Category: policy

Measurement matters . . .

Todd Moss at the Center for Global Development has a post about Ghana and the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC).  Overall, he makes some good points about the purpose of MCC compacts, and whether or not it makes sense to re-up with Ghana in 2012 for a second compact.  While Moss makes a number of good points in his post (including the fact that Ghana has a lot of capital incoming from oil, and a ready market for its debt, both of which seem to negate the need for continued grants), I was brought up short by one stunning statement:

Ghana is (suddenly) just barely “low income”.  A recent rebasing of its GDP found the country was 63% richer than everyone thought.  Ghana might still technically qualify for the MCC but the rationale for another huge compact drops pretty significantly.

Now, to be fair to Moss, he has an excellent post here on the implications of such rebasing.  Importantly, the second lesson he takes away from this sudden revaluation of Ghana’s economy is:

Boy, we really don’t know anything. Over the past thirty years Ghana has been one of the most scrutinized, measured, studied, picked-over economies in Africa. (yes, I too did my PhD on Ghana…) Yet, we were all taking as gospel a number that was off by a tremendous margin. If we are nearly two-thirds wrong on Ghana’s GDP, what hope can we possibly have in stats for Chad? Everyone knows that data is dubious, but this seems to add a whole new level of doubt.

His fourth point is closely related:

I’m still confused… but it probably doesn’t matter. The Reuters article quotes the government statistician as estimating GDP per capita at $1318 instead of $753. This doesn’t add up to the total GDP figures also given since this implies a 75% increase. If the $1318 is correct, then that either implies that the government thinks there are only 19.4 million people instead of the normal estimates of about 24 million. Or, if the total GDP number of $25.6 billion is right, then per capita GDP is really $1067 per capita. (I think I’m already violating my lesson from #2.)

I have a chapter in my book dedicated to understanding why our measurements of the economy and environment in the Global South are mostly crap, and even when the data is firm it often does not capture the dynamics we think it does.  I then spend a few chapters suggesting what to do about it (including respatializing data/data collection so that it can be organized into spatial units that have social, economic, and ecological meaning, and using basic crowdsourcing techniques to both collect data and ground truth of existing statistics).  Even better, this is rooted in a discussion of Ghana’s economy.  I give Moss credit for being willing to point out the confusing numbers, and acknowledge that they confuse him.  They should.
But Moss gets it totally wrong here:

Ghana has long aspired to be a middle-income country by 2020, and this now seems like it will happen many years early. Accra certainly feels like a middle-income city.

This statement explains how he can label Ghana “barely low-income”, even after he has called the very statistics that make such a claim possible into question: he’s focused on Accra.  Accra has very little to do with how the bulk of the Ghanaian population lives – and most of that population is very, very poor.  Ghana is not barely low income – it is still quite low income, with some pockets of extreme wealth starting to distort the national statistics.  It doesn’t matter how Accra feels – that city is home to at best 10% of the population.  Kumasi is home to between 5-8% more.  Generously including Tamale and Takoradi in the middle-income city categories (this is very generous) nets you probably 25% of the population – nobody else is living in a middle income country.  Like Moss, I did my dissertation work in Ghana.  I still work there.  The difference is that I did my work in rural villages, and still do.  $1 a day beyond subsistence is a common income in the rural areas of the Central Region, even now – and the Central Region has a lot more infrastructure than most of the Northern, Upper East and Upper West Regions.  This population remains poorly educated – failed by poor rural schools.  They cannot support a transformation of the Ghanaian economy.  Most of Ghana is still a very low income country, not ready for any sort of sustained economic growth.  The country has seen enormous success in recent years – I am stunned by what I have seen in the past 13 years – but the fruits of that success are not distributed evenly.  While the cities have boomed, the villages are nearly unchanged.  This is Ghana’s new challenge – to spread this new wealth out and foster a diverse, resilient economy.
This is not to say that an MCC compact is the right tool to foster this, or that Ghana is the best place to be putting MCC money.  However, declaring “success” too soon creates its own set of risks – let’s use some nuance when considering how a country is doing, so we can identify the real challenges to overcome and successes to build on moving forward.

Posted on by Ed 0

The missing gigatons . . .

So, I heard a new and depressing phrase today – “the gigaton gap”.  UNEP published a technical report, just before the Cancun COP, on the gap between likely emissions under any global agreement, and our best scientific understanding of what our emissions levels need to be to prevent warming beyond 2 degrees Celsius over the next 90 years.  The findings were stunning (but sadly not all that surprising)

  • To get on a path likely to keep us at or below 2° C of warming, we would need to hold ourselves to emissions levels of  44 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (this includes all CO2 emissions, as well as emissions of other greenhouse gases normalized to CO2 by converting their impact to the amount of CO2 required to create that same impact).

Yeah, it is a huge number, so big as to be meaningless – but don’t worry about the huge number – worry about how this number stacks up the next set of numbers

  • If we just keep doing what we are doing, projections have us at 56 GtCO2e in 2020, leaving a gap of 12 GtCO2e.  That is a big, big gap.  Horrifically huge.  Hell, we have a gap equal to 21% total emissions!
  • Low ambition pledges are not that much better.  Lenient implementation of such pledges would lower emissions to around 53 GtCO2e, leaving a gap of 9 GtCO2e.

But this really gets depressing when we look at the “good” scenario:

  • Even under a best case scenario for the agreement, emissions would only drop to about 49 GtCO2e, STILL LEAVING A GAP of 5 GtCO2e.

“But 5 is much better than 12 or 9, right?” you say.  Well, it is better.  But 5 GtCO2e is approximately equal to the annual global emissions from all the world’s cars, buses and transport in 2005.  ALL OF THEM.  So 5 GtCO2e is not good news.
Summary: In Cancun, we kicked any real action down the road a year, making things harder to achieve under any circumstances.  We already knew this.  But, even under the good scenarios, we were going to come up short of what was needed – something many have long suspected, but after Copenhagen and Cancun, we now have numbers people are likely to commit to, so the analysis becomes a lot more read.  Ladies and gentlemen, ditch the global agreement – we can do this other ways.

Posted on by Ed 0

Militarizing aid

The role of the military in development is a terribly fraught issue – and it has been with us for a very, very long time.  In my book, I argue that globalization and development turned into each other long ago – insofar as development has largely been reduced to a means by which we connect different parts of the world into a global market and political economy.  This is not because development is some sort of militaristic economic movement (though, of course, sometimes it has been used as such), but because one of the dominant assumptions in development is that free markets and a globalized political economy are the best ways to bring about improvements in human well-being (my book is an extended, empirically-based critique of this assumption).  If you accept this definition of development, colonialism was really the first phase of “development” as we understand it today.  Military force was an important part of colonial efforts to open new territories to these markets (often couched in terms of peoples “own good”), thus creating a remarkably negative association with the military in development circles.
Today, the military has largely taken on a very different role – it is a critical means by which relief supplies are delivered to disaster-stricken areas. And, in conflict zones like Iraq, the military has been forced to take on development work, despite the fact that its personnel are not trained for that mission (something most folks in the military are well aware of, and would like to see changed).  Underdevelopment has been viewed as a national security issue (such as the very poorly substantiated assumption that poverty breeds terrorism), especially in the context of climate changes which are presumed to negatively impact the poorest and most vulnerable such that they will threaten state stability in many parts of the world.  Engagement with the military is something that is nearly impossible to avoid if one works for a major agency.
I’ll be frank, here – I’ve never been comfortable with the military’s engagement with development.  As I mentioned above, they are at best highly disciplined amateurs who have little experience and no real knowledge base when conducting “aid work”, which as we all know can make anyone more dangerous than helpful.  I also think it is unfair to ask people trained for one mission to go out and conduct another for which they are not prepared – it’s never good to set someone up for failure.  But the New York Times ran a story today that really gets to the heart of my issues with the militarization of development – it makes it impossible for anyone to do good development work.  When development work is conducted alongside military operations, especially as conscious parts of a hearts-and-minds campaign, development becomes a tool of war.  This makes the practitioners combatants, at least in the eyes of the opponent.  I am in no way justifying the kidnapping or killing of those who work in development in places like Afghanistan or Iraq, but I think we have to be honest about why otherwise unarmed civilians working on projects that are intended to have a community benefit might end up becoming targets.  It is not because “the enemy” is utterly depraved and indifferent – indeed many on the other side might see the use of development as a tool of war as itself depraved, a sort of holding people’s well-being hostage to larger geopolitical ends.
This post is not, in the end, a critique of the military – I certainly wish we lived in a world where they were not needed.  I imagine many of those serving in the military feel the same way.  But that is not the world we live in.  We live in a world where the military is doing development because someone has told them they have to.  This is not their fault.  However, I would ask that the military step back and think carefully about using development as part of larger combat campaigns – the association with conflict and combat gives our entire endeavor a bad name.

Posted on by Ed 0

Understanding the politics of a climate deal with charts

While I have my doubts that a global climate agreement is actually in the best interest of the planet (mostly because I think local adaptive management is likely to yield locally-appropriate, more accountable outcomes), it is worth remembering why there is so much debate about such an agreement.  Many people still fail to grasp why the developing world thinks it absurd that places like the US, Canada and Germany feel justified in demanding big cuts of them – there are two reasons:
1)Big cuts close the door to historical development pathways.  Most of the OECD countries went through a major industrialization phase that was hugely polluting.  China is going through this today on an unprecedented scale. While I think these pathways are, by and large, dead ends for development anyway these days, the fact is that a global climate deal more or less demands that currently poor countries abandon the very methods that we in the wealthier countries used to get to our current status.  This, by the way, is why there is a transfer of money and technology being built into the agreement – because the wealthy countries are not completely hypocritical, and therefore recognize that creating new development pathways will be expensive and beyond the means of most currently-poor countries.  If we are going to demand they change what they are doing, we should at least contribute financially to those changes.  So the next time you hear this deal called a huge wealth transfer, feel free to remind the speaker that the age of exploration, through colonialism, through the first 40 or so years of free trade was a giant wealth transfer from poor to rich.  We are only partially answering for that, no matter how large the transfers built into a climate agreement.
2) While we in the US like to point at China’s and (to a lesser extent) India’s total emissions as an argument they have to accept big cuts, and use the argument that 80% of future emissions growth will come from poorer countries to argue for cuts to all emissions, these demands fail to account for the per-person production of these emissions.  The Washington Post has two graphics, which they ran on their front page on December 10th, that capture this issue perfectly.  First, the total emissions graphic:
Yeah, that looks pretty bad – China produces more emissions than we do, and India is catching up quick.  Man, we’d better get those people under control . . . right?  Well, no . . .
Yep, per capita we in the US are big emissions hogs – per person, we crank out 385% of the average Chinese person, and a boggling 1333% more emissions than the average Indian.  Hell, Iran looks bad compared to China when we get down to per-person use.  This is the sticking point – what right do we in the US have to be sloppy with our emissions, yet demand cuts of everyone else?
Building a global deal that addresses both of these issues is damn near to impossible – we need to control total emissions, but at the same time recognize that not everyone emits equally.  Addressing the first of these is politically unpalatable for the poorer countries.  Addressing the latter is unpalatable here in the US and in many other wealthy countries. The result: weak global agreements that address neither.

Posted on by Ed 1

“Madam President, millions of dollars have been spent on the Millennium Village Project but we have seen nothing concrete done for our people,”

Well, there’s nothing like continued empirical evidence for the arguments I have been making about Jeff Sachs’ Millennium Villages Project (MVP), and thanks to a Tweet from Michael Clemens, I’ve now got more.  Clemens is one of the authors of a report that is very critical of the MVP, and that report was good enough to find and cite my work on this topic – but how he dug up this story from a Liberian newspaper, I will never know:

“The project is a new approach to fighting poverty in post-conflict Liberia, but residents in the District have complained that they had seen no evidence of the project getting off the ground. In a brief statement to the President, Deputy Speaker Tokpah J. Mulbah indicated that the project, which seeks to improve the socio-economic and infrastructural development of the District lacked the residents’ involvement and that there was not tangible impact being felt by the villagers. He added that the people of that District were discontent about the way the project is being implemented in their village.”

But the brutal sentence is the one by Deputy Speaker Tokpah J. Mulbah that titles this post: “‘Madam President, millions of dollars have been spent on the Millennium Village Project but we have seen nothing concrete done for our people,’ he said.”
Clemens’ report is here.  My article is here.

Posted on by Ed 0

Easterly says what most of us are thinking . . .

Bill Easterly is one of the better public intellectuals in the area of development – I enjoy his writing, and I think that his work since leaving the World Bank has become more and more valuable as it takes on an ever-more critical edge.  I take him to task for some of his earlier work in my book, and I think that he does not quite question the workings of globalization and development to the extent necessary to really start to get at what is happening in the world, but by and large I think he is a tremendously valuable asset for the development community.
My belief in his value just went up tenfold, however, with his op-ed comparing the celebrity activism of Lennon to that of Bono.  While I take his points about Lennon’s activism, I suspect that Easterly overstates the case for Lennon’s importance as an activist a bit – it is hard to change the system from completely outside, as there is often no way to engage with people constructively – all you get is parallel conversations.  But Easterly’s criticism of Bono is dead on:

While Bono calls global poverty a moral wrong, he does not identify the wrongdoers. Instead, he buys into technocratic illusions about the issue without paying attention to who has power and who lacks it, who oppresses and who is oppressed. He runs with the crowd that believes ending poverty is a matter of technical expertise – doing things such as expanding food yields with nitrogen-fixing leguminous plants or solar-powered drip irrigation.

Bono becomes a problem not through any fault of his own, really, but because he becomes a mouthpiece for people like Jeff Sachs (I have plenty to say about him, but look here, here and in the peer-reviewed literature here) who really seem unable to think about power relations, history and political economy when considering development.  Asserting that poverty is the result of a lack of development asserts a problem and a solution all at once, without ever really addressing a cause.  Further, as I tell my students, there is no such thing as a purely technical, apolitical development intervention – even putting in a well will have variable impacts across a community, creating winners and losers.  The technical is not the hard part in development – if it was, we’d have accomplished a hell of a lot more than we have up to this point.
I also must admit that I really appreciated Easterly turning his guns on the other celebrity activists:

Bono is not the only well-intentioned celebrity wonk of our age – the impulse is ubiquitous. Angelina Jolie, for instance, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (seriously) in addition to serving as a U.N. goodwill ambassador. Ben Affleck has become an expert on the war in Congo. George Clooney has Sudan covered, while Leonardo DiCaprio hobnobs with Russian President Vladimir Putin and other leaders at a summit to protect tigers; both actors have written opinion essays on those subjects in these pages, further solidifying their expert bona fides.

But why should we pay attention to Bono’s or Jolie’s expertise on Africa, any more than we would ask them for guidance on the proper monetary policy for the Federal Reserve?

Why indeed?  I sure as hell don’t plan to lecture Clooney or DiCaprio on acting.  Affleck, well . . .
But I must take issue with Easterly a tiny bit here – yes, Bono is the frontman, but shouldn’t our frustration be directed at those who fill his and others’ heads with the belief that we can fix it all, with just a little more money (I’m looking at you, Dr. Sachs)?  I have no doubt that Bono, Clooney and all the rest have the best of intentions, and work hard to inform themselves rather than run around blind, but in the end they are manipulated by people with greater experience and what appears to be greater expertise to further agendas that these celebrities do not understand – Bono is backing Sachs’ push for more aid (which is in conflict with Easterly’s and others’ view that we need to focus on institutions, political systems and corruption).  Clooney is supporting a group that has one idea of how to address issues in Sudan, but may not have the best or the only ideas because they tend to deal in moral absolutes (like supporting an ICC warrant for Kony, which derailed peace talks in Northern Uganda/Southern Sudan/Congo/CAR).  We need to make sure we dig past the celebs to those who feed them these ideas, and address the problem at it source . . .

Posted on by Ed 3

Not good enough . . . maybe worse than nothing

Well, Cancun did not totally collapse . . . but the outcome was maybe worse.  What we now have is a one-year stall with very little to show for it. The targets are basically useless.  The only thing this agreement has created is an excuse to keep talking without doing anything.  As I argued the other day, we might be better off if the whole thing just collapsed, creating the space and urgency needed to really push forward the various state, city and local initiatives that seem to be the only effective measures that are moving us toward real emissions reductions and a sustainable future.  Instead, this agreement creates a counter-argument – just hang on, don’t do anything yourselves, and the countries will figure this out soon.
First, I doubt the countries will get to a place where a real, meaningful agreement could be put in place in a timely manner.  Second, as I argued in the post the other day, there is empirical evidence, via the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment’s Scenarios, to suggest that a global agreement isn’t the best way to get to a sustainable future anyway.
I know everyone working on this was well-intentioned, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions . . . and we’ve not yet taken the off-ramp.

Posted on by Ed 2

The right decision, but now we need action . . . quickly

Cote d’Ivoire gets a bit dicier, as the UN declares Ouattara the winner in the presidential election.  Russia was concerned about issues of sovereignty in this vote (of course they are – they have their own fairly entertaining electoral issues), but Gbagbo’s theft was so blatant, and so quickly condemned by the Economic Community of West Africa (ECOWAS), that it took remarkably little time to get everyone on board here.  Well, that and Cote d’Ivoire doesn’t yet have viable oil or other resources anyone absolutely must have, so this turns out to be fairly “low stakes” for the Security Council.  Not so much for the Ivorians, of course.
Why is this decision, so clearly rooted in facts, possibly problematic?  Well, the likelihood is that Gbagbo will try to use this decision to rally his support around the “meddling of foreigners in Ivorian affairs” (or something to that effect).  Nationalism can be an ugly tool, and in this case the subtle argument will be that to support Ouattara is to cave in to foreign pressure, to sell out the country.  Once you have set this argument in motion, it is pretty easy for the situation to turn violent, as the fight becomes about nationalism, not candidates.  Hopefully the UN and ECOWAS are prepared to move quickly here, as their statements will likely precipitate this sort of crisis.  If not, we could see a resumption of armed conflict with great potential for regional spread (Sierra Leone and Liberia are still recovering from an earlier civil war/cross-border conflict).  Public pronouncements only do half the job – but create an awful lot of responsibility to which we must live up.

Posted on by Ed 2

Ah, see . . . we are paying attention

Turns out the leaks that shall not be named by federal employees have produced a document demonstrating that the State Department is, in fact, paying attention to China’s role in Africa.  The BBC is carrying the story.  Of course, the story also highlights the amusing lack of self-awareness in our own diplomacy.  Take the following from Johnnie Carson, Assistant Secretary for African Affairs:

“China is not in Africa for altruistic reasons,” he says. “China is in Africa primarily for China.”

He adds: “A secondary reason for China’s presence is to secure votes in the United Nations from African countries.”

Well, yes.  Of course, why exactly is the US involved?  Why has anyone been involved with Africa over the years?  To paraphrase The Who, “here comes the new expropriator, same as the old expropriator.”
On the upside, most Africans with whom I interact suffer no illusions about the sudden interest of the Chinese in their continent.  Seems a learning curve has set in . . .
Also interesting here is what appears to be a clear rationale for the apparent silence of the US Government on Chinese expansion in Africa – a set of “tripwires” that would trigger a reaction:

Have they signed military base agreements? Are they training armies? Have they developed intelligence operations? Once these areas start developing then the US will start worrying,” he says.

I would think that we would have an interest in the Chinese locking down rights to arable land, minerals, etc., instead of such narrow concerns for military and intelligence operations, as these resources have strategic value.  But who am I to question State?*
*this, more or less, summarizes State’s attitude toward AID.

Posted on by Ed 0