How much is $700bn?

The arguments for a bailout to avoid systemic collapse are of course genuine and persuasive, but so are the arguments for aid and against standing by and allowing a child to die every 3 seconds, or a woman to die in childbirth every minute. To put the proposed Wall Street bailout into perspective. $700bn:

· Would clear the accumulated debt of the 49 poorest countries in the world ($375bn) twice over
· Is almost 5 times the annual amount of extra aid needed to achieve all the Millennium Development Goals on poverty, health, education etc ($150bn a year)
· Is about 7 years of current global aid levels ($104bn in 2007)
· Is enough to eradicate all world poverty for over two years (UNDP  calculates it would take $300bn to get the entire world population over the $1 a day poverty line).

On the other hand it’s
· only a quarter of the cost of the Iraq war ($3 trillion on Joseph Stiglitz’ calculation )
· a half of annual global military spending ($1339 bn)

Priorities, priorities

How will the meltdown affect development?

If the current financial meltdown causes the US and Europe to sneeze, will poor countries catch cold, succumb to pneumonia, or have they discovered a new flu vaccine in the growing economic presence of China? I’m currently on a visit to East Africa, and that is the question that is preoccupying many of its leaders. Here are some initial thoughts, but any pointers to good analyses would be very welcome. Read More …

Climate Wrongs, Human Rights and Female Condoms

A belated plug for a couple of top notch recent Oxfam policy papers. My colleague Kate Raworth has written an important paper on the relationship between human rights and climate change. By exploring the impact of climate change on a number of rights within international law (eg to food, life and security, subsistence and health), the paper links two important, but often separate disciplines. In public policy as in science, this kind of cross-fertilisation between disciplines often leads to innovation and progress. In this case, a human rights perspective highlights the obligations governments have already signed up to under international law, and raises the long-term possibility of tobacco-style litigation if they fail to uphold them. Read More …

Fixing Failed States

Just finished the book of this title by Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart. It left me with a mixture of excitement and frustration – excitement because it sets out some good ideas on state-building, frustration because it doesn’t quite live up to the title and is sloppily edited, with whole chunks repeated verbatim, wandering narrative etc (shame on you, OUP!). Read More …

Do development agencies need to look more like the private sector?

NGOs and others in the development sector spend a good deal of time beating themselves up about their many failings (listed in loving detail in the book). Recently, however, the private sector has picked up the baseball bat and got stuck in – arguing that all we need to do is adopt lean, efficient market approaches, instead of all that fuzzy, inefficient, participatory NGO nonsense.

Some have decided to show us directly how its done – resulting in a plethora of ‘social enterprises’, ‘social entrepreneurs’ and ‘philanthrocapitalists’ getting into development, both as whizzy ‘bottom of the pyramid’ businesses, and as funding agencies – the most celebrated being the Gates Foundation, well on the way to becoming a major aid donor in its own right. Now Michael Edwards of the Ford Foundation seems to have decided to fight back. Read More …

Health is social, not medical

It is often argued that municipal sanitation, rather than doctors, ended the periodic scourges of cholera and other disease that afflicted Victorian Britain (e.g. see here). Now the World Health Organization has adopted an even broader version of the argument in the new report of its Commission on Social Determinants of Health. It marks a significant shift in WHO thinking. Read More …

aid pessimists v aid optimists: watch ‘em slug it out

Last week’s ‘high level forum on aid effectiveness’ in Accra, Ghana (see here for a good NGO analysis of the results) has motivated some of the big beasts of the aid world to lock antlers in an intriguing debate on the pros, cons and limits to aid. Adrian Wood, former DFID chief economist kicked off in the Financial Times by advocating a cap on aid levels to Africa. The responses have since migrated to the website of the Center for Global Development in Washington DC. To read what Jeffrey Sachs, Adrian Wood, William Easterly, Nancy Birdsall et al have to say, click here.

Putting numbers on happiness – new efforts to measure well-being

GDP and income have long been criticized as extremely limited measures of well-being. When I asked my long-suffering 16 year old son Finlay over breakfast what makes people happy, he suggested a playstation (consumption), having kids (parental alarm bells), and a combination of friendship groups – a small tight-knit inner circle, and a wider group of people who ‘know who you are’ so that you ‘get included’. Contributing to unhappiness were divorce rates, and ‘when you can’t do something’, whether through inability or prohibition. Finlay’s list underlines the inadequacy of income as a measure of the ‘good life’. Read More …

What’s Kerala’s Secret?

In a recent academic roundtable on From Poverty to Power in Canberra, Robin Jeffrey, professor at the Australian National University and dean of its College of Asia and the Pacific, had a stab at applying the ‘how change happens’ framework to the cause celebre of Kerala in South India. Here are my notes on his initial effort, augmented with quotes from his book on the subject. Read More …

What’s the development debate like in Australia?

I’ve just finished a week of debates, seminars and book launches in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. My overall impressions include firstly the huge importance of policy debates over Australia’s Indigenous peoples on wider development thinking, not least because meetings in government, academia and NGOs now begin with the chair intoning variations on the formula ‘I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we are meeting and pay respects to their elders both past and present.’ At first this seemed a bit tokenistic, but it accumulated over the course of my visit and must impinge in some subtle way.  Read More …