Owen abroad

Archive for April, 2005

An iron law of politics is that it is never the mistake that causes the political damage, but the cover-up. Think of Watergate, or the Lewinsky affair. Think of Peter Mandelson’s troubles over his loan from Robinson, or Blunkett’s resignation. The leak of the Attorney General’s advice on the legality of the war in Iraq makes compelling reading. It has emerged at a time when it will do maximum damage to Tony Blair’s prospects for re-election. The question is why the Government did not quietly release this document as part of its evidence to the Butler Enquiry, or at soon after the Butler Enquiry produced its report which (superficially at least) appeared to exonerate the Government from wrongdoing. But because the Government tried to avoid releasing it, it has acquired almost totemic status, and the damage done to the Government will be amplified. Having read the leaked advice, I find it hard to believe that Parliament would have voted for the war if they had been given the full advice, or even an accurate summary of it. By failing to reveal to Parliament that the legal case was questionable – even if the Attorney General concluded that on balance military action would be legal – the Government can fairly be accused of having misled Parliament. And that is not a good thing in a democracy.

New York Times Editorial today (free registration required) about Ghana’s success, against enormous odds, in making progress towards democracy and economic growth.

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.

In February, I commented favourably on Brian Sedgemore’s farewell speech to Parliament. Now Mr Sedgemore has defected to the Liberal Democrat Party, because of New Labour’s policy on Iraq. This should be a big blow to Blair’s New Labour. Sedgemore is what the press call a "veteran" MP (he has been in Parliament for 27 years) and, while he has always been independently minded, he represents a substantial body of opinion. He claims that there are many other Labour MPs who also feel strongly about the Iraq war.

I’m shamelessly going to quote my Dad’s blog, not because he is my Dad but because he is right. He dissects Tony Blair’s defence of the decision to go to war in Iraq, as given to Jeremy Paxman.

The idea that at that historic moment it had been Tony Blair’s personal responsibility to take that ‘hard’ decision whether to remove Saddam or to “leave him there”, “still running Iraq”, is not only weird: it is also frankly frightening, because it suggests that our prime minister is unable to form a realistic view of his own responsibilities, of the limits on Britain’s power and responsibilities in the world, or of his place in it.

Paul Krugman has two interesting articles in the New York Times, here and here about the US Health Care system.

Most Americans probably don’t know that we have substantially lower life-expectancy and higher infant-mortality figures than other advanced countries. It would be wrong to jump to the conclusion that this poor performance is entirely the result of a defective health care system; social factors, notably America’s high poverty rate, surely play a role. Still, it seems puzzling that we spend so much, with so little return. A 2003 study published in Health Affairs (one of whose authors is my Princeton colleague Uwe Reinhardt) tried to resolve that puzzle by comparing a number of measures of health services across the advanced world. What the authors found was that the United States scores high on high-tech services – we have lots of M.R.I.’s – but on more prosaic measures, like the number of doctors’ visits and number of days spent in hospitals, America is only average, or even below average. There’s also direct evidence that identical procedures cost far more in the U.S. than in other advanced countries. The authors concluded that Americans spend far more on health care than their counterparts abroad – but they don’t actually receive more care. The title of their article? "It’s the Prices, Stupid."

And:

So we’ve created a vast and hugely expensive insurance bureaucracy that accomplishes nothing. The resources spent by private insurers don’t reduce overall costs; they simply shift those costs to other people and institutions. It’s perverse but true that this system, which insures only 85 percent of the population, costs much more than we would pay for a system that covered everyone.

Very interesting article in The Times about Ratzinger and his time in the Hitler Youth.

“Resistance was truly impossible,” Georg Ratzinger said. … Some locals in Traunstein, like Elizabeth Lohner, 84, whose brother-in-law was sent to Dachau as a conscientious objector, dismiss such suggestions. “It was possible to resist, and those people set an example for others,” she said. “The Ratzingers were young and had made a different choice.” In 1937 another family a few hundred yards away in Traunstein hid Hans Braxenthaler, a local resistance fighter. SS troops repeatedly searched homes in the area looking for the fugitive and his fellow conspirators.

You can say we should forgive him the choices he made as a young man. But don’t tell me he didn’t have a choice. He did, and he chose wrong.

The bad news is that the cardinals, hand-picked by JPII, have chosen as the new Pope a man who will continue to cause the suffering and deaths of millions of people across the developing world by opposing contraception and the use of condoms, which reduce the spread of AIDS. The good news is that, by picking a man who will take the church further from the mainstream of world opinion, the cardinals have continued the marginalization of the church and so, we hope, helped to reinforce the trend decline in baleful influence of the Roman Catholic Church.

Christian Aid does itself no favours by talking of "the slavery of free trade". To compare free trade with slavery is a grotesque mischaracterisation. A more rational position would be:

• trade liberalisation will, on average, increase incomes and well-being across the world;
• the challenge for globalisation is to determine how those gains are shared;
• because of the imbalance of economic power between rich and poor nations, determined efforts will be needed to ensure that poor countries secure their fair share – or more – of the benefits of the liberalisation
• while there are benefits in the long run from trade liberalisation, there may be some short run costs – for example, in reskilling populations for new jobs – which poor countries can ill afford and which must be properly managed and paid for

Despite the hyperbole, four of the five requests of the Trade Justice movement are entirely reasonable:

2. An end to the IMF and World Bank setting poor countries’ trade policies 3. Special treatment for poor countries at the WTO 4. Cut the massive export subsidies used in rich countries 5. Debt cancellation and aid increases must not be used to further impose free trade

Only the first demand is questionable:

1. Stop the EU’s free-trade agreements with former colonies

Whether these should be agreed depends on what they will say. There is a danger that the so-called partnership agreements will be a distraction from real progress towards multilateral trade liberalisation, and will create a byzantine set of rules – for example on rules of origin – that make trade more expensive. But done well – such as by extending Everything But Arms, the EU’s free trade policy for least developed countries – an extension of trade access to the EU would be of enormous benefit to the poor. We should be calling for more trade liberalisation, not less.

Tim Worstall worries that he will get stick from me and Jim about his latest post, in which he draw attention to a piece by Jeff Sachs. Sachs says:

If the United States and a united Europe will honour their long-standing – and long-neglected – pledge of 0.7% of GNP, then Africans and other impoverished people on the planet will roll up their sleeves and get to work saving themselves and their families, and ultimately helping to save all of the rest of us as well.

You will get no stick from me on the need to do economically rational things, like putting in place markets and improving the institutional structure necessary for them to operate. Nor will you get any stick from me on the view that these are as, important as giving more aid, and in some cases more so. But I don’t understand Tim’s near pathological desire to suggest that the need to do these things is any reason not give more aid as well. Furthermore, that doesn’t seem to be what Jeff Sachs is saying either. I suspect my difference with Tim is emphasis. I think that we (ie the rich countries) should focus mainly on the things that are our responsibility and which we can fix, such as liberalising the trade rules, stopping being corrupt, selling fewer arms, being more consistent in our willingness to step in to conflicts and humanitarian disasters like Rwanda and Darfur, contributing less to global warming and desertification, having more rational migration policies, and giving more and better aid; and – at least until we have done what we ought – we should spend rather less time lecturing others on what we think they should do.

There is a strange misconception around that differential pricing of pharmaceuticals (in which rich countries pay more than poor countries) is a form of subsidy by the rich of the poor. In fact, the opposite is true. If the people in poor countries pay something above the marginal cost – even if only slightly – then they are contributing towards the R&D costs. If you have a single price and so exclude the poor – so that they cannot buy the medicines at all – then they use nothing and contribute nothing. So differential pricing allows the burden of paying for the R&D to be spread more widely, and so the poor, to some (possibly small) extent, contribute to the costs of medicines used by the rich. Which means we should not think of differential pricing as a form of subsidy by the rich to the poor.

Bizarre editorial in the Washington Post saying that

People who care about this institution and its mission — as many of Mr. Wolfowitz’s detractors do — should think carefully before they damage it by attacking its new boss.

In other words, we should not criticize the appointment of the World Bank President because, er, it is an important institution. As Brad deLong says:

No argument that Paul Wolfowitz is the best candidate for World Bank President. No argument that he is even a good candidate. No argument that he is either minimally qualified–in his understanding of development, in his understanding of international finance, or in his ability to manage a large bureaucracy.

My own view is that the President of the World Bank should be appointed by a process of open and fair competition. I have no idea if Paul Wolfowitz is the best person for the job; I do know that the Board that has approved his appointment does not know either.

Today’s NY Times has an interesting article about drugs companies racing to make drugs to fight obesity.

From pharmaceutical giants to tiny start-ups, the industry is spending billions of dollars developing obesity drugs. An estimated 200 possibilities are now in the research pipeline or under test among patients at dozens of clinics like L-Marc, according to MedMarket Diligence, a health care research firm.

Compare that to the pitifully small investment in vaccines and drugs for diseases concentrated in developing countries, such as HIV, AIDS and tuberculosis, which kill 5-7 million people a year around the world. We’ve been working on an idea to create a market for vaccines for these diseases, so that the pharmaceutical firms have an incentive to invest. This NY Times article only confirms that if the market is there, the investment will follow.

Make Poverty History has a short video here about the fact that a child dies unnecessarily every 3 seconds of extreme poverty.

Guinea worm is set to be the next disease eradicated from the world and the first to be overcome without a vaccine or treatment. Through the effort of The Carter Center and its partners, this disease has been reduced by 99 percent: from an estimated 3.5 million cases in 1986 to fewer than 32,193 reported cases in 2003. Today, we are fighting the last 1 percent of the disease.

Read Matthew Yglesias on the contradiction between opposing abortion but believing in stem cell research.

the view seems to be that the moral standing of embryonic life is somehow large enough to override a woman’s interest in her autonomy, but small enough to be overridden by our interest in maybe developing a treatment for Parkinson’s Disease. This seems like one of those things you sort of have to be a man to believe.

I’ve been setting up the first blog for my employer, the Center for Global Development. This blog is about the use of vaccines in developing countries – mainly about the development of new vaccines, but also about access to existing vaccines. If you think that might interest you, take a look here.