Bailouts v aid v climate change – $ reveals priorities

The most popular post ever on this blog was ‘How much is $700bn‘ – a set of ‘killer facts‘ on the initial US bailout. These days $700bn feels like small change, so it’s time for an update in the run up to Saturday’s Financing for Development meeting in Doha and Monday’s start to this year’s big climate change ‘conference of the parties’ in Poznan. ‘Skewed Priorities’, a new report by Sarah Anderson, John Cavanagh and Janet Redman at the Washington DC-based Institute for Policy Studies, compares the scale of global bailouts with spending on aid and climate change. Key finding? The United States and European governments have committed 40 times more money to rescue financial firms than to fight climate and poverty crises in the developing world. 

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What might Obama do on US Aid Policy?

By the time I got to the US (a week after the election), euphoria seemed to have given way to the strange interregnum between presidents. I found a vast gossip machine on who gets what job in the new administration (7000 jobs are up for grabs), and a lingering underswell of pride and anticipation, laced with concern at inflated expectations (not confined to the US – have a look at this front page from Uganda).

Aid is clearly not going to be Obama’s top priority, but he has already said some sensible things about his plans, and there are some real opportunities, many of them created by some well targeted research and advocacy work involving networks of foundations, thinktanks and NGOs, with Oxfam America’s excellent aid effectiveness team playing a central role. Read More …

US elections: killer facts, what happens now? And Palin the poet

The December issue of my favourite current affairs magazine, Prospect, has some great analysis (laced with whimsy) of the election and transition. Top billing goes to an insightful assessment of Obama’s likely direction by Michael Lind. Lind cautions against euphoria, drawing on the already over-used comparison with FDR in predicting that Obama’s first term will mostly have to be devoted to dealing with the economic crisis. Sorting out the US health system will probably have to wait for a second term when, like FDR, reformers will need to think big. (Man of the moment Paul Krugman thinks Obama has to think even bigger than FDR – writing in the New York Times, he said ‘the truth is that the New Deal wasn’t as successful in the short run as it was in the long run. And the reason for FDR’s limited short-run success, which almost undid his whole program, was the fact that his economic policies were too cautious.’

Prospect also has a handy guide to the most influential thinktanks and other influences on Obama from Martin Walker at the Woodrow Wilson Center. He gives the nod to the Center for American Progress, the Brookings Institution and Lind’s own New America Foundation.

Here are a few killer facts from the issue: Read More …

How did the book go down in Obamerica?

Just got back exhausted from an intense two week tour of the US organized by the hyper-efficient Kristen Prince at Oxfam America. Highlights included an afternoon on Capitol Hill in West Wing Wonderland discussing the book with Congressional staffers, big and enthusiastic turnouts at the Gates Foundation, Northeastern, Georgetown and Brandeis Universities and the World Bank (where we broke our sales record), a presentation to some Silicon Valley types at Stanford (I’ve never had valet parking outside one of my talks before…), and an enjoyable knockabout with Lant Pritchett at Harvard’s Kennedy School (Lant’s a climate change denier – he doesn’t deny it is happening, but thinks we shouldn’t spend any money on it. He was part of the misleadingly named ‘Copenhagen Consensus‘, which mercifully seems to have dropped off the map of late). So what emerged from this extended road test with about 1000 of the USA’s best and brightest? Read More …

Is Daewoo the new East India Company?

Last week the South Korean multinational Daewoo announced it had secured a 99-year lease (i.e. more or less bought) for 2.5 million acres (1 million hectares) of Madagascar’s land, mostly in the Indian Ocean island’s arid west. Daewoo aims to grow 5m tonnes of corn (maize) a year by 2023, and produce palm oil from a further lease of 120,000 hectares (296,000 acres). Most of it will go to South Korea. (for full details see here). This is the latest in a series of such deals, in which wealthy Middle East oil producers and others buy up land in poor countries to guarantee their food supplies. It sounds neo-colonial – a throwback to the days of privatized colonialism epitomised by Britain’s East India Company – but who really wins and loses? Read More …

Reshaping Economic Geography – the latest World Development Report

A helpful summary from my colleague Richard King of this year’s World Development Report – the World Bank’s flagship publication. The title is ‘Reshaping Economic Geography’ and Richard found it ‘exciting’. But then he’s a geographer – I found it hard going and fell asleep several times, but maybe that’s the jetlag…..

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What Happened at the G20 Summit on Saturday?

Some initial thoughts on the emergency summit in Washington DC, held to respond to the financial crisis. First, some positives: it was the first time the G20 have met at heads of state level. Could this mark the start of the eclipse of the G8, as major developing countries take a seat at a larger table? It still leaves serious concerns about the exclusion of the others (for example South Africa is the sole representative from the whole African continent), but it’s undoubtedly an improvement on the G8. Read More …

What needs to happen at the G20 summit on Saturday

Here’s my op-ed linked to today’s launch of a new Oxfam paper prior to the summit. See the end for some other good sources of policy ideas ahead of the meeting. Read More …

Will we ever be able to talk about limits to growth?

Some challenging discussions on this on the New Scientist website. Here’s an extract from an article by Tim Jackson
‘The Ehrlich equation, I = PAT, says simply that the impact (I) of human activity on the planet is the product of three factors: the size of the population (P), its level of affluence (A) expressed as income per person, and a technology factor (T), which is a measure of the impact on the planet associated with each dollar we spend.
Take climate change, for example. The global population is just under 7 billion and the average level of affluence is around $8000 per person. The T factor is just over 0.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide per thousand dollars of GDP – in other words, every $1000 worth of goods and services produced using today’s technology releases 0.5 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. So today’s global CO2 emissions work out at 7 billion × 8 × 0.5 = 28 billion tonnes per year.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has stated that to stabilise greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere at a reasonably safe 450 parts per million, we need to reduce annual global CO2 emissions to less than 5 billion tonnes by 2050. With a global population of 9 billion thought inevitable by the middle of this century, that works out at an average carbon footprint of less than 0.6 tonnes per person – considerably lower than in India today. The conventional view is that we will achieve this by increasing energy efficiency and developing green technology without economic growth taking a serious hit. Can this really work? Read More …

More good stuff to read on the meltdown

Paul Krugman argues in the New York Times that Obama has to think big on reflation: ‘Barack Obama should learn from F.D.R.’s failures as well as from his achievements: the truth is that the New Deal wasn’t as successful in the short run as it was in the long run. And the reason for F.D.R.’s limited short-run success, which almost undid his whole program, was the fact that his economic policies were too cautious.’

China shows how it’s done. When they decide to spend $586bn to boost the economy, it’s on real stuff like infrastructure, not bank bailouts.

The meltdown gets to Brazil, which had previously considered itself invulnerable.

Dani Rodrik ‘leaks’ the G20 communiqué of his dreams ahead of the big summit on Saturday, and shows how Asia has successfully resisted financial globalization (and is now reaping the benefits).