100 indicators of well-being or just one? Stiglitz v Layard

The OECD conference I’ve been attending is winding down. Lots of banquets, but not much booze, so I never had to try the hotel’s tempting room service item ‘outer leaves of cabbage broth to chase a hangover.’ What’s the takeaway (ideas rather than food)?

The key debate seems to me to be over complexity. The various presentations described literally hundreds of different indicators already being used to measure progress, and proposed hundreds more. The World Bank reportedly has 27 indicators of governance alone. The Stiglitz Commission proposes ‘dashboards’ of indicators, allowing different people and institutions to combine them in different ways to measure and track the things that matter most to them (mental health, carbon emissions, citizen participation or whatever).

But there’s a cost to that, as Geoff Mulgan pointed out. Decision makers and ordinary people can only keep a limited number of indicators in their heads (Geoff put it at about 5). Above that and they get increasingly baffled. A South African number cruncher lamented that ‘an indicator cloud has descended on Africa, creating a fog of confusion’, while an EC statistician worried that composite indicators rapidly become a political football as each member state argues for the combination that puts its own performance in the best light, and each successive government changes them, meaning you lose comparability both between countries and across time. For similar reasons I started to harbour heretical doubts about the merits of ‘bottom up’ indicators designed by communities – fine, as a way for the community to understand itself, but the cost is that the government won’t be able to compare progress with the village next door (which will have designed its own, different bottom-up indicator).

Geoff’s answer was to combine the merits of simplicity and complexity by picking 3-5 standardized indicators, each of which would be at the centre of a cluster of disaggregated numbers allowing policy makers and researchers to drill down into the relationships between different aspects of people’s lives (eg between income inequality and child well-being). A key to this model’s success is what the conference called ‘visualization’ – efforts to make data much more intelligible and interesting – including the launch of what looks a potentially remarkable ‘wikiprogress’, which among other things is going to use graphics software that’s even more funky than gapminder.

Richard Layard was more drastic. He argued that ‘we have to go much further than the Stiglitz report and establish a different metric from the metric of money.’ His preference is self-reported life satisfaction (i.e. happiness), which he predicts will replace GDP within the next 25 years. Like Mulgan’s model, satisfaction would be reported across a number of domains (health, family, work, income, community, environment etc).

The conference (and the OECD, judging by its roadmap for future work on well-being, distributed in Busan but not yet online), largely sided with Stiglitz. They had doubts about the robustness of happiness as an indicator – does it really mean the same thing in different countries? If people are happy through ignorance of what they are missing, does that invalidate their view (false consciousness alarm bells)? Don’t things like voice and engagement matter on their own merits? Are we proposing the social lobotomy of a Brave New World of drugged, happy, obedient slaves?

But I’m leaning towards Layard. This was a conference of the modern data magisterium, the ‘counting community’ as one speaker called it. They live and breathe statistics and complexity. But most people are not like that. If you want to measure well-being in a cash-starved low income country, communicate messages to the public, or interest politicians, simplicity is vital.

The Layard v Stiglitz debate set me thinking about paradigm shifts. One typical feature of a paradigm shift is that as the old model starts to get into trouble in describing reality, layers of complexity are added to it to try and keep it afloat. Eventually someone like Copernicus comes along and says ‘let’s put the sun at the centre of the solar system, not the earth’ and the complexity melts away. Layard feels much more like the Copernicus of well-being than does Stiglitz or any other speaker at this conference.

The last word on this conference goes to the wonderfully serene (and enigmatic) abbot of Beomeosa, a breathtaking Buddhist monastery on the outskirts of Busan. I asked him if he could help us by telling us what happiness is and how we could achieve it. He smiled and told me to drink my tea, and then he would answer. ‘Did you like the tea? Yes? That is happiness.’ He also described happiness as ‘thinking about happiness’ and ‘the undivided mind’. Put that into your metrics, guys.

Joe Stiglitz addresses ‘the movement’ on well-being v GDP

I’m still surrounded by the world’s statisticians (not as bad as it sounds) at the OECD Measuring the Progress of Societies conference in South Korea, where yesterday Joe Stiglitz gave a great presentation. Rather than simply rehearse the findings of his commission’s report to President Sarkozy, he reflected on why criticisms of GDP, which have been around for almost as long as GDP itself, have recently gone mainstream (see previous blog) – quite striking hearing him address a room full of besuited number crunchers as ‘this movement’.

First and most obviously, is the crisis (’crisis is the mother of statistics’ as Korea’s rep to the OECD observed earlier in the conference): booming GDP numbers in 2005-7 were based largely on the escalating profits of the financial sector, which were ‘fictitious – a mirage’. Ditto counting as genuine profits from the real estate bubble.

GDP ignores the growing concerns over financial sustainability, i.e. the level of debt (one of the more innovative features of the Stiglitz Commission’s report is the way it calls for the inclusion in our metrics of different aspects of sustainability, not just environmental.)

Climate change has highlighted how distorted prices become when you effectively put a zero price on carbon. This has led to a ‘carbon bubble’, which must now burst through including carbon prices in economic decision making.

Globalization makes GDP seem rather parochial, because it measures output according to place, rather than who benefits. In Stiglitz’s words: ‘if a foreign transnational opens a mine, takes away the minerals, pollutes the environment, damages people’s health and pays no taxes, if you focus on GDP would say the mine’s a good thing.’ Using Gross National Product instead would help correct this bias.

The growing share of government in the economy is misread by GDP, which ignores productivity improvements because it measures government inputs (eg health spending) not outputs. So US health spending of 17% of GDP v 11% in France does not reflect the fact that the health system is actually better in France. Correcting this single anomaly removes a third of the GDP difference between the two countries, questioning whether the US is doing ‘better’ than France in any real sense.

GDP growth is increasingly based on improvements in quality (rather than quantity) of products. Imputing values to improvements in quality is much less reliable, and so introduces more questionmarks.

Politicians like Sarkozy are keenly aware that the metrics are not consistent with what people feel. That leads to a ‘dangerous distrust of government’. A number of speakers have echoed this sentiment – statisticians worry about the political impact of their work on the ‘social contract’ between citizen and state.

Rising inequality means that the boom in wealth of a tiny proportion of the richest people raises the average, while most people see no benefit (in the language of the conference, medians and averages diverge).

On the positive side, improvements in research and our understanding and measurement of well-being provides more robust alternatives to GDP.

What are the implications?

Political impact: Stiglitz pointed to what amounts to pre-crisis GDP envy– Europeans admiring deceptive US GDP numbers and so calling for a shift to the anglosaxon model of deregulation.

Moreover, a better measure of economic performance would remove many of the false choices that bedevil public debate – eg protect the environment v maximise GDP growth. If GDP includes environmental degradation, you can get over the current polarization of the ‘limits to growth’ discussion.

Economic impact: The economics profession runs endless regressions to determine what factors lead to GDP growth. But if GDP is misleading, so will be the policy conclusions from such regressions, eg because of the faulty measurement of public sector activity, regressions usually find that a smaller public sector is good for growth.

Interesting stuff. Everyone here shares the view that we have reached some kind of tipping point on the need to measure well-being. And these are hard-boiled chief statisticians, not tree huggers. Whether they can do so in a way that actually gets the attention of the politicians is a different issue, and a subject for tomorrow’s blog. Off to listen to Richard Layard now.

3 minute conference youtube including interview with Stiglitz below

How could we measure well-being in a crisis? Some thoughts from Korea

I am currently in Korea’s second city, Busan, attending a big OECD conference on ‘statistics, knowledge and policy’, organized by its ‘Measuring the Progress of Societies’ project. The massive conference centre looks out on a consumerist paradise, including a giant Tesco’s supermarket (everything’s big here, giving you that sense of suddenly having shrunk that you get in Tiananmen square) and what declares itself to be the world’s biggest department store, complete with ice rink, spa etc, so perhaps it’s an appropriate setting to talk about what matters in terms of human wellbeing, and how to measure it.

Yesterday was the first day of three, but it’s already got me thinking about the tensions between efforts to fill 3 gaps in our knowledge

-         a more holistic understanding of well-being, including issues such as happiness and environmental sustainability, that remedies some of the failings of GDP (the cartoons offer two opposed versions of that story)

-         the need for real time or ‘high frequency’ data on what is happening in poor countries when crises hit. The current crisis has revealed a remarkable gap in our ability to find out fast what is happening to poor people when a shock hits.

-         the weak statistical systems of many low income countries

The Stiglitz Commission recently reported back to President Sarkozy (see previous blog) with recommendations that were essentially pretty complex: it’s futile to try and replace GDP with another single indicator. Instead, what we need is dashboards of dozens of indicators, from which people can construct composites that capture what they want to measure (human security, safety, material well-being, health etc).

Well fine, but that militates against sorting out gaps 2 and 3. You can’t collect high frequency data on dozens of issues, and in any case low income countries struggle to meet even current data requirements. 

So my question is ‘given weak statistical capacity, is there any one thing we could measure easily and at regular intervals (eg monthly) that would give a better guide than GDP to the state of well-being in a poor country?’ Frances Stewart of Oxford University and Vikram Nehru from the World Bank East Asia team suggested infant mortality rates (too complicated and unreliable for high frequency collection), or self-reported life satisfaction (‘are you happy?’). Others suggested physical security (‘do you feel safe?)’ or access to services such as healthcare. Any other candidates?

Frances reckons that it might be worth some NGOs getting together and piloting these – if we’d had them in place as the global crisis spread to the poorest countries, what would they have shown? Worth thinking about…..

The conference is being webcast Wednesday and Thursday here

Charter Cities – visionary, naive or bonkers?

Charter Cities are a proposal to build cities from scratch in the world’s poorest nations, outsourcing their design and government to rich countries. Visionary, naïve or plain bonkers? Probably a bit of all three.

They are the brainchild of US economist Paul Romer, who explains his idea on this (20 minute) video.

He’s serious – last year he gave up his professorship at Stanford to devote himself to selling his big idea. He argues that if poor people like the cities, they will migrate there, creating a ‘global archipelago of economic powerhouse city states’ in the words of a Boston Globe piece.

Here’s one example, from the Charter Cities website

‘For decades, the Unites States and Cuba have been parties to a treaty that gives the United States administrative control over a portion of Cuban territory straddling Guantanamo Bay. In a new treaty signed by the United States, Cuba, and Canada, the United States could give up its treaty rights, and Canada could take over local administration for a defined period of time.
An administrator appointed by the Canadian prime minister would be responsible for setting up and enforcing the rules that apply in this special territory. The legal protection and institutional stability that the Canadians provide would attract foreign investors and foreign citizens to the city.

As the city grows, the Cuban government would gradually allow freer movement of people and goods between the land it governs and the charter city. At the same time, supporting cities and suburbs would grow up on the Cuban side of the city’s boundaries. The charter city itself would eventually return to Cuban control.

In this case, a treaty creating a special administrative arrangement already exists and Hong Kong provides a model for how a city might be governed. An interesting variant would be one in which several countries (e.g. Canada, Spain, Norway, Mexico, and Brazil) stand in place of Canada alone.’

To me, this all feels like part of an understandable but slightly alarming series of ‘lament of the technocrat’ calls for experiments in greenfield development. Politics, institutions and societies are messy, unpredictable and frustrating, so academics in particular come over all Founding Fathers and board the latest intellectual Mayflower in search of a nice ‘clean’ experiment: think Jeffrey Sachs and his Millennium Villages, or Paul Collier and Independent Service Authorities.

As for this latest grand vision.

Pluses:
The innovate, pilot and replicate model works in some cases (eg China)
Effective states are certainly needed at the city and local level, as well as national
To some extent the proposal recognizes the rise of subnational units within globalization

Minuses:
This is ahistorical: the key to China’s pilot/replicate model was an effective state. How would charter cities do anything other than suck talent and resources away from nation states?
Hong Kong is pretty sui generis – about the only example of success built on laissez faire. According to Ha Joon Chang every other country required hands-on industrial policy and state intervention to develop
Apolitical: Even if it works, you end up with some kind of modern city amid Mad Max chaos – does he really think the city can just build a wall and keep the chaos at bay? It’s a bit like Paul Collier thinking you can give the money to technocrats in ISAs to spend, and no-one will notice!

I’ve asked around, and had a few comments back. Becky Buell, an ‘exfam’ (former Oxfam) colleague who now works on urban issues at MIT’s Green Hub, has this to say:

‘It’s interesting to note a “back to the future” element to all this.  The idea that somehow cities can be planned at all was largely abandoned by the late 70s as urban growth and informality outpaced and out-smarted the urban master planner.  There seems to be a rebirth of attempts to come up with new forms of master plan that are ambitious in scope, but that are different from past efforts in that they see a minimalist role for government, and put the private sector at the center of planning and delivery.  The Charter Cities and the World Bank’s recent Eco2Cities concepts are examples of this, with differing degrees of government leadership and management in the two examples.  The most important gap in all of these is the absence of an analysis of power dynamics, and the likely failure of any attempt at planning that doesn’t recognize and work with this.  The other big gap, I think, is the lack of perspective on the informal sector, where the vast majority of people in developing countries live and work.  Any plan that does not consider this vast world will again repeat the structuring of fragmented, segregated societies.’

Tom Goodfellow, an LSE doctoral student, emailed this after a debate with fellow LSE urbanists:

‘At the moment it certainly seems like a recipe for the creations of islands of poverty or islands of wealth (depending on the country in which the charter city is ‘hosted’) which could not easily be integrated into the surrounding society even if they were to attract people and investment, as Romer assumes they would. On the one hand, the example of a city in Australia built specially for Indonesian workers sounds like labour migration designed in such a way as to maximise negative social consequences; Romer states that public services and welfare support in the city would be ‘comparable to those in Indonesia’ (i.e. considerably lower than for people in the rest of the country in which the city is located) and Indonesians in the city ‘would be subject to the same immigration controls whether entering Australia from this zone or from Indonesia’. This smacks of the deliberate creation of ghettoes and even echoes of Apartheid townships!
 
On the other hand the creation of cities in poor countries by rich governments such as Canada is no less dubious. Firstly it is very unlikely that any sovereign developing country will voluntarily relinquish sovereignty over a city of any size for both economic and political reasons. And even if this does somehow happen, the huge amounts of private sector finance necessary to get industrial cities of the kind Romer envisages off the ground would likely lead to protected pockets of wealth that largely flows out of the country generating little benefit for the host nation state. Moreover, given the weight of private interests involved the idea that the city would somehow naturally return to the control of the host nation-state after a period of time sounds highly improbable (not unlike the Marxian idea of the state ‘withering away’…)
 
Meanwhile, having highlighted the evils of slums as one reason for creating these new cities, Romer says of the Cuban example that ‘supporting cities and suburbs would grow up on the Cuban side of the city’s boundaries’…in other words, the presence of a wealth and employment generating city would create huge slums outside the island of great institutions, which doesn’t move us on very far at all. Don’t need to build a charter city to create gated communities surrounded by squalid slums, just go to South Africa, Nairobi, Brazil, wherever!’

Chris Blattman has also blogged on this, Paul Romer has responded to his criticisms here, and Chris, in determined search of the last word, has responded to Romer’s response here.

Rodrik on protectionism; Tories and climate change; my son’s a blogger; medicine v aid; regulating the banks; good news on HIV and piano stairs: links I liked

Dani Rodrik, who has tragically abandoned his blog due to a combination of work pressures and spammers, takes aim at groupthink on protectionism and the crisis.

See what a blogging subset of Tories think about David Cameron’s recent speech on climate change. Looks like he’s got his work cut out.

Proud father time – son Finlay came with me to Bangladesh recently and wrote this lovely piece for the Oxfam yoof page. Wish I could write like that.

Bill Easterly wonders why critical research is welcomed in medicine, and abused/ignored in aid.

‘Either we impose a credible threat of bankruptcy, or institutions we have to support are made safer, or, better, we have both of these. Open-ended insurance of weakly regulated institutions that take complex gambles is intolerable.’ Martin Wolf gives a brilliant overview of the case for much tougher bank regulation. 

The Economist passes on some glass-half-full news on HIV – 42% of those who need the drugs are now actually receiving them, a massive impr ovement on recent years (see other chart)

And finally, making healthy options more fun – piano stairs – but don’t you hate the corporate branding? [h/t Jo Rowlands]

Forget Cannes – check out the Golden Poo Awards, 2009

OK, so Global Handwashing Day on 15 October may have passed you by, but take a minute (well, 3 minutes) to watch these two winning entries (less than two minutes each) for the accompanying Golden Poo awards.

Behind the humour is a very serious purpose of course. Handwashing with soap is among the most effective and inexpensive ways to prevent diarrheal diseases and pneumonia, which are together responsible for the deaths of over 3.5m children before their 5th birthday, every year. [h/t Cat Pettengell]

25 years after the Ethiopian famine, what have we learned?

It’s 25 years since the Ethiopian famine and the region is again being flayed by drought. Expect lots of media coverage, at least some of it along the lines of ’why did we bother? Nothing’s changed.’ Not so. Band Aids and Beyond, an Oxfam briefing paper published today, summarizes what’s been learned since then and asks why donors and governments haven’t acted on that knowledge. It argues that ‘For Ethiopians it is more sustainable, dignified and cost effective to identify and tackle the risk of disaster rather than simply waiting for disaster to strike.’

Highlights:

‘In 1984, one million Ethiopians died during a catastrophic famine. The severity of suffering seen 25 years ago has not returned to Ethiopia. But drought still costs Ethiopia roughly $1.1bn a year – almost eclipsing the total annual overseas assistance to the country.

[this prompts two questions, and a single answer]:
1. What can be done to prevent the next drought from becoming a disaster?
2. Seventy per cent of humanitarian aid to Ethiopia comes from the USA. Most of this is ‘in-kind’ food aid, subject to conditions which have nothing to do with development and mean that it costs up to $2 of US taxpayers’ money to deliver $1 of food aid. Are there any more cost-effective ways of dealing with disasters?

The Disaster Risk Management (DRM) approach goes a long way to answering both these questions.  DRM means working in partnership with countries and communities to:

Cash for work project, Amhara region

• Identify all potential threats to lives and livelihoods (not just one threat, such as drought) and people’s vulnerabilities to these threats;

• Build their resilience – their ability to withstand shocks without jeopardising their ways of working and living.

Women have a crucial role in the response of communities to shocks such as drought, but they are too often marginalised in decision-making. To be effective, DRM must involve women and men equally.

What does DRM look like?

• Providing micro-insurance for farmers to help with rapid recovery from prolonged drought;

• Giving communities cash in exchange for work to reduce the risk of flooding. The cash can be used to buy food locally, which also helps local markets;

• Buying food for emergency reserves from small-scale farmers in the country or region, which provides a boost for agriculture and a meal for those facing hunger;

• Establishing early warning systems and standby stocks to facilitate a timely response to impending food shortages or other disasters.

DRM is not a new concept, but worldwide it remains an under-used idea: just 0.14 per cent of overseas assistance is allocated specifically to tackling disaster risk. [which prompts a third question]

3. Why is DRM not already the guiding approach to disasters in Ethiopia?’

Last word goes to Birhan Woldu, who became the media face of the Ethopian famine in 1984-5, survived and has now graduated with a diploma in agriculture and a degree in nursing:

Birhan Woldu in 1985 and today

‘25 years ago, my life was saved by Irish nursing sisters who gave me an injection, and food aid from organisations like Band Aid. So it may seem strange for me to say now that to get food aid from overseas is not the best way. As well as being demeaning to our dignity, my education has taught me that constantly shipping food from places like the USA is costly, uneconomic, and can encourage dependency.’

Water, land, air, life: what is a safe environmental operating space for humanity?

Sorry guys, sorting out climate change is just the start. Their success in influencing climate change policy (if not practice) seems to have emboldened earth system scientists to initiate a wider debate about the earth’s limits. A recent issue of Nature journal tries to establish the ecological ‘operating space’ for humans, and could spark off some pretty interesting debates over the coming months.

‘We have tried to identify the Earth-system processes and associated

The inner green shading represents the proposed safe operating space for nine planetary systems. The red wedges represent an estimate of the current position for each variable. The boundaries in three systems (rate of biodiversity loss, climate change and human interference with the nitrogen cycle), have already been exceeded

thresholds which, if crossed, could generate unacceptable environmental change. We have found nine such processes for which we believe it is necessary to define planetary boundaries: climate change; rate of biodiversity loss (terrestrial and marine); interference with the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles; stratospheric ozone depletion; ocean acidification; global freshwater use; change in land use; chemical pollution; and atmospheric aerosol loading (see Fig. 1 and Table).

Their conclusion? ‘Humanity may soon be approaching the boundaries for global freshwater use, change in land use, ocean acidification and interference with the global phosphorous cycle. Our analysis suggests that three of the Earth-system processes — climate change, rate of biodiversity loss and interference with the nitrogen cycle — have already transgressed their boundaries.’

Oops.

[h/t Steve Jennings]

Migration and development: how to improve on a feeble new Human Development Report

The Human Development Report, published by UNDP, is traditionally the best of the UN annual tomes. This year’s HDR, entitled Overcoming Barriers, discusses migration. It’s a critical issue in development – moving in search of work and a better life has always been a strategy for people living in poverty as most modern-day Americans and Australians can testify (not including indigenous inhabitants, and we deported some of the Aussies, but you know what I mean).

First, some highlights from the survey of the data, which explodes any number of stereotypes:

‘The 2009 HDR explores how better policies towards human mobility can enhance human development. It lays out the case for governments to reduce restrictions on movement within and across their borders, so as to expand human choices and freedoms.

The overwhelming majority of people who move do so inside their own country. Using a conservative definition, we estimate that approximately 740 million people are internal migrants—almost four times as many as those who have moved internationally. Among people who have moved across national borders, just over a third moved from a developing to a developed country—fewer than 70 million people. Most of the world’s 200 million international migrants moved from one developing country to another or between developed countries

Most migrants, internal and international, reap gains in the form of higher incomes, better access to education and health, and improved prospects for their children. Surveys of migrants report that most are happy in their destination.

People displaced by insecurity and conflict face special challenges. There are an estimated 14 million refugees living outside their country of citizenship, representing about 7 percent of the world’s migrants. Most remain near the country they fled, typically living in camps until conditions at home allow their return, but around half a million per year travel to developed countries and seek asylum there. A much larger number, some 26 million, have been internally displaced.

The share of international migrants in the world’s population has remained remarkably stable at around 3 percent over the past 50 years, despite factors that could have been expected to increase flows.[cheaper transport, communications etc] [The reason lies in increasing] government-imposed barriers to movement. Internal migration rates have also only increased slightly.’ (see graph)

And what’s the HDR’s proposal?

‘Overcoming Barriers lays out a core package of reforms, which comprises six ‘pillars’. Each pillar is beneficial on its own, but together these offer the best chance of maximizing the human development impacts of migration:

1. Liberalizing and simplifying regular channels that allow people with low skills to seek work abroad;
2. Ensuring basic rights for migrants;
3. Reducing transaction costs associated with migration;
4. Improving outcomes for migrants and destination communities;
5. Enabling benefits from internal mobility; and
6. Making mobility an integral part of national development strategies.’

There’s some good detail under each heading, but I must admit, I find it a pretty disappointing list. Why?  Because it ignores the political realities of migration – anti-immigrant feeling is high all over the rich world and yet the debate seems paralysed, with no attempt to find new ways of ensuring that migration benefits all sides. What is the HDR’s response to this? To ignore it, apart from saying ‘you are wrong’ to the anti-migration lobby and making some rather feeble exhortations for ‘political leadership’, which basically consists of asking politicians to commit professional suicide by becoming advocates for increased migration. Hardly a winning strategy.

This absence of political engagement contrasts with an excellent draft paper by Gonzalo Fanjul and Lant Pritchett (submitted to the new Global Policy journal), which argues that ‘labor mobility is a glaring, and as yet unaddressed, challenge to fair and progressive system of global governance.’ Gonzalo and Lant argue that since both unilateral liberalization and a binding, WTO-style international agreement are ‘politically radioactive’ in the rich countries, the answer will have to lie in what they call a ‘Goldilocks approach’ somewhere between the two, that is “adaptive” and “pluri-lateral”. How would this work?

‘Countries or other entities could join an organization by acceding to a minimal(ist) core set of standards.  The organization would then serve three functions: 
(a) a registry of migration voluntary agreements among the nation-state members of whatever scope the nation-state members choose (bi-lateral, regional, open accession by a host, multi-lateral),
(b) an implementation and dispute-resolution forum dealing with registered agreements, and
(c) a capability to examine experiences and promote extension of success, tailored to circumstances.’

Such an organization would allow countries to experiment, learn and share that learning, while reducing some of the political risks in doing so. Gonzalo and Lant point out that lots of interesting experiments are already happening (as does the HDR, to be fair), but they are not being scaled up or passed on rapidly enough:

‘New Zealand has launched a temporary migration scheme for agricultural labor with explicitly developmental objectives; Canada and Jamaica have an innovative program in which cooperation in voluntary return of temporary migrants is encouraged by allocating fixed quotas to specific Jamaican localities; Spain is considering a range of “co-development” schemes with major migration partners.  There are innovations in improving aspects of existing large-scale flows—such as protection of the human rights of Indonesian migrants—by publicizing their rights and providing access to regular communication.  There are also existing large scale successful programs in managing repeat temporary migration, often just within sending countries but also involving bi-lateral agreements, such as those in the Philippines.  Individually, these are not “the solution” waiting to be adapted, but by having no organizational nexus in which lessons can be drawn and elaborated they lack sufficient dynamism to scale up and affect the system.’

Shame the HDR didn’t borrow more of these ideas. And the final word goes to Gonzalo (who – declaration of interest – is a friend and works for Intermon – Oxfam Spain); ‘why is no big international NGO campaigning on this? I fear our capacity for outrage is selective.’

Identity and AK47s; bloody flags; fossil fuel subsidies; AidWatch v Sachs (again); CO2 is good for you and a good nobel prize (not that one): links I liked

‘“Give us our identity cards and we hand over our Kalashnikovs”, said the leader of the rebel forces in Côte d’Ivoire’, Bronwen Manby discusses the battle for citizenship in Africa.

Here’s the flag of the Benin Empire, a pre-colonial African state situated in modern Nigeria that lasted from 1440 until 1897.  Any nominations for which of today’s governments should adopt it? [h/t Chris Blattman]

The rich countries are cooking the planet, and what was the main new action agreed at the G20 in Pittsburgh? End fossil fuel subsidies, used almost entirely by developing countries (see chart). Still the Economist argues that it makes both economic and environmental good sense to sort them out.

‘Imagine that you are a policymaker in a developing country, with limited resources at your disposal. What can you learn from the Millennium Villages? So far, not very much.’ Laura Freschi on the Aid Watch blog laments the lack of proper monitoring in the Jeff Sachs flagship project (and starts another row – Aid Watch is clearly positioning itself as the development industry’s shock jock)

This is what the US climate change debate looks like (on a bad day). [h/t Alex Evans]

But at least the Nobel committee are doing something about it. Here’s the new (joint) economics prize-winner, Elinor Ostrom, who is both distinctly non-orthodox and the first woman to win the prize, with an 8 minute presentation on ‘beyond the tragedy of the commons’ [h/t Michael Harvey]