Owen abroad

Archive for June, 2008

Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, Pablo Querubín and James A Robinson nail it:

One can find instances where the root of these distortionary policies is in mistaken economic theories. But this is the exception rather than the rule. Few policymakers create insurmountable entry barriers, hyperinflations or large budget deficits because they think this is good for the economy. Instead, the root of distortions lies in political economy. In most instances, bad policies are adopted because of political economy constraints and distorted incentives facing politicians in many societies with poor general institutions, such as weak checks and balances and lack of political accountability.

This seems to me exactly right; and it is something that not everybody understands.

Here is the Marie Stopes team for the Olympic Day Ring Road Relay yesterday. Each team of 12 people ran a kilometre each on the newly built ring road, between Meganagna and Bole. It was an out-and-back route, so we got to see the elite athletes going past. Haile Gebrselassie presented the prizes at the finish.

I have to say it isn’t easy to run a kilometre anyway – it is a lung-busting, all out effort – but it is harder still with the heat and pollution of the Addis ring road.

And this is what power-athletes have for breakfast.

I’ve not seen much press coverage of the 2008 DATA report which aims to hold donors to account for meeting the promises they gave in 2005. This year’s report finds that rich countries have so far given only one seventh of the extra aid they promised. This year, the report (with its celebrity backers, Bob Geldof and Bono) singles out France as falling particularly far behind.

As the report says:

change remains incremental and tremendous success stories on the ground are not being taken to scale in the manner necessary to realise the shared goals of the international community

According to the FT:

DATA found that the increase in aid to Africa amounted to an average of $1bn a year from 2005-07, while countries were expected to give an additional $2.6bn in 2008. But this was far short of the extra $6.4bn needed this year to keep the G8 countries on track to meet their $50bn target.

I would be trying to beg, steal or borrow tickets for the Ethiopiques concert at the Barbican Hall, London, on Friday June 27. Here is an extract from an article in the weekend FT: Raider of the lost archives:

The golden age of Ethiopian music ran from 1969 to 1978. In the last years of Haile Selassie’s reign, censorship relaxed sufficiently for an outpouring of musical creativity. Musicians thronged the nightclubs of Addis Ababa and about 500 singles and 30 albums were recorded in that period. …

Ethiopian musicians, who had remained aloof from musical developments in the rest of Africa, mixed these influences from American R&B with their own music into something distinctive and strange. At the time, it was denounced. “When you read the press of the time”, says Falceto, “there are polemics against abandoning the culture and so on.” …

Many of the musicians whose 1970s heydays are captured on the Ethiopiques series are still working, mostly playing for the vast Ethiopian diaspora, more than 1m-strong in the US alone. Ahmed and the influential arranger and keyboard player Mulatu Astatké both live there, working largely with American bands. At the Barbican, they will be joined by Alèmayèhu Eshèté, who channels the spirit of James Brown, and by the saxophonist Gétachèw Mèkurya. Instrumental support will come from the Either/Orchestra, a Boston-based group.

(Hat tip to my Mum for spotting the article and sending me the link.)

Every day, about a 120 children come to get lunch at Beza le Hiwot, a day-centre at near the Merkato in Addis Ababa.

Their food is provided by Our Father’s Kitchen, set up a year ago by Yasser and Manal Bagersh who own a couple of restaurants here in Addis. Their kitchens provide food every day for these children, most of whom are living with HIV.

It costs 217.20 birr (about $20) a month to feed a child every day. A decent meal is an essential part of staying healthy for a child living with AIDS – the drugs make you sick on an empty stomach – and the simple provision of this meal enables these children to go to school. With this simple investment, Yasser and Manal are transforming the lives of these children.

They want to expand the programme and they are launching a pledge campaign. Yasser is setting up a website for people to donate; until then you can pick up a sponsorship form at The Lime Tree Cafe or email ourfatherskitchen@yahoo.com.

Guzzling coffee may cut heart disease – health – 16 June 2008 – New Scientist

The researchers found that women who drank four to five cups per day were 34% less likely to die of heart disease, while men who had more than five cups a day were 44% less likely to die.

The Cabinet Office has now published guidance for civil servants for blogging and participation in online sites.

How the Civil Service Code applies to online participation

The Civil Service Code applies to your participation online as a civil servant or when discussing government business. You should participate in the same way as you would with other media or public forums such as speaking at conferences.

Disclose your position as a representative of your department or agency unless there are exceptional circumstances, such as a potential threat to personal security. Never give out personal details like home address and phone numbers.

Always remember that participation online results in your comments being permanently available and open to being republished in other media. Stay within the legal framework and be aware that libel, defamation, copyright and data protection laws apply. This means that you should not disclose information, make commitments or engage in activities on behalf of Government unless you are authorised to do so. This authority may already be delegated or may be explicitly granted depending on your organisation.

Also be aware that this may attract media interest in you as an individual, so proceed with care whether you are participating in an official or a personal capacity. If you have any doubts, take advice from your line manager.

Good luck to civil servants as they try to implement this. I had rather a torrid time when the Mail on Sunday chose to attack me for my previous blog.

Simon Dickson has more.

Clare Lockhart in Prospect Magazine June 2008 issue 147 (pay firewall):

We would like to tell you the story of $150m going up in smoke,” said the young villager. “We heard on the radio that there was going to be a reconstruction programme in our region to help us rebuild our houses after coming back from exile, and we were very pleased.”

This was the summer of 2002. The village was in a remote part of Bamiyan province, in Afghanistan’s central highlands, and several hours’ drive from the provincial capital—utterly cut off from the world. UN agencies and NGOs were rushing to provide “quick impact” projects to help Afghan citizens in the aftermath of war. $150m could have transformed the lives of the inhabitants of villages like this one.

But it was not to be, as the young man explained. “After many months, very little had happened. We may be illiterate, but we are not stupid.

So we went to find out what was going on. And this is what we discovered: the money was received by an agency in Geneva, who took 20 per cent and subcontracted the job to another agency in Washington DC, who also took 20 per cent. Again it was subcontracted and another 20 per cent was taken; and this happened again when the money arrived in Kabul. By this time there was very little money left; but enough for someone to buy wood in western Iran and have it shipped by a shipping cartel owned by a provincial governor at five times the cost of regular transportation. Eventually some wooden beams reached our villages. But the beams were too large and heavy for the mud walls that we can build. So all we could do was chop them up and use them for firewood.”

My current work is about how we can make aid more transparent, so that this kind of thing does not happen.

I’ve been enjoying a new technique for losing weight.

First, eat or drink something that does not completely agree with you, in a tropical country like Ethiopia.

Then spend three days as fluids gush from every orifice, like a three-cornered fountain in a town square.  The fever flushes and shivers last only a day, and the headaches only for two.

(It seems to defy the laws of physics that you can lose more than your own body-weight in water, but I never understood the thing about which way water swirls down a plughole at the Equator either.)

By the third day, your throat may be sore from the acidic vomit, and you may not have regained your appetite, but you’ll be a lot lighter than you were on Thursday afternoon.

We are still in a hotel, so I don’t have bathroom scales to measure the effect. But I estimate that my weight must now be slightly less than zero.

I’ll keep taking sachets of oral dehydration salts in the hope that my equilibrium will be restored.

The thing you notice most flying in to Addis Ababa is the amount of construction everywhere.  This part of Addis, the Bole area, is full of shops and restaurants, and new houses and hotels are being built everywhere.

Addis has always benefited from having plenty of great coffee shops (coffee did, by some accounts, originate in Ethiopia).  Now many of them have free wireless internet too – like the Swiss Cafe, which has this splendid sculpture outside its door.

With the traffic and pollution, this part of Addis feels more like Los Angeles than Berkeley.  But inside the coffee shop – paying about 20p for an excellent cappucino and free wireless – you could almost be in the Bay Area.

Thilo Thielke in Der Spiegel yesterday:

Development aid is a planned economy, even if it doesn’t have a plan. The belief that food shortages can be overcome in a planned economy is one that has already proved disastrously wrong in the former Soviet Union, North Korea and Cuba. One has to feel sorry for the Africans for their continued role as human guinea pigs. …

A series of African intellectuals is currently calling on people to finally just let Africa be … Trade, they say, is a much better solution to the problem than aid is. They also say that property and land need to be privatized and that subsidizing dictators needs to come to an end. They see the cure in the opposite of development aid. It would be a very valuable effort.

I think this is grossly overstated. But there is something in the some of these thoughts:

• that development work is too often “a planned economy without a plan”;
• that aid dependence can be a problem, especially if the donors do not follow best practice; and
• that trade would be better than aid (but both is better still, in my view, if the aid is done right).