is 7am to noon in Botswana (which is 2 hours ahead of GMT and does not have daylight savings time).

H/T: Boing Boing.

Under questioning from senators, Rob Portman, the US trade representative, said: "We are not going down that road.

"The kinds of radical changes the EU and others are talking about would not be just harmful to our farmers and ranchers, but also terribly damaging to the developing world," he told the Senate agriculture committee. …

The EU, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Australia and Thailand are all urging the US to stop providing direct shipments of food to developing countries except in genuine emergencies. They argue that food aid displaces commercial sales, distorts agricultural markets in developing countries and is used primarily to dispose of surplus crops encouraged by high domestic subsidies.

The same day, the New York Times reports that food aid threatens the livelihood of farmers in Niger:

after a season of good rains, Niger’s farmers are producing a bumper crop of millet, the national staple. This should be a cause for rejoicing, yet in one of the twists that mark life in the world’s poorest countries, the aid that was intended to save lives could ruin the harvest for many of Niger’s farmers by driving down prices.

The newly harvested millet and the donated food will reach market stalls at the same time, and with prices depressed, poor farming families may be forced to sell crops normally set aside for their own use and use the money to pay off debts. The effect would be a new cycle of hunger and poverty.

This is not rocket science, and many of us predicted exactly this would happen.  On August 2nd, I said:

What is striking about these cases is that food aid – that is, buying surplus production from rich countries and shipping it to the places where people are hungry – may do more harm than good.  What the poor people need in these circumstances is buying power, to enable them to buy the food that is already being produced but is not available to them.  Food aid may depress local food prices, and thereby cause some harm to food producers and perhaps reduce future production. In these circumstances, it would be better to drop dollar bills out of helicopters than sacks of food.

See also Head Heeb

• Holiday
  There doesn’t seem to be a word for this in the US. In Europe people take maybe 6 weeks a year of holiday.  Americans have two weeks of something called "vacation" which means they do their email with a blackberry instead of their PC.
• Liberal
  An insult to many Americans but never in Europe. In the US, liberal means left wing and is associated with large-government. To Europeans, liberal means someone primarily concerned with freedom and choice, and is often associated with small government (q.v.)
• Middle class
  When Americans talk about the middle class, they mean the middle class and below. Europeans mean middle class and above.  Europeans aspire to join the middle class; Americans aspire to leave it.
• Privacy
  When Americans talk about whether the Constitution includes a right to privacy, they mean what Europeans would call freedom. For an American, privacy is whether you can do certain things (eg to have oral sex, anal sex, same-sex relationships, abortion, polygamy) without finding yourself in prison.  For Europeans, it is whether you can do these things without finding yourself in the newspapers.
• Quite
  To Americans, this means "very". To the English, it means "not very". Which is quite an important distinction.  When Clinton said that Kerry would make "quite a good President", this was a compliment. It sounded to Europeans like an insult.
• Small Government
    In America, this apparently means a Government small enough to fit in your bedroom.

Other contributions welcome in the comments section.

The administration’s bill would be the biggest change in fisheries management in a decade. It aims to double by 2010 the number of "dedicated access privileges" programs, which allocate shares of each fishery to individual fishermen, who can then can buy and sell their shares. In Alaska, for example, fishermen are granted a portion of the allowed halibut catch and can trade these quotas among themselves; in most U.S. fisheries, regulators govern the annual catch by limiting how many days fishermen operate and how much they collect each trip.

Good. Almost every expert in fishing agrees that a property-rights based approach to reducing overfishing is exactly what is needed. Furthermore, it is good economics. Nor are there any environmental arguments against using tradable quotas as a way to deliver reductions in overfishing in the most efficient way possible. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Steve Murawski, chief science adviser to the Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service, said … the administration recognizes that good fishery management is based on peer-reviewed science, and that the government should help fishermen make better business decisions through the use of fishing quotas.  "In many cases they do not make market decisions that are in their own best interests and the long-term interests of the country because of this race to compete with each other," he said. "This ‘survival of the fittest’ — it generates a lot of conservation issues."

It is good to see the administration turn to peer-reviewed science for support. Now why can’t the Bush Administration apply exactly the same logic to limiting greenhouse gas emissions, by limiting carbon-dioxide emissions using tradable quotas? They could start by supporting the Clear Skies bill which desperately needs Administration support if it is to get through Congress.

<dream> One of the greatest assets that developing countries have today is that they are low emissions economies.  Wouldn’t it be great if we divided the world’s limit for greenhouse gas emissions equally, by head of population, and then let the world’s poor, who are clean, rent to the world’s rich, who are dirty, the right to use their pollution limits? </dream>

Update 22 September:  See the post on this by Jane Shaw at the Commons Blog

Many of the changes are just tightening of the language, adjusting some of the UN-speak into plainer English; reducing repetition and superfluous words (such as deleting "hereby"). I welcome a simpler text, though I do not think that it is worth disrupting international consensus to achieve this.

Another group of changes are aimed at eliminating favourable references to existing multilateral agreements. Some of these changes remove mention of agreements that the US does not support (such as the Kyoto Protocol and the International Criminal Court). More worryingly, other changes would remove references to agreements which the US has ratified. For example, the amendments would remove the references to the commitments by nuclear nations in the Non Proliferation Treaty (which the US has ratified) to take steps towards nuclear disarmament; and would take out the reference to the Convention on Biological Diversity. It is not clear whether this reflects a desire on the part of the US to step aside from these international commitments: if so, they should defend their new position openly, rather than try to back out of agreements by stealth. 

The proposed changes relating to international poverty are the most interesting.  The amendments would remove nearly all the references to the Millennium Development Goals.  Until now, the official US position has been that it accepts the first seven UN goals, as set out in the Millennium Declaration of the General Assembly, but does not consider itself bound by the quantitative MDG targets that were subsequently defined as a way to measure progress towards the agreement in the Millennium Declaration; the US has also consistently opposed the eighth Millennium Development Goal (which is the one about developing a partnership for global development).   

Many of the proposed US amendments have the effect of removing a bold attempt by the UN system to put itself in the role of coordinating international development policy, instead of the World Bank and IMF.  For example, the amendments would remove this:

We further reaffirm the need for the United nations to play a more decisive and central role in international development policy and in ensuring coherence, coordination and implementation of the development goals and actions agreed by the international community …

On this, I think Mr Bolton’s amendments are right. I recognize that there is a case to be made for the UN to play a more central role in promoting development: it is possible to argue that the UN has more legitimacy (because countries are represented on a more equal basis); and some people feel that the World Bank and IMF promote a particular ideological view of economic policy, where the UN bodies would accept a more diverse range of opinion about the best way to achieve poverty reduction.  But whatever the theoretical merits, the UN system is too dysfunctional to take on responsibility for coordinating development policy; and the World Bank actually does rather a good job at the moment. I also agree with the basic tenets of the so called Washington Consensus; and I don’t believe it is in developing countries’ interests to weaken our resolve to base poverty reduction on a common set of broad policy goals which include macroeconomic stability, free and open markets, political accountability and investment in the health and skills of people.  Effective international development policy is too important to allow people to play politics with it; until the UN system is reformed and shows itself capable of taking on this role, the US is right not to endorse a shift of power and responsibility to the UN.  (The appointment of Kemal Dervis as the Administrator of UNDP is a good first step towards the UN becoming more effective.)

But while I agree with blocking language which attempts to shift power from the World Bank to the UN, the other changes to the draft conclusions on development seem to me to be much more sinister. 

Recall that in 2000, world leaders (including the President of the United States) signed up to a Millennium Declaration which said:

We will spare no effort to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty, to which more than a billion of them are currently subjected. We are committed to making the right to development a reality for everyone and to freeing the entire human race from want.

The process of drafting by committee has done much to obscure the really important issue of the September UN summit: are we willing to accept, now in 2005, that we are not going to meet the lofty objectives we set for ourseves in the Millennium Declaration? Or are we going to do something about our failure to act, which will require more resources and greater efforts on the part of rich countries?  This conference could have been the moment at which the world is shamed by its failure to act to meet the objectives it set for itself, and galvanized into action.  If we do not do so now, it will be impossible to meet the 2015 objectives. By removing references to the Millennium Development Goals, and the likelihood that they will not be met, the US approach would ensure that we do not face up to what is arguably the world’s most important challenge. 

(See more on this at Talking Points Memo and at Liberals Against Terrorism, which has a defense of John Bolton by Nadezhda.)

The site’s objective is:

• To provide intelligent comment on private sector development issues in the news.
• To highlight new Web sites, articles and books that development practitioners might find useful.
• To provide a link between the detailed resources on the World Bank Group’s Rapid Response Web site, and the ever changing world of the blogosphere.

The PSD Blog is already proving itself an invaluable resource, with lots of interesting information and links. It is maintained by the World Bank Group’s Rapid Response knowledge service, which specializes in policy advice on business environment reform and privatization policy in developing countries.The blog has two impressive authors:

Tim Harford is an economist at the International Finance Corporation (IFC). Before joining the IFC, he was the first Peter Martin Fellow at the Financial Times, where he was a leader writer in 2003. His book of popular economics, The Undercover Economist will be published in late 2005. He is also the author, with Michael Klein, of The Market for Aid, published in June 2005. Rather implausibly, he writes a problem-page column for the Financial Times called Dear Economist.

Pablo Halkyard is a private sector development associate in the joint World Bank-IFC Private Sector Development Vice-Presidency. Prior to joining the World Bank, he worked at an international strategy consultancy specializing on project risk analysis. Born in Brazil, he was raised in the Himalayas, grew up in Washington, studied in Lima, has a British passport, though claims to be Chilean. Unlike Tim, he is still working on his first book. 

Ghanaians like to brag that they have passed the point of no return in making their humid patch of West Africa a functioning democracy with all the perks that brings: a free and vibrant press, steady though slow economic growth, tourism. There is even a shopping mall with a multiplex cinema going up in Accra. With such obvious payoffs for adopting good governance, many Ghanaians say it is inconceivable that the country will turn back to the failed-state practices that have taken so many other African countries down the drain. … Almost half of Ghana’s national budget comes from foreign aid; Britain is its largest single-country donor. But the size of the country’s budget, a scant $3 billion, supporting some 20 million people, is testament to just how far Ghana still has to go, and just how much more it still needs to climb out of poverty. British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s proposal for rich countries to drastically increase their aid to Africa in a Marshall Plan approach would be a huge step toward helping to bring the continent back into the folds of the rest of the world. Ghana shows what a tough road this is going to be. But it also shows that bringing Africa back is eminently doable.