Owen abroad

Archive for February, 2009

Here is a job I might have applied for if I were in London: Director of Digital Engagement:

Develop a strategy and implementation plan for extending digital engagement across Government

But I’m quite glad not to be eligible. Here are some phrases from the job description that should give pause for thought to anyone with experience of Government:

… You will manage a small team, directly, but will have to manage relationships with a wide group of senior officials across Government. This will require developing working arrangements in which departmental officials feel they are accountable to the Head of Digital Engagement without the benefit of a formal line management arrangement…..

… you will have to develop these relationships from scratch in a pressured environment in which Ministerial expectations of delivery are high.

… You will have a small budget

… Within two years the use of world class digital engagement techniques should be embedded in the normal work of Government

Or, in plain English, the post will have no staff, no budget, no power, and yet Ministers expect you to see to it that within two years the UK Government will make world class use of digital engagement.

Good luck to whoever gets this job!

Alex De Waal writes:

The last ten years has been a remarkable experiment in using official development assistance (ODA) as a motor for development in Africa (and other developing countries too). It has been a bonanza for the aid industry and especially the favoured elements such as HIV/AIDS, which have often found themselves in the remarkable situation in which resource availability is not a binding constraint.

… But, aid seems to displace the other parts of the development debate. Of the other pillars, only debt relief has seen any significant progress in the last ten years. Trade reform and economic governance are much harder, and far less progress has been made.

Aid donors and recipients alike have good reason for preferring to focus on aid rather than trade or governance.

I see two things wrong with this argument.

First, it has not been a bonanza for aid. We have just about recovered aid volumes to the level they were before they collapsed at the end of the cold war.  We are still talking about 20 cents per person in poverty per week in Africa.  It is hardly a lot of money.

Second, I understand the argument that aid may have been a displacement activity for rich countries unable or unwilling to make progress on issues such as trade, reducing conflict, a fair deal on climate change, or extending migration opportunities.  I agree that these issues are important – and that they are potentially more important than aid.  But I am much less clear that there really is a trade-off between aid and making progress on these issues.  How do we know? 

Alex is making a bold claim that aid has delayed progress on these issues.  Given the enormous good that aid does, the people who call for governments to pay less attention to aid had better be sure that this really will unblock progress on the other policy issues that will compensate for the loss of aid that will result.  I am not so sure that they are right.

David Roodman at the Center for Global Development has begun an “open book” about microfinance. He is publishing chapters as he goes, with space for readers to comment.

As well as an interesting way of working, this threatens to be a very interesting topic. David is not starry eyed about the role that microfinance (and other financial services for the poor) can play in development – he’ll bring an unsual degree of rigour and balance to this debate.

The latest edition of Development Drums is now online.  I fear it may not be of universal interest.   The Chair of the  Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the OECD, and the Director of the Development Cooperation Directorate of the OECD, talk about whether donors are living up to their promises, and the next steps on aid effectiveness.

I was planning to record another episode today, but the internet connection here in Addis wasn’t good enough.  I’ll try again soon – and please let me know if there is someone in particular you want me to have on.

If you have an iPod and iTunes, the easiest way to listen to Development Drums is to go to iTunes on your computer, go to the Apple store, go to podcasts and search for Development Drums. (It is free, of course). Then if you subscribe, iTunes will in future download new episodes as they are released.

Interesting idea from Homi Kharas at the Brookings Institution

That is why the G20 should consider declaring a development emergency for 2009. They should urge aid agencies to take every step possible to accelerate the disbursement of already approved funds. They should support staff and managers for taking risks to speed up the flow of money. Their representatives on the boards of these agencies should monitor progress. Poor countries need the money, and they need it now. Rich countries have already paid for this. Now they just need to demand speedier results.

I can see how that would help in the short run (though presumably the financial crisis may be leading many aid agencies to do the exact opposite – shifting expenditure “to the right” is one way that donor countries may be coping with fiscal effects of the crisis.

But I can’t see how that would help in the long run. What we need is an automatic fiscal stabiliser that increases aid to poor countries in a crisis. One way to do this would be set up entitlement programmes – safety nets below which nobody can fall – and accept that the cost of these programmes will automatically go up when the economy turns down.

Our Sunday runs start on Entoto, the mountain to the edge of Addis Ababa.  We start and finish at an altitude of about  3,000m.  Here are some things we’ve seen on our runs in the last two weeks:

• 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.

Alex Singleton is the man who called himself the Globalisation Institute for a while, which he used as a platform to argue against things that would help poor people, like fair trade and aid.

When that folded (presumably on account of talking rubbish) he now seems to write leadrs for the Daily Telegraph.

The always excellent Chris Dillow explains why Alex is talking rubbish again, this time about about domestic economic policy:

Alex Singleton claims that today’s cut in Bank rate will prolong the recession. I think he’s confused.

Jean Herskovits says that the Obama administration should adopt a hippocratic Africa policy

The past decade of U.S. Africa policy has made some wish most for policies that would “first, do no harm.” A Hippocratic test could be useful for President Obama’s new Africa team at the NSC and the State Department, as they reflect on the harm that has punctuated their predecessors’ policies towards many African countries.

I’m more in favour of a hippocratic policy than a hypocritical one. But though “first, do no harm” it is often cited as a valuable guiding principle, when you think about it is not a very good rule of thumb.  (In many respects there are parallels with the so-called “precautionary principle”, which also strikes me as heavily overrated as a guiding light.)

Suppose someone had argued as follows in 1994:  “Intervention to stop the genocide in Rwanda might do harm.  We don’t fully understand Rwandan politics, and we don’t know how to disengage from a military intervention.  Our rule is: first, do no harm. Therefore we will not intervene to prevent the genocide.”  Interesting argument, wrong answer.

Actually, Anthony Lake (President Clinton’s National Security Adviser) did say something a bit like that. He said on May 5 1994:

We have to ask the hard questions about where and when we can
intervene. And the reality is that we cannot often solve other people’s
problems; we can never build their nations for them …”

The literal application of the hippocratic rule prevents policy-makers from taking risks where there is a possibility of doing harm but where the good could massively outweigh it.  If we adopt a policy of never doing harm, we will limit the amount of good we can do.

The following seem to me good principles:

• think about the wider and long term consequences of your decisions
• only do things were the good is likely to outweigh the harm
• where possible limit the harm you do

That said, I agree with Ms Herskovits that the US has made policy mistakes in Nigeria, Kenya and Somalia.  The answer is not the Hippocratic Oath but more often choosing values and long-term interest in democracy and peace over short term strategic considerations.

According to Iqbal Quadir in the Wall Street Journal

Aid empowers bureaucracies, promotes statism, and weakens government incentives to boost tax revenues through growth. Economic assets are often kept in the hands of the state, leading to monopolies, stagnation and extortion. All of this hurts entrepreneurs, who have the potential to create wealth and promote governmental accountability.

The history of Western economic and political advancement illustrates that it is the economic strength of citizens — not governments — that gives rise to checks and balances

This seems a plausible theory, but I’ve yet to see any evidence for the claim that aid reduces the accountability of governments.  If anything there seems to be a modest positive correlation between aid and government taxation (that is, governments that receive more aid also tend to tax their citizens more  – though perhaps taxes would be even higher without the aid).  And I’ve never seen any proper analysis of whether accountability goes up in proportion to taxes or whether there is a threshold (are Denmark and Sweden more accountable than the UK and France because they have a higher tax rate?). 

I also observe that many of the most active political movements draw their strength from people who pay relatively little tax, such as students.

So my take is: maybe. Show us the numbers.

• Ngaire Woods on what Africa needs from the G20
• Bill Easterly’s new AidWatch blog
• The Global Crisis Debate in the run up to the G20 (moderated by Dani Rodrik)
• Simon Maxwell’s reflections on Davos

We predicted a “quadruple whammy” for developing countries in the financial crisis. The value of existing aid commitments will fall; donors are less likely to meet those commitments; financing needs of developing countries have increased; and non-aid finance (such as investment and remittances) will fall.

The Irish Government is first up with aid cuts:

Taoiseeach Brian Cowen announced the cuts in the Dáil today as part of a plan to secure €2 billion in savings to the Exchequer. The Overseas Development Aid budget will be cut from €891 million to €796 million.

…  Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin and Minister of State for Overseas Development Peter Power defended the “difficult” decision. They said that despite the cuts, Ireland remains the sixth most generous donor internationally in per capita terms.

“The size of our aid programme is linked to our own economy, and specifically to GNP growth,” the ministers said in a joint statement.

The only thing that can be said in favour of Ireland’s announcement is that they are at least being open about their failure to meet their obligations. Other countries – namely:  Italy, Germany, Portugal, Greece and France – will not meet their international commitments either but have not had the guts to say so.

And CAFOD have estimated that the financial crisis will reduce UK aid by $41bn over 7 years. (There is no sign of the paper on their website, so here is a copy.)