Owen abroad

Archive for May, 2006

I have been a vegetarian since I was a teenager, and I wear plastic rather than leather shoes.  I do this because I believe that animals have a rights, and that it is wrong to kill animals simply for pleasure.

I do not regard this as a purely personal choice: I would readily vote for a political party which was committed to making it a criminal offence to eat an animal for pleasure. 

Even so I would have no hesitation in eating an animal if my life depended on it. To say that animals have rights is not the same as saying that they have the same rights as humans.  (I would also have few qualms about a group of people killing and eating a fellow passenger in a shipwreck if there is no other way to survive.  Rights can be trumped by other rights.)

I believe that the qualitities that attract moral consideration – essentially, consciousness and especially self-consciousness – are present in many animals but are more significant in humans than in guinea pigs and rats. I believe that a human being has a more signficant claim on our moral attention than a guinea pig.

I today signed ‘The People’s Petition‘ supporting the use of animals in medical research in the UK.  The petition says

‘I believe that medical research is essential for developing new medical and veterinary treatments.  I understand that finding safe and effective treatments and medicines requires some studies using animals. 

I believe that medical research using animals, carried out to the highest standards of care and welfare, and where there is not alternative available, should continue in the UK.

I believe that people involved in medical research using animals have a right to work and live without fear of intimidation or attack.’

I do not support animal testing for cosmetics.  But I believe that the good to mankind of medical research far exceeds the harm done to animals.  I understand that animal models are not perfect measures of the risk and benefit to humans, but they are not, as the critics would have us believe, useless. They provide essential information that saves millions of lives and reduces suffering and disability. Even as a committed member of the vegetarian jihad, I therefore support the controlled use of animal testing.

Clare Short in The New Statesman writes in praise of the World Bank:

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.

According to BBC news the government’s clamp-down on junk food in schools has led to a black market in the playground:

Ring leaders are buying bars of chocolate and packets of crisps in bulk, and making small profits by surreptitiously selling on to sugar-craving classmates.

Even if the school started selling these things again, we’d still buy from these boys as they’re not so expensive 16-year-old school girl  "You can get a good deal from the boys selling sweets," says a 16-year-old pupil at a respectable comprehensive in south London. "They sell them cheaper than the tuck shop used to."

She claims that three boys in her year are selling junk food to fellow pupils. And it seems that they are cartelising the market: one boy sells crisps, another chocolate, and the third sweets – "chewy sweets and hard sweets and things like that," says the pupil, who asked not to be identified.

"Our school has a healthy eating policy, so the shop and the canteen stopped selling crisps and things. Not long after, these three boys kind of took things over. Now we all know where to go if we want something like that to eat."

You shouldn’t laugh, really – selling sugar to kids is no funnier than selling other addictive and harmful drugs to vulnerable people.   But it is encouraging to hear that an entrpreneurial spirit is flourishing among the British youth.

After all, what are schools for if they don’t teach economics? In today’s lesson, we have learned that markets will generally find a way to close an artificially-created gap between supply and demand; and Government regulations rarely have the effects that the policy-maker intended.

Alex Tabarook has written an open letter on immigration from the economics community:

Immigration is the greatest anti-poverty program ever devised. The American dream is a reality for many immigrants who not only increase their own living standards but who also send billions of dollars of their money back to their families in their home countries—a form of truly effective foreign aid.. America is a generous and open country and these qualities make America a beacon to the world. We should not let exaggerated fears dim that beacon.

Economists from any political background are invited to sign. I agree, of course, and have emailed to say so (though I am far less eminent than many of the economists who have already signed up.)

Personally, I would go further. My sympathies are with Chris Dillow, who argues for free immigration.  He makes this interesting point:

I’m not saying here that immigrants should have rights to welfare benefits. They have a liberty right to live where they like, not a claim right upon our money (ta, Norm).  I suspect most hostility to immigration is based upon the failure to see this distinction.

Read the rest of this entry »

The BBC news reports that

Nigeria’s Senate has thrown out a move to allow President Olusegun Obasanjo to seek a third term in office next year – an issue which has divided the country.

Under current Nigerian law, President Obasanjo is due to stand down in May 2007 at the end of his two terms in office. There has been a heated national debate about the constitutional amendment that would have allowed him to stand again (he has never actually declared an intention to do so). Some feared that allowing a President to remain in office might permit a President to stay in office too long.

Nothing is as simple as it seems in Nigeria, however. Many of the political figures who helped put Mr Obasanjo in office have felt that he has not rewarded them as extravagantly as they had hoped. So the decision not to allow President Obasanjo a third term – particularly the opposition of the Senate – may not reflect a mature decision to ensure democratic renewal so much as a protest against the relatively clean Obasanjo government.

Given the tensions between the Muslim north and the Christian south of Nigeria, there may be a period of instability as different groups battle it out for the succession.

I’ve got a piece up on the CGD blog about a new evaluation of budget support, which finds that budget support helps to improve capacity for financial management and accountability in developing countries. 

I’ve been a long-time advocate of budget support, as I think it is a very important way to reduce some of the possible negative impacts of aid, such as undermining the systems of recipient governments, and reducing their accountability. It is good that the anecdotal evidence on which the policy is based has been backed up by this more comprehensive, rigorous and independent review.

I’m a bit surprised by the OECD press release about the evaluation (pdf) which is much more nuanced about the findings than the evaluation report itself (5Mb pdf here).

Hilary Benn, the UK development minister, was more effusive:

Mr Benn said Britain provided 25% of its aid directly to governments and, in addition to boosting health and education spending, there had been better management of public finances, greater transparency and more effective coordination between donors. …

The development secretary said he reserved the right to stop donating to  governments that failed to meet expected standards of governance and human rights. Britain has cut off aid to Ethiopia and Uganda over alleged human rights abuses, and in Zimbabwe the UK is
prepared to back only specific projects, such as HIV/Aids assistance.

See also the BBC report here.

William Easterly and Jeff Sachs make a living by disagreeing with each other, though it seems that there is actually quite a bit of common ground.  The Los Angeles Times has a head-to-head (free registration required).   So far, Easterly is beating Sachs in the readers’ poll 2:1. 

Here are the money points:

William Easterly:

The end of poverty will come as a result of homegrown political and economic reforms (which are already happening in many poor countries), not through outside aid. The biggest hope for the world’s poor nations is not Bono, it is the citizens of poor nations themselves.

Jeff Sachs:

Instead of pointing to failures, we need to amplify the successes — including the green revolution, the global eradication of smallpox, the spread of literacy and, now, the promise of the Millennium Villages.

My views, for what they are worth, are as follows:

• Easterly is right to challenge central planning – there are no examples in which it has worked.
• Sachs is right that aid can, and does, work.  Saying – as Easterly does – that we know that aid doesn’t work from the fact that Africans are still poor is like
  saying that modern medicine is ineffective as people still get sick.
• Though central plans are not the answer, there is too little coordination – we could do better if we reduced duplication & contradiction, learned more from success, and maximised synergies between interventions. 
• Sachs’s villages will prove nothing, even if they are successful. They simply cannot be scaled.  Easterly’s label of "Potemkin villages" is on the mark.
• Easterly is right to complain about the corrosive impact of corruption.  But very little of the corruption in developing countries is fuelled by aid – most of it flows from the private sector (for example, in kickbacks for oil contracts).  We all want more private sector involvement in developing countries; but Easterly is kidding himself if he thinks this will be less corrupt than aid.
• Aid agencies are "devising specific, definable tasks that could actually help people and for which the public could hold them accountable" as Easterly thinks they should, and using the money for medicines, clean water, bed nets, text books, and improving the environment for business.  But there is too little aid money to do enough of this.  Three million people die each year of vaccine-preventable diseases alone.  That is why the agencies also have to run a "glitzy but unrealistic campaign to end world poverty".
• Sachs may well be right that "An African green revolution, health revolution and connectivity revolution are all within reach."  Now that would be something.

Tim Worstall’s roundup is here.

I wrote earlier this week about China’s growing role in Africa.  Here are six further insights into the implications of China’s push into Africa. Read the rest of this entry »

This caught my eye in the Number 10 morning press briefing from 4 May 2006

Asked if the Prime Minister had sanctioned a peerage to Peter Law, the PMOS said that it was not only a party matter, but also, as people knew, the PMOS did not talk about the nomination process for the House of Lords.

The House of Lords are our legislators, for chrissake. They make our laws. And the official spokesman of the person who chooses them is not allowed to talk about the process for putting them there?

According to this BBC report, the Government is to back down over the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which would have given ministers the power to alter legislation without the approval of Parliament.

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.

Please tell me that the following are not controversial:

• courts, not civil servants or politicians, should determine what punishment a criminal deserves, based on the individual circumstances of the crime;
• foreigners should be punished no more harshly, and no less, than a UK citizen. 

I think it is downright racist to have a policy of imposing a punishment on foreigners that is harsher than you would impose on UK citizens in the same circumstances.

It is worrying that the Home Office was unable to carry out its policy of deporting foreigners after their release.   But moving to a policy of deporting all foreigners, irrespective of whether that was the punishment imposed by the sentencing judge, would be the biggest over-reaction since the Dangerous Dogs Act. 

Update: Bondwoman at The Sharpener is spot on about this.

Abraham McLaughlin in the Christian Science Monitor has been writing for some time about the growing role of China in Africa. 

China is increasingly making its presence felt on the continent – from building roads in Kenya and Rwanda to increasing trade with Uganda and South Africa. … Under the auspices of the UN, the China-Africa
Business Council opened this month, headquartered in China, to boost
trade and development. It has peacekeepers in Liberia and has
contributed to construction projects in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Zambia,
though critics say it is using these projects to garner goodwill that
it can tap into during prickly issues like Taiwan’s independence or UN
face-offs with the US.

It seems to me that this is an example of China’s capacity to take the long view; seeing Africa not as a problem but as an opportunity and recognising the value for China’s own prosperity (and the security of its energy supplies) of building economic and political partnerships there.

The industrialised countries of Europe and North America have largely abandoned Africa, providing sticking plaster aid while refusing to allow Africa to trade fairly in agricultural and textile products. We have patronized, lectured and bullied; propped up some of the most vile regimes of the 20th century; and allowed (indeed, encouraged) our companies to bribe their way into sweetheart deals for oil, minerals and other natural resources, resources which are happily returned by the corrupt beneficiaries to bank accounts in Europe.

China’s engagement in Africa is in some ways problematic.  China is less troubled by the human rights record of some of the countries with which it is building new partnerships, such as Zimbabwe; and in some countries such as Sudan its actions have broken the well-intended donor cartel which has sought to bring pressure to bear.   But having neglected Africa for thirty years – despite repeated warnings that it was not in our economic, security or political interests to do so – we in the West can hardly complain now that China is stepping in to fill the vacuum.    We should not forget the damage we did to Africa during the cold war, when the Soviet Union sponsored monsters like Mengistu while Europe and America propped up equally repugnant regimes like those of Mobutu and Eyadema. 

On the positive side, perhaps this might at last herald a new, more positive scramble for Africa: this time, a scramble for investment and trade.  This suggests we need a way to constrain the behaviour of all the economic powers, through transparency and codes of investment, to ensure that Africa benefits from renewed interest in the continent and does not again suffer as board-full of geopolitical pawns.

Ethan Zuckerman asks:

If the Chinese become a dominant investor on the continent, will we see
a shift in African alignment, from the US to China? And will anyone in
the US notice before the oil and other natural resources in Africa are
spoken for?