Why ‘Human Capital’ is an abomination

I’ve always felt uneasy with using the term ‘human capital’ as a synonym for ‘people’. In this month’s issue of the consistently excellent Prospect magazine, philosopher Edward Skidelsky beautifully nails the arguments:

‘Economists, said John Maynard Keynes, should think of themselves as humble specialists, on a par with dentists. But his advice has gone unheeded. Over the past 50 years, economics and its jargon have penetrated every corner of human life. Decisions to marry and inject heroin alike are explained in terms of utility maximisation. Doctors, priests and scientists are lumped together as service providers or rent seekers. Schoolteachers are urged to “add value” to their pupils. The pig philosophy, as Thomas Carlyle called it, has become all-embracing.

Of the many harms inflicted by economics on the English language, “human capital” is the most grievous. Coined by Chicago economists Jacob Mincer and Gary Becker in the 1960s, it refers to the stock of personal skills and qualities that constitutes a worker’s economic value. Such skills and qualities are often costly to acquire and yield returns only over a long period of time, so are readily thought of as a kind of capital. Mincer and Becker’s work has provided the intellectual rationale for the huge expansion of higher education in recent decades. In an economy dominated by the knowledge and service industries, with personality and expertise at a premium, “investment in human capital” is the name of the game.

The phrase “human capital” is now so thoroughly naturalised that we seldom pause to ponder its implications. What is capital anyway? Capital is not a particular kind of good, but any good viewed in relation to certain interests. A donkey is capital to the wood-carrier. A derelict church is capital to the restaurant entrepreneur. Capital, in short, is wealth viewed not as an end in itself but as a means to more wealth. The phrase “human capital” insinuates that human beings too are to be viewed in this light—as instruments of the productive process. We have all of us attained the status which Aristotle reserved for slaves, that of living tools. What a triumph for the dismal science! Keynes naively supposed that economic growth was for the sake of personal cultivation. His modern successors have put him right: personal cultivation is for the sake of economic growth.’

Brilliant. ‘Human capital’ shall not pass my lips again.

Lifting the Resource Curse (or how to make finding oil a blessing)

‘Lifting the Resource Curse’, a new Oxfam paper, revisits the difficult question of how to ensure natural resources are a blessing, and not a curse, for poor countries. Countries like Angola, where oil revenues (which represent 80 per cent of national income) are estimated at $10bn per year, yet 70 per cent of the population live on less than $2 per day. By one estimate, between 1997 and 2002 more than $4bn in state oil revenues ‘disappeared’ from the Angolan treasury; an amount almost equal to total government spending on social services in the same period.

The first step for any country is to get your hands on the money. There are some successes to point to: Bolivia saw oil and gas revenues rise from $448m in 2004 to $1.531bn in 2006, due to the redistribution of profits agreed in contracts after 2005.

But then you have to use the money wisely (and not nick it). Indonesia and Norway are good examples of countries with significant revenue from natural resource extraction, where public spending is aligned coherently with long-term development goals. Oxfam’s research highlights some key ways to improve the opportunities offered by revenues from extractive industries: upgrading legal and fiscal frameworks in poor countries with natural resources; renegotiating contracts with big extractive companies; and putting in place or reinforcing public financial management systems. These systems should use extractive revenues for social spending, as well as for setting the foundations for the diversification of production, job creation, and to mitigate the social and environmental impacts of exploitation.
 
A cornerstone of such policies should be the promotion of transparency throughout the extractive industry supply chain, from the agreement of contracts to the allocation of revenues through public budgets.

If you have a government that wants to make natural resources into a national blessing, there is no shortage of advice. Numerous “best practice” guides have been developed in the last few years showing how to improve management of the extractive “value chain” – from licensing to government expenditures. These include the IMF’s Guide to Resource Revenue Transparency, the Natural Resource Charter developed by Paul Collier and others, a book, “Escaping the Resource Curse” edited by Macartan Humphreys, Jeffrey Sachs and Joe Stiglitz, and innumerable academic and NGO reports (the Oxfam report has over 4 pages of recommendations to be getting on with). African governments can access technical advice c/o the AfDB’s new African Legal Support Facility.

Fine, but what if you don’t have an effective state – if vested interests are skimming off revenues from oil and mining, and will do their best to stop you spending it on schools and hospitals? (This is where I try desperately to avoid using the phrase ‘political will’, banned by a previous blog). This is quite common since part of the curse of wealth is precisely that ‘money coming out of the ground’ often weakens the social contract between state and citizen (eg the state no longer needs to tax its people) and undermines institutional development.

At a national level, Lifting the Resource Curse argues, unsurprisingly, that the active involvement of civil society is essential both to increase the public pressure on governments to make the most of natural resource endowments and to act as watchdogs, tracking both the origins and uses of revenues from extractive exploitation. It is also of crucial importance to have public institutions that can support this process of participation and which are efficient in their control, monitoring, and enforcement of it.

But I think the paper could have gone a bit further with its power analysis on this – what other influential domestic groups have an interest in harnessing extractive industries for the national good? Answer, virtually all of them – business sectors (manufacturing, exporters, agriculture, finance), trade unions, media, national parliaments and local governments. Where and how have these kinds of coalitions formed and had an impact? There’s a lot more to life (and change) than CSOs.

At an international level, apart from the ever-expanding but voluntary Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, there are moves in the US to introduce legislation that would require extractive industry companies that list on the New York Stock Exchange (basically all the big ones) to disclose payments to governments. Similar moves are under way in Spain. Clamping down on tax havens and international banking secrecy might also curb some of the outflows of stolen money. Export Credit Agencies could insist that any companies they support comply with the highest standards on bribery, corruption and transparency.

With high commodity prices looking set to continue, the ability to make natural resources work for the common good, rather than private evil, will play a big part in determining which countries prosper and which fail.

See also my recent post on a World Bank paper on this issue. Oh, and the black and white pic is apparently a Californian beach in the 1920s. Those were the days, eh?

The gender impact of the global meltdown: 7 new papers and a video

One of the aspects which is almost invariably missing from substantive discussions on the global economic crisis (and which quite often, doesn’t even get lip service) is the gender dimension. Women and men experience crises in different ways, and are unequally affected by government responses. Often, pre-existing inequalities, which include under-representation of women at all levels of economic decision-making and their over-representation in informal, vulnerable, and casual employment, are more significant than gender inequalities arising specifically from the crisis.

Disaggregating the gendered inequalities, impacts and responses can reveal issues that are largely invisible from conventional accounts of the crisis, for example, the impact on the ‘unpaid economy’ as women are forced into taking second and third paid jobs to make ends meet, or the squeeze on women in the informal economy resulting from job losses in the formal economy, or women’s particular vulnerability to being put on short hours in factories and large firms. Since the early days of the crisis, Oxfam’s been trying to fill that gap, and has just published a spate of papers, most of them from our hyperactive East Asia team. Here’s a quick guide

Gender Perspectives on the Global Economic Crisis kicks off with an overview of the issues, and the findings of research from this and previous crises  

Women Paying the Price: The impact of the global financial crisis on women in Southeast Asia summarizes the regional lessons

The original paper from March 2009 that set things in motion, Paying the Price for the Economic Crisis  

Then we get down to the national level

The Real Story Behind the Numbers: The impacts of the global economic crisis 2008–2009 on Indonesia’s women workers

Feminised Recession: The impact of the global financial crisis on women workers in the Philippines

Triple Burden: The impact of the financial crisis on women in Thailand

Beyond the Crisis: The impact of the financial crisis on women in Vietnam 

More Vulnerable: The impact of the economic downturn on women in Cambodia

And finally, the East Asia team has produced this short (6 minute) video of vox pops with Asian women that puts a human face on the issues discussed in the papers

Deadlines; zapping mosquitoes; Rodrik is blogging again; Paul Collier is blaming the NGOs; why isn’t Britain more like Norway?, and pregnant breakdancers: links I liked

The end of this week (26 February) is the deadline both for commenting on our new draft paper on the impact and response to the global economic crisis, and to take the ultra-quick online survey to help sharpen up the contents of this blog. After that, I promise not to request participation of any kind for at least a month.

Back to some nice links. Zapping mosquitoes with Chris Blattman

Even if the Robin Hood Tax’s only success is to persuade Dani Rodrik to take up blogging again, (and it won’t be), it will have been worth it

Interesting challenge, and some chutzpah. Paul Collier blames NGOs for undermining Haitian state-building. Pots? kettles? (see my previous post)

Alex Evans wishes that Britain could be more like Norway

It’s a bit old, but it’s still brilliant. (Mostly) pregnant women breakdancing for the cause (maternal mortality) on London’s South Bank back in the summer of 2008.

More IMF revisionism, this time on capital controls

Another day, another IMF U turn, this time in a ‘Staff Position Note’ on capital controls by Ostry, Ghosh, Habermeier, Chamon, Qureshi, and Reinhardt (they seem to prefer writing by committee at the Fund – personally, I’m with Sartre: ‘hell is other people’). This comes hard on the heels of its recent rethink on inflation, part of a laudable institutional journey of reflection, prompted by the financial meltdown. Don’t think this one needs subtitles, so here are the highlights, plus some comments from me.

First the intro, which drives a wedge between the case for liberalizing trade and that for opening up capital markets, and summarizes the concerns of emerging market economies (EMEs) on the latter.

‘The benefits from a free flow of capital across borders are similar to the benefits from free trade, and imposing restrictions on capital mobility means foregoing, at least in part, these benefits. Notwithstanding these benefits, many EMEs are concerned that the recent surge in capital inflows could cause problems for their economies. A concern has been that massive inflows can lead to exchange rate overshooting (or merely strong appreciations that significantly complicate economic management) or inflate asset price bubbles, which can amplify financial fragility and crisis risk. More broadly, following the crisis, policymakers are again reconsidering the view that unfettered capital flows are a fundamentally benign phenomenon and that all financial flows are the result of rational investing/borrowing/lending decisions. Concerns that foreign investors may be subject to herd behavior, and suffer from excessive optimism, have grown stronger.

The question is thus how best to handle surges in inflows. The tools are well known and include fiscal policy, monetary policy, exchange rate policy, foreign exchange market intervention, domestic prudential regulation, and capital controls.’

And the findings?

‘If the economy is operating near potential, if the level of reserves is adequate, if the exchange rate is not undervalued, and if the flows are likely to be transitory, then use of capital controls is justified as part of the policy toolkit to manage inflows. Such controls, moreover, can retain potency even if investors devise strategies to bypass them, provided such strategies are more costly than the expected return from the transaction: the cost of circumvention strategies acts as “sand in the wheels.”

A key issue of course is whether capital controls have worked in practice. Our sense is that the jury is still out on this. Controls seem to be quite effective in countries that maintain extensive systems of restrictions on most categories of flows, [got that? – the IMF is saying that capital controls work best when they’re comprehensive!] but the present context relates mainly to the reimposition of controls by countries that already have largely open capital accounts. The evidence appears to be stronger for capital controls to have an effect on the composition of inflows than on the aggregate volume. For example, in the case of Chile and Colombia, controls do appear to have had some success in tilting the composition of inflows toward less vulnerable liability structures.

Looking at the current crisis, our own empirical results suggest that controls aimed at achieving a less risky external liability structure paid dividends as far as reducing financial fragility. An interesting twist is that some foreign direct investment (FDI) flows may be less safe than usually thought. In particular, some items recorded as financial sector FDI may be disguising a buildup in intragroup debt in the financial sector and will thus be more akin to debt in terms of riskiness.’

A few caveats, which largely seem to be about not encouraging China to see capital controls as an alternative to devaluing its currency (a political hot topic in Washington and elsewhere):

‘Global recovery is dependent on macroeconomic policy adjustment in EMEs, which could be undercut by capital controls, notably in cases where currencies are  undervalued. In addition, controls imposed by some countries may lead other countries to adopt them also: widespread adoption of controls could have a chilling longer-term impact on financial integration and globalization.’

The caveats are weaker, and the U turn more pronounced than in the paper on inflation I reviewed last week. That’s partly because this is a journey that began over a decade ago. On the eve of the Asian financial crisis of 1997/8, the Fund was on the verge of amending its Articles of Association to enshrine capital account liberalization as one of its explicit aims. The Asia crisis started a rethink, which has continued with the latest trauma. But I’ll only believe that the Fund has really changed when we see its staff out there advising developing countries on the best ways to introduce capital controls.

And anyway, a rethink at the Fund may not be enough. The push for capital account deregulation has been locked in in several regional and bilateral trade agreements. In its bilateral trade agreements with Chile and Singapore, the US government insisted on the elimination of precisely some of those ‘speed bump’ controls now recognized by the Fund as useful tools to help economies navigate the turbulent seas of international capital.

So a long way to go to make capital markets work for development, but this is at least a welcome step. More coverage in the Economist and the New York Times.

A big rethink at the IMF, with subtitles for non-economists

The IMF is doing some very interesting (and praiseworthy) rethinking in response to the global crisis, if a new paper co-authored by its chief economist Olivier Blanchard is anything to go by. It’s written by and for economists, so it’s not exactly bedtime reading (unless you’re an insomniac), but here’s the highlights, and my attempts at translation.

Overview: ‘The great moderation lulled macroeconomists and policymakers alike in the belief

All change at the IMF?

that we knew how to conduct macroeconomic policy. The crisis clearly forces us to question that assessment.’

Translation: we thought we knew it all. We don’t. Back to the drawing board.

‘To caricature: we thought of monetary policy as having one target, inflation, and one instrument, the policy rate. So long as inflation was stable, the output gap was likely to be small and stable and monetary policy did its job. We thought of fiscal policy as playing a secondary role, with political constraints sharply limiting its de facto usefulness. And we thought of financial regulation as mostly outside the macroeconomic policy framework.’

Translation: We thought all you had to do was keep inflation down, and all you needed to do that was vary interest rates to control prices. Government finances were secondary, and anyway, we didn’t like pesky politicians interfering. We thought regulating financial institutions was irrelevant to overall stability. Whoops.

‘It is clear that the zero nominal interest rate bound has proven costly. Higher average inflation, and thus higher nominal interest rates to start with, would have made it possible to cut interest rates more, thereby probably reducing the drop in output and the deterioration of fiscal positions.’

Translation: because we kept inflation rates so low, interest rates were also low, so when the crisis hit and we needed to boost the economy, we only had a bit of leeway to lower interest rates (you can’t take them below zero). Instead we had to spend shedloads of cash, and that has left us with a massive fiscal hangover.

‘The crisis has returned fiscal policy to center stage. It has also shown the importance of having “fiscal space”. The aggressive fiscal response has been warranted given the exceptional circumstances, but it has further exposed some drawbacks of discretionary fiscal policy for more “normal” fluctuations—in particular lags in formulating, enacting, and implementing appropriate fiscal measures (often due to an awkward political process).’

Translation: Fiscal policy really matters, and many governments have tried to spend their way out of recession, but getting spending plans through the legislature takes much longer than dropping interest rates, and gets bogged down in pork. In normal times, it’s better to have other options (like more leeway on interest rates).

‘Identifying the flaws of existing policy is (relatively) easy. Defining a new macroeconomic policy framework is much harder. The bad news is that the crisis has made clear that macroeconomic policy must have many targets; the good news is that it has also reminded us that we have in fact many instruments, from “exotic” monetary policy to fiscal instruments, to regulatory instruments. It will take some time, and substantial research, to decide which instruments to allocate to which targets, between monetary, fiscal, and financial policies.’

Translation: Damn, life is more complicated than we thought. Still, lots of work for us researchers….

‘The crisis has shown that large adverse shocks can and do happen. In this crisis, they came from the financial sector, but they could come from elsewhere in the future—the effects of a pandemic on tourism and trade or the effects of a major terrorist attack on a large economic center. Should policymakers therefore aim for a higher target inflation rate in normal times, in order to increase the room for monetary policy to react to such shocks? To be concrete, are the net costs of inflation much higher at, say, 4 percent than at 2 percent, the current target range? Answering these questions implies carefully revisiting the list of benefits and costs of inflation.’

Translation: We think we need to double inflation targets to give governments more room for manoeuvre on interest rates. But hold on a minute, we work for the IMF, so we’d better play safe and pretend we’re merely posing this as a question.

‘If one accepts the notion that, together, monetary policy and regulation provide a large set of cyclical tools, this raises the issue of how coordination is achieved between the monetary and the regulatory authorities, or whether the central bank should be in charge of both. The increasing trend toward separation of the two may well have to be reversed. Central banks are an obvious candidate as macroprudential regulators.’

Translation: The economy is just too important to be left to elected politicians. Why not put the Central Bank in charge of everything? 

This paper is mainly about policy in the rich countries, but if the change in tone ‘trickles down’ into the Fund’s work in poor countries, it should at least lead to a reduction in its traditional insistence on low inflation at any social cost. Encouraging signs? Further coverage in the FT and on the Vreelander blog.

Natural Resources and Development Strategy after the crisis: useful (but flawed) new World Bank paper

The World Bank’s influential PREM (Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network) team has a new series of topical notes, pulling together its research on breaking issues (they’ve obviously been reading the literature on using research for influence – rehashing existing research at the right moment for policy makers is one of the most effective forms of influencing). It’s called ‘Economic Premise’ (geddit?). Very welcome idea, but the premises behind the first issue are a bit patchy.

Issue number 1 is entitled ‘Natural Resources and Development Strategy After the Crisis’ and starts with the data.  ‘It is notable that, while commodity prices fell sharply from their peak in 2008 with the onset of the global recession, they generally remained much higher than previous recession lows, often as high as in 2005–07, a period of robust world growth. Furthermore, prices have also rebounded smartly over the course of 2009.’  [see graph]

The paper then addresses four main issues:

1.  How dependent are developing countries on primary commodity exports?  ‘Although declining, commodity or natural resource dependence remains a fact of life for a majority of developing countries. Commodities still comprised a little over 60 percent of the merchandise exports of the average developing country in the middle part of this decade [presumably they mean the last one], although this was down from over 90 percent in the late 1960s.’

2. What is the outlook for primary commodity prices? ‘In the 1950s the famous Prebisch-Singer thesis argued that real primary commodity prices (for example, relative to manufactures prices) displayed a long-run declining trend. [But] based on econometric study of long time series, the present consensus appears to be that real commodity prices do not display any permanent trend or drift over time.’

3. Is there a natural resource “curse” (or blessing)? ‘The short answer is “no” or rather “it depends.” Natural resources are “neither curse nor destiny”… negative long-run growth effects are mostly related to oil and minerals —concentrated “point source” resources that can easily become the object of rent-seeking and redistributive struggles (including armed conflict). On the other hand, there is little evidence of negative growth effects related to high prices for agricultural commodities, which are generally more open to competitive entry. Second, high oil and mineral prices mostly have a negative impact on long-run growth in exporting countries with bad governance. They have a significant positive impact on growth in exporters with good governance. This finding suggests that continued high commodity prices in the next few years could provide valuable resources to accelerate economic and social development in commodity exporting countries with good policies and governance.’

At this point alarm bells started to ring for me. Natural resources and governance are not independent variables – the interesting question is the impact of natural resources on governance itself. Countries are not born with either good or bad governance, they evolve, not least because of the influence of ‘money coming out of the ground’. How will Ugandan governance fare when its new oil finds come on stream this year? The Bank (or at least PREM) seems stronger on the economics and data than on the politics.

But that is nothing compared to this paper’s blind spot on environmental constraints. An entire paper on commodities, including agriculture, in which the only reference to climate is ‘investment climate’ is really quite an achievement. Might climate change not just have a bit of an impact on the future supply of commodities? And nothing on natural resource exhaustion either. Long term investors have largely accepted that oil production will peak, probably this decade, and then fall away. But in this paper the happy world of unlimited natural resource usage lives on. Extraordinary. Other bits of the Bank are doing good work on climate change, but it doesn’t seem to have reached the authors. Deep breath and back to point 4.

4. What policies can help poor countries best manage commodity resources for development? A fairly standard set of policy prescriptions:

a) Deal with governance through transparency, as in the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, backed up by citizen watchdogs. Not a bad thing (after all, we NGOs developed the ideas behind the EITI as Publish What You Pay, before Tony Blair nicked and rebranded the idea), but hardly a game changer.

b) Set up Natural Resource Funds to put money aside during booms and smooth out the impact of price swings on government revenues.

c) Don’t spend all the money on consumption and wages. Better in low income countries ‘to devote a larger portion of resource revenues to high-return public domestic investments, leading to higher growth and, ultimately, a higher value of consumption than under the permanent income strategy.’

For natural resource wonks, this last point is more significant than it seems. The authors think the standard advice, known as the ‘permanent income approach’ to natural resource fiscal management, doesn’t go far enough, and want governments to spend more.

Is the spread of supermarkets in poor countries good news or bad?

Supermarkets are not just a northern phenomenon, but are spreading fast across the developing world. Some of them arrive from outside, like the giant Tescos outside my hotel on a recent visit to Korea; others are homegrown. Either way, they are having a big impact on the lives and prospects of farmers, large and small. Thomas Reardon at Michigan State University is the guru on this, and in a recent issue of World Development, pulls together a series of case studies from Eastern Europe, Africa, South Asia and China to take stock of where the supermarketization of the world has got to. It’s not open source, I’m afraid, but here are some highlights:

Modern, Western-style supply chains are spreading, along with several other traits, including ‘the shift from public to private standards, from spot market relations to vertical coordination of the supply chain using contracts and market inter-linkages, and shift from local sourcing to sourcing via national, regional, and global networks.’ As with supermarkets in the rich countries, this is all done to cut costs and increase quality. The rise of the supermarkets is one part of a three-pronged ‘agrifood industry restructuring’ that is also transforming the wholesale sector and food processing.

When there’s a choice, companies tend to source from larger farmers and avoid the little guys on grounds of cost, quality and general hassle. However, there are exceptions: companies source from small farmers in contexts where small farmers dominate the agrarian structure. But even then, they prefer to buy from small farmers with access to irrigation, farmers’ associations, farm equipment, and paved roads, rather than the poorest of the poor.

However, where companies need or want to source from small farmers, but the farmers lack access to credit, inputs, or extension, companies sometimes use ‘‘resource-provision contracts” to address those constraints. This kind of ‘contract farming’ is spreading in many countries, and includes both contracts that are exploitative, and others that provide genuine opportunities for small farmers.

Overall, the research for the journal tends to show positive effects on small farmers of inclusion in modern channels, including on incomes and assets of farmers, and positive externalities to the local labor markets (I think that means more and better jobs….), although Reardon wants to see more research based on panel data (i.e. comparing the same households over time), rather than cross-sectional stuff that just compares countries or communities at a single point.

The research concludes that ‘government policy affects the pace and nature of agrifood industry transformation, and influences the inclusion of small farmers. While there are situations where the transmission effect of food industry transformation to farmers is still relatively weak (such as in China), in many countries the impacts are already emerging. While medium/large farmers are best equipped to face this transformation, even small farmers can be included and improve their lot via the modernizing markets, but their access to non-land assets such as irrigation, access to roads, to association, to greenhouses, and so on, is crucial for this inclusion. In some cases the food industry companies will themselves provide access to these assets (via ‘‘resource-provision contracts”) in order to assure their farm supply base. But there is a significant and substantial and urgent role for governments to provide assets to farmers to ‘‘make the grade” for the successful participation of small farmers in the transforming food economy.’

The implications for small farmers are profound. Supermarkets source the majority of their products locally, and the volumes traded are significant and growing. Domestic markets are central to the livelihoods of small farmers, and supermarkets could potentially expand farmers’ sales. But unless they can meet the supermarkets’ demanding quality and quantity requirements, farmers risk being consigned to the least profitable backwaters of the domestic economy, just as they are currently at the global level.

The rise of food processors and fast food chains in developing countries poses similar challenges. Citing problems of scale and quality, branches of McDonalds and Pizza Hut in Ecuador prefer to import potatoes for French fries, even though the Andes is the original home of the potato. Any NGOs or others trying to support small farmers by helping them achieve ‘power in markets’, by for example forming associations to increase scale and improve quality, had better be aware that they are chasing a moving target.

Mobiles; Avatar-for-good; Goldman Sachs v Robin Hood; rickshaws (+judges) v cars and conflict/security: links I liked

Mark Weston captures the rush of Sierra Leone’s mobile phone boom

An inspired bit of entrepreneurial campaigning. The Dongria Kondh tribe from eastern India publicly appeal to film director James Cameron to help them stop controversial mining company Vedanta from opening a bauxite mine on their sacred land, comparing their plight to that of the fictional Na’vi tribe in Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar 

Goldman Sachs, rigging votes on the Robin Hood Tax? A big thankyou from campaigners everywhere – what would we do without dummies scoring own goals?

And the Robin Hood Tax website is getting interesting, with lots of to and fro between supporters and sceptics on the proposal for a financial transactions tax. Good to see a bit of genuine interactivity on a big campaign.

India’s justice system continues to surprise, this time ruling in favour of rickshaw wallahs rather than the car-owning middle classes

Alex Evans takes a tour of the World Bank’s blog output on conflict, sketching out the likely content of this year’s WDR on conflict and development

While his colleague Richard Gowan (it’s a Global Dashboard week, folks) takes on Alex and other more starry-eyed global-systems colleagues. Reporting back on a big conference on ‘Emerging Powers, Global Security and the Middle East‘, he finds the debate is all in terms of national self interest, not global governance and concludes that he is ‘increasingly convinced that we can only construct our responses to [transnational threats like climate change] on a traditional, balance of power foundation – which means prioritizing hard security talks, and basing deals on transnational threats on agreements on the global division of influence.’

If you want this blog to get better, I need 5 minutes of your time

This blog has now been running for 18 months and it’s time to obey that NGO golden rule – ‘if it moves, evaluate it’ (and if it keeps moving, restructure it…). So, could you please take 5-10 minutes (honest – it’s really quick) to fill out this on-line survey? Why? Because the feedback will help me improve the quality and relevance of the content and provide some evidence of audience interest (or lack of it) for my Oxfam bosses (they’re understandably suspicious that I enjoy blogging so much). In the interests of accountability, transparency, motherhood, apple pie etc, we’ll mash up the results of the questionnaire with the various other sources of stats and feedback, and report back in due course.

Click here to take my survey