The good news on maternal mortality: Uncertainty about everything except the advocates' response

UPDATE 4/15, 4pm EDT: see end of post. The NYT lead story today (as well as other media) reports a new study with some very good news:

For the first time in decades, researchers are reporting a significant drop worldwide in the number of women dying each year from pregnancy and childbirth, to about 342,900 in 2008 from 526,300 in 1980.

So happy about success! Alas, the universal rule with media reports of development statistics is that they are mishandled so badly that they raise more questions than answers, such as:

(1) why is this reported as an absolute number rather than a maternal mortality rate (usually per 100,000 live births), which is the usual thing of interest, and would show even better news because of the large population increase since 1980?

(2) why attempt to estimate it for the whole world rather than only for those countries that have the most solid data?

(3) it's well known that maternal mortality numbers over the years have been mostly made up, a problem that has only recently been (partially) corrected (i.e. sometime since 2000). The 1980 and 1990 numbers are worthless, so the headline-grabbing sentence above is the wrong way to present the findings. Indeed the NYT story notes:

the new study was based on more and better data, and more sophisticated statistical methods than were used in a previous analysis by a different research team that estimated more deaths, 535,900 in 2005.

The story cannot simultaneously report "more and better data" and report a trend "drop," since the new numbers will not be comparable to the old "less and inferior" data. We can't know from this story what part of the change is due to change in methods, and which is real.

The most clear and interesting thing to emerge from this story is this:

But some advocates for women’s health tried to pressure The Lancet into delaying publication of the new findings, fearing that good news would detract from the urgency of their cause, Dr. Horton said in a telephone interview.

“I think this is one of those instances when science and advocacy can conflict,” he said.

Dr. Horton said the advocates, whom he declined to name, wanted the new information held and released only after certain meetings about maternal and child health had already taken place.

He said the meetings included one at the United Nations this week, and another to be held in Washington in June, where advocates hope to win support for more foreign aid for maternal health from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Other meetings of concern to the advocates are the Pacific Health Summit in June, and the United Nations General Assembly meeting in December.

People have long accused aid officials and advocates of being afraid of putting themselves out of business by success, but it's rare that such an episode is documented so clearly.  Sad, very sad.

But there does seem to be some good news on maternal mortality in here somewhere, so let all non-self-interested people celebrate!

UPDATE: Columbia Journalism Review on 4/14 posted a story on the massive confusion caused by the press on both aspects of the story discussed here.

The magical 0.7 percent

The blog of Laurence Haddad, director of the UK-based Institute of Development Studies, pointed us towards the just-released manifestos of Britain’s Conservative and Labour parties. Both manifestos declare their intention to codify into law the development target of 0.7 percent of national income allocated to aid. From the Tories:

A new Conservative government will be fully committed to achieving, by 2013, the UN target of spending 0.7 per cent of national income as aid…We will legislate in the first session of a new Parliament to lock in this level of spending for every year from 2013.

The Labour Party:

We remain committed to spending 0.7 per cent of national income on aid from 2013, and we will enshrine this commitment in law early in the next Parliament.

While such a bipartisan commitment to ensure consistency of development funding is something the US could only aspire to, perhaps it is time for a word of caution on the origins and relevance of that target for our friends across the Atlantic, courtesy of Michael Clemens and Todd Moss:

First, the 0.7% target was calculated using a series of assumptions that are no longer true, and justified by a model that is no longer considered credible…. Second, we document the fact that, despite frequent misinterpretation of UN documents, no government ever agreed in a UN forum to actually reach 0.7%—though many pledged to move toward it. Third, we argue that aid as a fraction of rich country income does not constitute a meaningful metric for the adequacy of aid flows. It would be far better to estimate aid needs by starting on the recipient side with a meaningful model of how aid affects development.

The 2007 paper, Ghost of 0.7%: Origins and Relevance of the International Aid Target (ungated version here), gives a fascinating historical look into the machinery of global development cooperation, showing how the target came to be, and how promoting such a nonsensical target could be harmful. Their summary concludes:

The 0.7% target began life as a lobbying tool, and stretching it to become a functional target for real aid budgets across all donors is to exalt it beyond reason. That no longer makes any sense, if it ever did.

Criticism of Sachs video withdrawn

The links in our post Another blog criticizes a video by a certain famous economist have gone dead, and the critical post on the other blog site has been deleted.  They made this statement in direct communication:

The original post author has deleted the post, finding his words a bit too harsh and annoyance misplaced.

The original Sachs video, which was produced as part of a series by Ericsson,  is here.

Does health aid to governments make governments spend more on health?

If you’re not an economist, you might reasonably assume that the answer to this question is yes. The story might go something like this: aid agencies give money to poor country governments to distribute bed nets or give vaccinations, and those additional funds are added to whatever money the country was able to scrape together to spend on health before the donor came along. As a result of the health aid, the total amount of money spent on health increases. There is new evidence, from a study from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation published in the Lancet last week, showing that this story doesn’t describe what’s really going on. Overall, global public health financing shot up by 100 percent over the last decade, but the study’s authors found that on average, for every health aid dollar given, developing country government shifted between $.43 and $1.17 of their own resources away from health. The trend is most pronounced in Africa, which received the largest amount of health aid.

The finding that health aid substitutes for rather than complements existing government health spending has caused a mini- scandal in the press precisely because it runs so counter to people’s optimistic expectations, perpetuated by aid agencies’ fund-raising campaigns, about the level of control that donors can exert over the spending of developing country governments.

Economists, on the other hand, have been beating the dismal drum for a long time on this issue. In 1947, Paul Rosenstein-Rodin, then a deputy director at the World Bank, famously said, “When the World Bank thinks it is financing an electric power station, it is really financing a brothel.” Economists expect that aid will be at least partially fungible (that is, that aid money intended by donors for one sector or project can and will be used by governments interchangeably with funding for other priorities), and this prediction is borne out by empirical studies from the late 1980s on. The authors of a 2007 paper in the Journal of Development Economics observed, “While most economists assume that aid is fungible, most aid donors behave as if it is not.”

You might argue (as Owen Barder does in depth here) that recipient governments are acting rationally in response to erratic donor funding, which ebbs and flows according to donor priorities and how well the global community mobilizes fundraising around a particular issue in any given year. After all, doesn’t the donor community’s insistence on country ownership mean that they want poor country governments to be able to set their own budget priorities?

The problem is that aid agencies have long used the argument that earmarking aid for a specific project or sector is a credible way to force recalcitrant recipient country priorities into line with donor priorities—to coerce bad governments into making good decisions.

If  governments that don't prioritize their people's welfare respond to an influx of aid money by simply shifting their existing resources around to circumvent donor priorities (and we don’t know what is happening to the resources shifted away from health—they could be going to private jets and presidential palaces, or to education, infrastructure, or loan repayments, or really anything at all),  then the aid agency argument for project aid falls apart. The burden of proof correctly lies with the aid agencies to show that aid isn’t freeing up funds for bad governments to use badly.

The Lancet findings are scandalous, relative to the naïve but widespread belief that donors can use earmarked aid to force bad governments to behave.

Me and Lady Gaga

You are connected by “Six Degrees of Separation” to almost everyone. This surprising amount of connectedness was brought home to me when I realized that I knew a person who knew Lady Gaga (One Degree of Separation). The connection had nothing at all to do with my career or that of Stefani Germanotta, but only with our respective networks of family and friends. Economists have gotten as excited as anyone else by social networks. A previous blog post talked about intra-ethnic-group networks that are useful for enforcing contracts and deterring cheating. Another important social network function is spreading information. A paper forthcoming in the American Economic Review by Tim Conley and Chris Udry describes how Ghanaian farmers were more likely to succeed at growing pineapples for export the more successful were neighbors already growing pineapples. Pineapple growing is very sensitive to having too much or too little fertilizer, so it was useful that farmers could adapt their fertilizer use based on what had worked for their neighbors.

A similar paper finds that farmers in Mozambique are more likely to adopt a profitable new crop (sunflowers) if someone in their family and friends network had done so. They were somewhat less likely to do so if somebody in the village of the same religion (mainly Catholic v. Protestant) was an adopter, while it had no effect if someone in the village of a different religion was an adopter.

The conclusion is that social networks are a great way to spread success (although I have yet to benefit from Lady Gaga’s knowledge of how to do a music video that gets 175 million hits on YouTube). Unfortunately, networks can also explain persistent poverty, since the poor are out of luck if there is no success to spread in poor people’s social network.

Another blog criticizes a video by a certain famous economist

Update 4/13/10: see Aid Watch post above From ICTWorks.org post:

Sachs has a new video out about ending global poverty, and I find it very disturbing.....Sachs (and all the white people) sitting in very nice, even posh settings, but black people are filmed from a car in poverty settings. Does that mean we can take time and get face-to-face with whites, but best to stay in the car and drive by black people quickly?

Speaking of animals, what's up with the cameos of wild animals? Are they counted in global poverty numbers? Or does Sachs feel all of Africa is zebras and giraffes?

While his narration is palatable, I am really disappointed in the video work - too many stereotypes he should know better than to promote.

The video is on the blog site.

Needless to say, any opinions expressed here are those of another blog and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Aid Watch,  its bloggers, its sponsors, or any blood relative or social acquaintance of any of the above.

Famine Africa stereotype porn shows no letup

The UN takes the photographer to the "hungriest place on earth", Akobo, South Sudan (HT Wronging Rights). Then

The aid groups Save the Children and Medair have canvassed the Akobo community over the last week, searching for the hungriest children.

And surprise: you get the most horrific images possible of starving children, to be featured prominently on the Huffington Post, which reinforces the Western stereotype of "famine Africa."

An equivalent procedure would represent New Yorkers by the most horrific images possible of the homeless. But we don't do that because we don't have the stereotype that typical New Yorkers are homeless.

At least now I can update my references for my Africa class on disaster porn, which had relied on an old quote from Alex de Waal's classic book, Famine Crimes:

{Television producer in Somalia in 1992-93 said to Somali doctor}: “pick the children who are most severely malnourished” {to be photographed}

Michael Clemens won’t let up on the Millennium Villages + bonus links

It’s nice to see scholars bringing attention to the critical need for evaluation and informed public dialogue (not just “success stories” or short-term impact evaluation) for the Millennium Villages Project, which we have also covered on this blog. Michael Clemens of the Center for Global Development is currently carrying on a very revealing dialogue with Millennium Villages. In Michael’s first blog post which we blogged, he makes three central points:

1. The hundreds of thousands of people living in the Millennium Villages, present and future, deserve to know whether the project’s combination of interventions is backed up by good science.
2. Randomized evaluation is the best way to do this. While it may be too late to properly evaluate the first wave of villages, there is still time to conduct such a study for the next wave of villages.
3. The MVP evaluation should demonstrate long-term impact before it is scaled up.

In a subsequent post, Michael parses the curious non-answer he receives from the director of monitoring and evaluation for the MVP, Dr. Paul Pronyk. He breaks down—for those of us not intimately involved in the finer details of impact evaluation—the difference between true scientific evaluation and what the MVP says it is doing, namely “matched randomly selected comparison villages.”

What the MVP has done is something very different from…a rigorous evaluation.  First, village cluster A1 was chosen for treatment, for a range of reasons that may include its potential for responding positively to the project.  Then, long after treatment began, three other clusters that appear similar to A1 were identified — call these “candidate” comparison clusters A2, A3, and A4.  The fact that all three candidates were chosen after treatment in A1 began creates an enormous incentive to pick those candidates, consciously or unconsciously, whose performance will make the intervention in A1 look good.  Then the comparison village was chosen at random from among A2, A3, and A4.

Differences between the treated cluster and the comparison cluster might be due to the MVP. But those differences might also be due to how the original Millennium Village was chosen, and how the three candidate comparison villages were chosen.  This is not a hypothetical concern…

So, either the MVP director of evaluation does not understand evaluation...or he thinks we won't know the difference.

Dr. Pronyk promises the release of the MVP’s midpoint evaluation at some unspecified time later this year, and said they “look forward to an active discussion about the initial findings regarding poverty, hunger, and disease in the Millennium Villages.” We hope the scholarly community and the wider reading public concerned with development issues will give Dr. Pronyk precisely what he’s asking for.

Bonus Links

* Sounds a bit like a parody we wish we’d written….but it’s true. Yesterday’s NYT features this quote from a story on China’s bid to supply California with technology, equipment and engineers to build a high-speed railway, and to help finance its construction:

“We are the most advanced in many fields, and we are willing to share with the United States,” Zheng Jian, the chief planner and director of high-speed rail at China’s railway ministry, said.

* We’d be remiss not to mention this helpful timeline of celebrity aid to Africa featuring an interactive map from Mother Jones (and some additional commentary from Wronging Rights and Texas in Africa.)

The coming collapse of the aid system?

There are signs of coming collapse all around us.  The complexity of the system is accelerating, despite the good intentions of the Paris and Accra declarations, as the system struggles to cope with change.  Here is a graph showing the number of individual aid projects recorded in the AidData database:

This comes from the blog of Owen Barder. His apocalyptic musings were inspired by NYU professor Clay Shirky blogging about Joseph Tainter’s book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, which describes how advanced societies (the Romans, the Mayans) become inflexible and collapse rather than adapt in the face of stress.

Owen sees evidence for impending implosion of the aid system in the proliferation of aid projects (pictured above), the popularity of anti-aid views from figures like Dambisa Moyo and Andrew Mwenda, and emerging actors like China and the Gates Foundation that work to some degree outside the existing aid system.

The post is full of great examples illustrating the development bureaucracy truism that it is perversely much easier to make something more complex than it is to make it simpler. The most succinct: “Senegal has 82 individual aid coordination forums.” He also describes a recent donor meeting in Ethiopia intended to simplify and streamline the aid landscape in which each donor came prepared only to make the case for their essential involvement in every single sector.

Why should this be so? Owen observes that “the bureaucratic and political need to be involved in many sectors in every country is a far more powerful force than the intangible development benefits of simplification.” A new paper presented at the recent Aid Data launch conference argues that bilateral donors fractionalize their aid into smaller and smaller projects order to increase their control over aid expenditure.  Once again, it’s all about control and what makes good politics for the donor, not about what’s most effective for the recipient.

These examples and new research make it easy to follow the argument that the sector is doomed to become more and more complex. But what the apocalypse will look it – or if it will happen – is very unclear.

Dani Rodrik's unexpected personal insight into the Turkish political crisis

Certainly one would expect Dani Rodrik on his blog to have some inside knowledge on the confusing "military coup plot" trials in Turkey -- who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? But he has even more inside knowledge than you think: as he reveals in Foreign Policy, one of the generals arrested is his father-in-law.

Condolences to Dani and his family, and here's hoping justice and democracy prevail.

You want cell phone entrepreneurs, we’ll give you cell phone entrepreneurs

Last week we posted some cool maps showing the spread of cell phones especially in Africa over the last decade. We called this “a triumph of bottom-up entrepreneurial success,” but you weren’t convinced. You thought it was foreign direct investment (FDI). Provide more evidence that entrepreneurs are part of this picture, you said. Aid Watch never declines a challenge: 1) OK, it’s true that 52 percent of the African Market is dominated by 6 multinationals: Orange (France), Vodafone/Vodacom (UK/South Africa), Zain (Kuwait), MTN (South Africa), Moov (UAE), and Tigo (Luxembourg).  But that other 48 percent is the battleground of dozens more, many of them home-grown.  (Also we heard a rumor that South Africa is located somewhere in Africa.) To give an example from The White Man’s Burden:

Entrepreneur Alieu Conteh started building a cellular network in the Democratic Republic of the Congo … when it was still in the midst of its civil war in the 1990s. He couldn’t get foreign manufacturers to ship cellular towers into the country with rebel soldiers around, so he got local men to weld scrap metal into a makeshift tower. Demand exploded for Conteh’s phones, and in 2001 he formed a joint venture with the South African firm Vodacom. One illiterate fisherwoman who lives in the Congo without electricity relies on her cell phone to sell her fish. She can’t put the fish in a freezer, so she keeps them alive on a line in the river until customers call to place an order.

Sudanese-born entrepreneur Mo Ibrahim is another example. His mobile telecom company, Celtel, had about 5 million subscribers in 13 African countries when it was sold in 2004 for $3.4 billion. 100 Celtel employees, most of them African, earned more than $1 million from the sale. Celtel is now part of Kuwaiti-owned Zain, which serves 40 million subscribers in 17 African countries.

2) Being a successful mobile operator often requires big infrastructure investments, so it’s no surprise many of the first telecom firms to enter the African mobile market have been large. Multinationals investing in Africa to provide millions of Africans with essential service is a GOOD thing. Yes, the market needs more  effective regulation, increased competition, and lower end-user costs, but those trends are now happening.

3) Multinationals spur smaller entrepreneurs. The Nigerian telecom sector has created some 450,000 indirect jobs since it was liberalized in 2000. And Uganda’s five mobile operators provide employment for more than 100,000 people, who work for the operators directly or indirectly, selling airtime or handsets. An Economist article noted:

In 2003 Ms [Mary] Wokhwale was one of the first 15 women in Uganda to become “village phone” operators. Thanks to a microfinance loan, she was able to buy a basic handset and a roof-mounted antenna to ensure a reliable signal. She went into business selling phone calls to other villagers, making a small profit on each call. This enabled her to pay back her loan and buy a second phone. The income from selling phone calls subsequently enabled her to set up a business selling beer, open a music and video shop and help members of her family pay their children’s school fees.

4) Finally, farmers and fishermen now check prices in markets across the country before selling their goods, while unbanked buyers can make payments with mobile banking technologies. Individual entrepreneurs are beneficiaries of mobile technology’s spread in a big way.

This device WILL change the world

No, no, no, not THAT one!

I meant the one below:

It's going to be a long while before very many poor people have iPads, but there is already one TV for every 4 people in the world.  I remember being in a remote village in Ghana with 30 people crowded around a TV set, so 1 in 4 implies a VERY big reach for TV already. In the words of one my favorite development economists,  Charles Kenny in Foreign Policy:

In our collective enthusiasm for whiz-bang new social-networking tools like Twitter and Facebook, the implications of this next television age -- from lower birthrates among poor women to decreased corruption to higher school enrollment rates -- have largely gone overlooked despite their much more sweeping impact. And it's not earnest educational programming that's reshaping the world on all those TV sets. The programs that so many dismiss as junk -- from song-and-dance shows to Desperate Housewives -- are being eagerly consumed by poor people everywhere who are just now getting access to television for the first time. That's a powerful force for spreading glitz and drama -- but also social change.

Social change from soap operas? Kenny is referring to the research of U. Chicago Professor Emily Oster joint with Robert Jensen, which found in a rigorous study that the introduction of cable TV in rural India was associated with decreased acceptability of domestic violence, decreased preference for sons over daughters, and increased school enrollment for young children. Cable TV in India features mainly game shows and soap operas.

Similarly Eliana La Ferrara and co-authors found that soap operas reduced fertility in Brazil, a trend often associated with increased power for women.  The soap operas portrayed much smaller families than what actually exists in Brazil. The research suggested the soap operas were pretty important, because parents were naming their children after the  main characters on the telenovela in the year of birth.

More seriously, TV can spread health messages like hand-washing (which shot up in Ghana after a TV campaign).

Sorry, I have to go, it's time to watch Law & Order.

Here’s the real story on Twitter for earthquake relief

See this brilliant analysis.

Capitalism and the Jews

No, you have not just stumbled on a neo-Nazi website by mistake. This topic has long been radioactive for obvious reasons, but some scholars are finally getting over it, as shown by a great book by Jerry Z. Muller by the same title (Princeton U. Press, 2010). The obvious patterns of interest: (1)                           Some capitalists are Jews

(2)                           Some anti-capitalists are anti-Semites

Both facts have been caricatured. It does not follow from (1) that all Jews are capitalist exploiters, and it does not follow from (2) that all anti-capitalists are anti-Semites.

Jews were prominent in capitalist history in particular as financiers and traders (“middlemen”). Famous banking examples are the Rothschilds in Europe and the Guggenheims in New York. In Hungary in the 1920s, 85 percent of bank directors and owners were Jewish. Famous Jewish traders in America were the Filenes (yes, THAT department store) and Levi Strauss (a trader before he stumbled across that whole denim thing).

Trade and finance are what is known as “contract-intensive” sectors. Unlike cash-and-carry transactions, transactions in these sectors need to separate delivery and payment. The huge need for a mechanism to enforce contracts is because one party can always abscond with the money or goods. One informal mechanism to enforce contracts is doing transactions within a tightly knit ethnic group with high trust between its members, backed up by the threat of expulsion from the group if you cheat. A previous post discussed how many ethnic minorities form business networks.

The Jews just happened to form the largest networks in the two most critical sectors for the emergence of European capitalism – trade and finance. Unfortunately, these two sectors have also been the ones that attract the most hatred from those opposed to capitalism, who can only see unproductive middlemen, speculators, and financial tricksters.

Actually, this is how European Jews wound up in those sectors in the first place, since European Christians traditionally banned “usury” in finance and “speculation” in trading goods. They also often banned the Jews from landowning and agriculture. So the outsiders, the Jews, were forced into trade and finance. When the Industrial Revolution conferred wealth on people good at trade and finance , there was the tragic anti-Semitic backlash against Jews for operating in sectors they had been forced into by previous waves of anti-Semitism.

Hatred of trade and finance is still very much alive today, in both non-racist and anti-Semitic varieties. For the latter, take Osama bin Laden’s Letter to America in November 2002:

You are the nation that permits Usury, which has been forbidden by all the religions. Yet you build your economy and investments on Usury. As a result of this…the Jews have taken control of your economy…and now control all aspects of your life.

To keep reiterating over and over, it would be fallacious and unfair to equate any criticism of Finance (some of them very well-deserved) with anti-Semitism or Osama bin Laden. Indeed, another striking phenomenon that Muller discusses is that some Jews have also played prominent parts in anti-capitalism, beginning with the partly-Jewish Marx through Trotsky (the Nazis absurdly blamed the Jews for Both Capitalism and Communism), Israel’s strong socialist traditions, and continuing through some of today’s most prominent anti-globalization writers. I won’t try to analyze Jewish anti-capitalism here (read Muller).

Yet for those who ARE anti-Semitic, anti-capitalist, and anti-Western all at the same time today, anti-Semitism is providing a lot of the rocket fuel for the anti-capitalism and anti-Westernism. As Ian Buruma and others have pointed out, some anti-Western movements around the world today are drawing upon anti-capitalist and anti-Semitic ideas that originated in the West itself.

Does your age determine your political beliefs?

Great picture from Will Wilkinson (Via Yglesias, and originally  from OKCupid’s OKTrends ) I'm in the libertarian position of an 18 year old, even though I should be moving into the fascist quadrant in my 50s.

Miracles of spontaneous order: where to get a cab around NYU

The New York Times has this wonderful interactive feature today, where you can see where most cab pickups and dropoffs happen at any time of day on any day. It confirms a puzzling feature that I had already observed: getting a cab is hopeless at one corner, but if you move just one block over you are sure to get one. The map shows the number of cab pickups around NYU at 5pm on a Friday, the legendary time when it is most difficult to get a cab. Most of the immediate NYU area (around Elmer Holmes Bobst Library)  is a taxi desert, so you have to walk either west to Sixth Avenue (a well known hot spot along most of its length downtown), or east to Lafayette (for example, Astor Place).  One thing that has always puzzled me is that it's always very hard to get a cab on Broadway, running parallel to Lafayette  just one block west.

Here's one amateur theory: the less obvious hot spots (excluding train stations etc.) can emerge out of nothing.  Over time taxi customers expect to get a cab on one street corner. Then taxis are more likely to cruise that street corner because that's where the customers are.  Both customers and taxis keep going to that street corner more and more as both sides come to expect the other to behave that way. And bang, you have now gotten the 1,425,674th example of spontaneous order.

This is a good metaphor for development because....

Made-up acronym is as credible for poverty research as Harvard

Dean Karlan just ran a fascinating experiment (HT Chris Blattman):

We designed one that would help us optimize our advertising strategy while also settling an important score: which academic institution's rep pulls the most weight in cyberspace? Our ad was simple:

Poverty Research

Breakthroughs to Fight Poverty

By [randomized] Researchers

Inside the brackets in the third line, Google ads then randomly inserted one of nine university names, one of three acronyms (IPA, JPAL, or FAI) , one of three "impostor" acronyms (ITA, GTAM, and MAI) that were phonetically similar to the real acronyms, or one of three generic words (university, top, and academic).

Dean then shows the picture depicting the results on ad effectiveness. Dean discusses relative rankings of different universities, but I think it's more interesting how a made-up acronym (MAI -- a variation on a real acronym FAI, which I even doubt many people recognize) did as well as Harvard (or more generally about as well or better than any university named).

This seems to confirm something I had noticed already: development academics' respect for academic brand-names (or any other measure of academic merit)  is not shared by the development policy community. Why is this?

Getting unstuck from the boring rut of aid debates

This aid debate is starting to sound rehearsed. People really need to move on to different questions, and stop running the same conferences and forums.

This is the very sensible opinion of Chris Blattman on an aid discussion just published in the Yale Journal of International Affairs, which included yours truly and other better people. I am bored as anyone else with endlessly repeating the same arguments, and would dearly love to move on.

Hope flared briefly with yesterday’s story: Aid agencies announce they will be accountable to independent evaluators. As soon as this happens, I would be very happy to close Aid Watch and move on to other things.

By all means, let’s all try to find new arguments, new tactics of persuasion, new satires, new promises to not do satire, anything that will work to get out of this rut.

But when the actions you criticize continue unchanged, you have to keep criticizing those same actions. And when the people you are debating keep making the same arguments, you have to keep repeating the counter-arguments.

Professor Collier, in your contribution to YJIA, you do offer hope to spice up the discussion. In response to the question about “the risks …[of] military intervention as an acceptable development policy tool,” you say:

We need clearer international rules of engagement. By defining the circumstances in which international intervention is legiti­mate, we also define those in which it is not.

Maybe we could move the debate to a more exciting level if you would clarify who is included in “We”?

You also add a very welcome dose of realism:

Everybody is happy to propose the aid architecture appro­priate for the best-case scenario, but there has been political reluctance to think through the architecture appropriate at the other end of the spectrum.

I totally agree with you, now we are getting somewhere!

Oops,  now I am a little bit puzzled by this recommendation:

I would like to see an explicit process of mutual commitments covering the post-conflict decade made by the Security Council (for the provision of security), the aid agencies …and the post-conflict government …I would like to see the Special Representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations given greater powers of coordination over other actors during this decade, in effect as the neutral supervisor of these mutual commitments.

So, all the Great Powers on the UN Security Council will give up all their foreign policy interests and agree to universal and benevolent neutrality, and everyone else in the world will now recognize them as neutral and benevolent? Wouldn’t this qualify as a “best-case scenario”? Perhaps if this scenario doesn’t work out then it's time to accept your suggestion to "think through the architecture appropriate at the other end of the spectrum”?

(I hope these last two blog posts don't violate my satire probation!)

Aid agencies announce they will be accountable to independent evaluators; This blog to permanently close

IRINA News, April 1, 2010 Geneva, Switzerland—A coalition of aid agencies meeting in Geneva today announced a historic agreement to reform the international aid system. In signing the agreement, heads of aid agencies formally committed to accept the verdicts of independent evaluators of the programs and projects in their portfolios.

The new measures require the 39 multilateral and bilateral aid agencies to scale up only those programs with a proven track record of success. Programs shown by independent evaluation to have no impact—or a negative impact—on their intended beneficiaries will not be funded.

“An international agreement of this type is long past due,” said Mr. Poshtoff Van der Peet, the spokesperson for the coalition. “We believe this is a major step towards making sure our aid monies are spent in such a way that they actually reach the poor. Some of use may even have to go out of business, but this is a price well worth paying to make sure aid reaches the poor.”

We were very glad to see this story on the wires today. Because of this breakthrough, Aid Watch blog will discontinue operations itself effective immediately. Laura Freschi and William Easterly will shift to doing research on the fundamental determinants of long run prosperity, leaving the commentary on aid in the safe hands of independent evaluators.

The worst-kept secret in aid: aid-receiving governments run the aid agencies

see UPDATE at end of this post

Thomas Friedman had a good NYT column about Karzai yesterday. {{1}} His column cleared up the puzzlement created by a Dallas News editorial and other very similar stories about how Obama’s visit to Afghanistan to get Karzai to clean up corruption was great for “seizing Karzai’s attention.” Now we know why there’s corruption in Afghanistan: Hamid Karzai just FORGOT to deal with it. Could one of our army doctors give him A.D.D. medication?

Friedman is more realistic about a phenomenon that has been long known in donor-government /recipient-government relationships:  the recipient is the one who runs the donor government’s policies towards the recipient government. The same happens in multilateral aid agencies. We saw this all the time at the World Bank, where the corrupt autocrats receiving our loans would let us know what conditions we should put on the loans to them.

Friedman has a pithy rule that donors routinely break:

Never want it more than they do.

Of course, when the donors want something more than the recipient, and the donors know they MUST continue the aid relationship, the recipient is in a strong bargaining position to ignore that something, and no amount of attention-seizing is going to work. As Friedman says:

If we want good governance in Afghanistan more than Karzai, he will sell us that carpet over and over. How many U.S. officials have flown to Kabul — the latest being President Obama himself — to lecture Karzai on the need to root out corruption in his administration? …. he believes he has us over a barrel and, in the end, he can and will do whatever serves his personal power needs because he believes that we believe that he is indispensable for confronting Al Qaeda…

Even in less fraught situations than Afghanistan, the donors have an extremely poor record enforcing conditions on recipients. Not only do they break the Friedman Rule, but the department for Country X in the aid agency MUST disburse its budget for Country X this fiscal year (or else it won’t get any budget next year). The recipient knows this and so can ignore the conditions. (For a more careful and technical development of this argument, see the classic paper on why aid conditions don’t work by Jakob Svensson).

The solution to the problem is as logically simple as it is politically difficult: give aid only to country governments who want IT more than we do.

UPDATE (4/1, 12:14PM): Karzai says to luncheon guests  that America is an obstacle to peace in Afghanistan. Well, THAT would really simplify the problem -- just remove the obstacle! 

[[1]]Just for the record, I usually think that whatever Friedman writes about economics is nonsense while what he writes about Middle Eastern/Central Asian politics is good. This may be because I know something about the former and nothing about the latter.[[1]]