Alex Singleton has an interesting post at the Globalisation Institute: The intellectual revolution in international development:
Three years ago, social justice was a left-wing term, about redistributing income and socialism. Now it means things like welfare reform and community entrepreneurs. That is quite an achievement. And that sort of achievement is what is needed now in the area of international development. The Department for International Development needs an intellectual revolution. We need to turn development policies upside down: we need to change to helping Africa from the bottom up.
Alex is right that those of us who care about international development should embrace practical ways that free markets can help people.
But I think we need to unpack the following proposition carefully:
These enterprise-based approaches to development are vastly more effective than the top-down help of which the government, unfortunately, is still far too fond.
There are three questions I have about this.
Q1. If we believe that enterprises are the basis of economic growth, jobs and poverty reduction (which I do, as does Alex), does it necessarily follow that aid should be used to support enterprises?
I do not think this follows at all. I have commented before on the irony that those who most support the free market are often vocal in advocating public subsidies for enterprises. For example, it is far from clear that if we believe in microfinance, we should subsidize it. We too easily fall into the trap of thinking that because something is important, we should support it. Governments in both rich and poor countries should focus on improving what they are responsible for and which the market will not provide well, and on getting out of doing things that they are not good at. While private enterprise is the foundation of economic growth, it does not follow that enterprise-based approaches to aid are the most effective use of aid.
Q2. Are donors doing enough support the development of enterprise and free markets?
As I pointed out here, the British Government, like other donors, rightly places great emphasis on development assistance designed to improve the supply performance of the economy. Many of the reforms needed – such as reducing import tarrifs, fighting corruption or commercialising state enterprises – are expensive and require considerable external support, and a large part of our aid goes into just this sort of thing. In fact, the UK Government is frequently criticized from the left for doing too much of this, by those NGOs who are sceptical about the value of free markets.
It is unfair of Alex to dismiss this support pejoratively as ‘top down’ (in contrast to ‘bottom up’, which everyone is in favour of). This top-down investment is used to vaccinate children, support scientific research into new crops, build roads, schools, wells and hospitals, reform customs, remove import tarrifs, liberalise telecomms, support teacher training, fight AIDS, tackle corruption, meet the costs of free and fair elections, provide safe drinking water – all things, in fact, that it is necessary for a society to do to enable enterprise and free markets to flourish.
Q3. Is there evidence that supporting NGOs and small businesses is a more effective use of aid than providing aid to governments?
If there is, I should like to see it. Some of this so-called bottom-up aid supports fantastic projects which make an enormous contribution to the people to whom they provide services. But much of it is ill-conceived do-goodery which is not sustainable and has high transactions costs for litle long-run benefit. (I’m thinking, for example, of the idiotic idea of shipping computers to schools, many of which have no electricity or place to store them safely, let alone anybody who knows how to use them.) If we are looking for transformation of these societies, and not merely alleviation of the symptoms of poverty, we need to contribute to transformation of systems and institutions. Bottom up support for NGOs and small enterprises is unlikely to deliver that.
Conclusion
I’m with Alex Singleton in believing in markets and enterprise. But I am more modest than Alex about my belief in what we can contribute directly to those. Good businesses will succeed, or not, because of the energy and enterprise of those who own them and work in them, not because of support we provide. The role of government is to put in place the conditions that enable those markets and businesses to thrive, such as transport and communications infrastructure, effective courts, and a healthy workforce. There is, of course, room for debate about the extent of that responsibility – some societies believe that education should be provided collectively, some do not. But it is not in doubt that many of the preconditions for enterprise are, in whole or in part, public goods, and that governments (and in the case of poor countries) donors may have a role in providing them.
Alex underestimates the extent to which the views he is advocating are already part of mainstream development thinking. Development will be driven by the people of poor countries improving their own lives, through education, hard work, and enterprise. There is much we can do, and are doing, to promote an environment in which that bottom-up growth can prosper and accelerate. But it is at best an oversimplification, and at worst dangerous, to think that because small enterprises are the basis of development that this is where we should put our support.
Given the enormous difficulty that the US and its allies have had in establishing a peaceful democratic future for Iraq, it is natural that many people are sceptical of the idea that international intervention in the internal affairs of another country can ever lead to a successful conclusion.
So we should celebrate and learn from a remarkable experience which has just come to a positive conclusion. The United Nations Assistance Mission in
Sierra Leone, UNAMSIL, successfully completed its mandate in December 2005 and the U.N. troops have been withdrawn over the last few weeks. The success of the U.N. mission in Sierra Leone has had very little attention in the media or among the bloggers presumably because failure makes better copy than success.
Ethan Zuckerman comments on the lack of media interest (either mainstream or online) in the continuing conlicts in Darfur and in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He also reports the study in the Lancet of the number of deaths in the DRC, which I reported on Friday.
It is shameful that, with the honourable exception of Nicholas Kristof, these unfolding disasters have had almost no media attention.
Binyavanga Wainaina, writing in Granta about how to write about Africa:
Throughout the book, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone. Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can’t live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed. ….
Broad brushstrokes throughout are good. Avoid having the African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances. Have them illuminate something about Europe or America in Africa. African characters should be colourful, exotic, larger than life—but empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause.
Animals, on the other hand, must be treated as well rounded, complex
characters. They speak (or grunt while tossing their manes proudly) and
have names, ambitions and desires. They also have family values: see how lions teach their children?
Elephants are caring, and are good feminists or dignified patriarchs.
So are gorillas. Never, ever say anything negative about an elephant or
a gorilla. Elephants may attack people’s property, destroy their crops,
and even kill them. Always take the side of the elephant. Big cats have
public-school accents. Hyenas are fair game and have vaguely Middle
Eastern accents.
I thought Charles Kennedy’s statement yesterday was brave and dignified. I am not going to comment on that. Instead I want to reflect on the role of Daisy McAndrew in all this.
Mr Kennedy’s statement was triggered by the intelligence that ITV News chief political reporter, Daisy McAndrew, planned to report the story on the ITV evening news.
So who is Daisy McAndrew? In the 1990s, as Daisy Sampson, she was a freelance journalist, scraping a living by hanging around the House of Commons doing tedious profiles for the (unreadable) House Magazine.
Her big break came in November 1999, when she became Press Secretary to none other than Charles Kennedy. In a gushing piece of self-praise, her (self authored) profile on the BBC website says:
Kennedy was widely credited as having by far the best
campaign of the 2001 General Election – in no small part down to
Daisy’s handling of his press and image.
Since the 2001 Election, Ms McAndrew has risen fairly rapidly, though without distinction, first co-presenting The Daily Politics with Andrew Neil (is it possible that Mr Neil chooses his co-hosts on the basis of something other than the size of their intelligence?) and then presenting the LBC evening radio programme.
At ITN, Ms McAndrew’s reporting has been pedestrian at best, and she has not broken any major stories. Her editors must have been beginning to wonder why they had appointed her. Her ‘scoop’ yesterday, reporting the worst-kept secret in Westminster – may have lifted her reputation in the news industry.
I hope it does not. This is not journalism, it is betrayal of confidence of a former employer. In my view, there is little or no public interest in reporting the details of Mr Kennedy’s private medical condition. But even if there were, it was not the story that Ms McAndrew should have broken. Ms McAndrew owes a duty of confidentiality to Mr Kennedy, with whom she worked closely at a personal level. Her career in journalism was given a significant boost by her two years working as his Press Secretary – indeed, if it were not for him, she would probably still be labouring over profiles in the House Magazine. Now she has decided to give her career a further lift by spilling the beans on the man who gave her her first real break and whose trust she has now betrayed.
According to a study in this week’s Lancet, nearly 4 million people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo as a result of the conflict which began in 1998.
Richard Brennan et al report the findings of a nationwide household mortality survey conducted between April and July, 2004. The national crude mortality rate of 2.1 deaths per 1000 per month was 40% higher than the sub-Saharan regional level – about 38,000 excess deaths per month. The total death toll from the conflict (1998-2004) was estimated to be 3.9 million.
To put that in perspective, twice as many people die preventable deaths each year in the Congo as died in the Asian Tsunami last year.
The proximate cause of the vast majority of these additional deaths is infectious diseases which could be easily prevented or treated, if security and humanitarian assistance were provided.
Dr Brennan comments:
"This is the fourth in a series of surveys since 2000 that have consistently drawn the same conclusion-Congo is the deadliest crisis anywhere in the world over the past 60 years. It is a sad indictment on us all that, seven years into this crisis, ignorance about its scale and impact is almost universal, and that international engagement remains completely out of proportion to humanitarian need. Major governments, the United Nations, the African Union, humanitarian agencies, and the international media must all play a role: improved security is essential to lower the death toll; greater political engagement is urgently required; the parties to the conflict must be held to account; and the level of humanitarian aid must be increased dramatically. The citizens of DR Congo must finally be given the chance to live their lives in peace and security, and to achieve their full potential".
On these figures, the conflict in the DRC has now taken more lives than any since the Second World War.
The rich countries could, with pitifully little effort, step in to prevent further conflict, provide security for the people of DRC, and provide the essential humanitarian support needed to end this slaughter. But we won’t.
Hugh Thompson, the American hero who stepped in during the Mai Lai massacre, has died.
Mr Thompson and his crew came upon US troops killing civilians at the village of My Lai on 16 March 1968. He put his helicopter down between the soldiers and villagers, ordering his men to shoot their fellow Americans if they attacked the civilians. A platoon commander, Lt William Calley, was later court-martialed and sentenced to life in prison for his role in the killings. President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence to three years’ house arrest.
Fortunately, nothing like that would ever happen these days.
My web-browsing suddenly slowed to a crawl last night. I knew it wasn’t my internet connection, because my Window$ laptop was still working fine.
The problem seemed to be with resolving domain names. So in Window$ I checked my DNS nameservers (using ipconfig /all) and found that on my Linux box the nameservers in /etc/resolv.conf were different. I put the correct nameservers from Windows into /etc/resolv.conf and voila! – normal service was resumed and I can browse again.
From time to time I gloat about how much better the weather is here in Northern California than in London, Washington or just about anywhere else.
Not this weekend it ain’t. This picture is of the town of Napa, the centre of wine country, about an hour north of Berkeley.
And Berkeley isn’t much better – I was up to my calves in water cascading down the roads when I was running yesterday, and I haven’t even tried to brave the rain today.
Take a look at this very interesting article from Associated Press about the experience of New Zealand, which ended farm subsidies in 1985:
It was 1985, and the government of New Zealand had made a momentous decision – to abolish farm subsidies in a country where farming had been king ever since Britain colonized the islands in 1840.
Farmers’ incomes plunged by 40 percent. Land and stock prices slumped. There were suicides. …
The farmers learned to work harder and do with less. “We were young, so we put our heads down and just worked the farm,” Ruth Rainey, now 46, recalled in an interview.
Farming today is 16.6 percent of total gross domestic product, up from 14.2 percent in the late 1980s, and in the year to April 2005 it was more than half of all New Zealand exports.
Farming began recovering within five years of the subsidy flow being turned off, and within 10 years the Pedersens and the Raineys were buying more land. Now the Pedersens farm 2,200 beef and dairy cattle, grow animal fodder and raise 150 acres of plantation forest.
Pedersen’s message to subsidy-rich farmers in the Northern Hemisphere if they lose their supports: “Agriculture will become a net contributor to their economies, farming will become more vibrant and farmers will be doing a real job again.”
As the case of New Zealand shows, farming can make a positive contribution to the economy, once it is weaned off the subsidies. We economists tend to understate the costs of transition and the impact on real people’s lives – and we should do whatever we need to do to provide support for them – but we are right about the long term gains.
I begin with a confession that I am an admirer of Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to the Republic of Uzbekistan. He deserves praise for his courage and clarity in speaking out against vicious human rights abuses by the dictatorial regime of Islam Karimov, which (deplorably) receives funding and support from the US and the UK Governments. As well as calling the world’s attention to the repressive regime in Uzbekistan, Mr Murray has been outspoken against the use of information gathered through torture and the practice of extraordinary rendition.
Recently, Mr Murray has published a series of confidential documents which purport to show that the UK Government government knowingly received information extracted by the Uzbekistan government using torture. This revelation has caused quite a storm in the blogosphere, including at Bloggerheads and at Daily Kos.
Mr Murray says (and the documents appear to confirm) that he warned the UK Government that information being passed on by the Uzbek security services was torture-tainted. But in a thoughtful post, another former Ambassador, Sir Brian Barder (who happens to be my father) makes an important distinction between using information tainted by torture as evidence in court (which is, and should be, inadmissable) and acting upon intelligence, however obtained, as the basis of further investigation.
As my father says, if our security services get information about a possible terrorist attack they should investigate it further, knowing that information gathered under duress of torture is likely to be far less reliable than information from other sources. That is what Mr Murray says has been happening, and it isn’t obvious to me that it it is either ethically wrong or illegal.
Furthermore, I don’t think UK Government Ministers have ever said that we don’t, or shouldn’t, act upon information even it is has been obtained by torture. So it not clear to me that Mr Murray’s documents demonstrate that the Government has in any way misled us about receiving or using such information.
I suppose it might be said that our willingness to receive and use information obtained from torture somehow encourages the Uzbek government to torture people that they otherwise wouldn’t. But given the nature of that regime, I doubt if it makes any difference to them if we do, or don’t, use the information they provide.
What Mr Murray is surely right about is the need for the UK and US to be much more robust in isolating the brutal, dictatorial regime and putting maximum economic and political pressure for change (read Mr Murray’s comments on my father’s blog for some idea of the nature of the government). It is deplorable that the relationship between the Uzbek government and the US or UK is sufficiently friendly for us to be receiving any intelligence information at all from their security services, let alone doing anything to encourage them to torture people.
So on this precise point, I don’t think Mr Murray is right, as it is not necessarily ethically wrong, nor is it illegal, for our services to use whatever information they can get in the fight against terrorism; and it is not clear to me that our Ministers have ever said otherwise.
The US Senate is choking on the US-UK Extradition Treaty (full text pdf) because they are concerned that it might adversely affect civil liberties of people living in the United States. The irony is that the treaty protects those liberties much better than it protects the liberties of British citizens. But we have no Senate to protect us.
The proposed extradition treaty was signed on March 31, 2003 by US Attorney General, John Ashcroft, and the British Home Secretary David Blunkett. It was transmitted by the President to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in April 2004, and was considered by them on 15 November 2005. The Committee hearings were held in private and no transcript has been published, so we don’t know exactly what happened, but it appears that the Committee declined to vote on the treaty. This is a major problem for the passage of the treaty, as the the full Senate cannot consider the treaty until the Committee has approved it.
Opposition to the treaty in the US is based on fears that it removes the exception for political offences, allows for extradition even if no US law has been broken, removes any statute of limitations, applies retroactively, and allows the UK authorities to try a person for an offence other than that for which he or she was originally extradited. The failure of the Committee on Foreign Relations to vote on the treaty is the result of opposition from American Civil Liberties Union (which probably doesn’t matter the Republican-controlled Senate) and from the Ancient Order of Hibernians and other Irish-American organisations (which probably does matter).
If the treaty removes liberties from US citizens it do so even more from people under the jurisdiction of the UK. Under the existing 1972 treaty, the US has to produce evidence sufficient to make a case to answer under UK law, whilst the UK has to satisfy a “probable cause” test for extradition from the US. (These are broadly similar in effect: the requirement for prima facie evidence is probably a little more onerous than the requirement to show probable cause.) Under the new treaty American prosecutors no longer have to provide prima facie evidence in order to extradite a citizen from the United Kingdom. Article 8 of the treaty only requires the US to provide a statement of the facts of the offence only. By contrast, Article 8.3(c) of the treaty requires UK prosecutors to supply information in an extradition request providing a “reasonable basis to believe that the person sought committed the offence for which extradition is requested”.
I have upgraded to WordPress 2.0 this morning. It took less than ten minutes and seems to be working fine. Not much changed from the point of view of the reader, as far as I can see; but it looks a bit different for the blogger. Kudos to all the team who put WordPress together and allow us all to use it.
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