From pinstripes to poverty: a refugee banker’s first 100 days at Oxfam

Oxfam is always keen to employ unusual suspects, none more so than Will Martindale, a banker turned “do gooder” (right, and no, that isn’t his Oxfam desk). Here he reflects on his first 100 days working among the (supposed) angels.

Banking. Most hate it. Few understand it. And I miss it.

I miss the pace, the energy, and the super smart people fluent in numerous languages. I miss the neon ties, the pinstripe suits and the sales guys with shiny shoes. I miss the IT geeks with their dozen monitors and knee-high coffee flasks. I miss the chic hotels, the business-class flights and French restaurants.

But I left – and was looking to move for a while – because underneath all the flash, my work had absolutely zero social worth. I worked in the more exotic side of credit default swap trading: a financial product far removed from the real economy.

So 100 days ago I joined Oxfam, eight years after I started JPMorgan’s graduate scheme, and I’m excited to have made the change.

At first “NGO-speak” was a babble of acronyms, the array of recycling bins brought on a mild sweat, and I can confirm that hot-desking is not cool. But there are super smart people fluent in numerous languages at Oxfam too. There is energy, but of a different sort; less pace but more space – to think, to challenge. There is an excitement that our work – my work – is changing people’s lives for the better. And contrary to my preconceptions, Oxfam is agile, radical and fundamentally progressive.

So the transition has been stark, but I survived, not least because I find my role fascinating.

With my colleague, former City-boy Rob Nash (ex Lehman Brothers), our objective is this: to create the space for progressive bankers to make financial stability, transparency, financial inclusion, a return to real economy banking and socially productive investment the norm, not the exception. And to sideline tax evasion, disproportionate remuneration, unsustainable leverage, high volatility and endemic price rigging.

This is a challenge. On the surface, the all male, all macho City stereotype prevails. A Christmas party involved a London treasure hunt in taxi cabs. A quiet day in the markets turned into a Krispy Kreme doughnut eating competition. A colleague’s mistake prompted a manager to send an email in size 100 font with the letters: “WTF”. And being a “tree-hugging banker” (as I was named), a trader thought it would be funny to slowly and methodically pour spaghetti bolognese into the paper-only recycling bin opposite my desk.

Yet, as with most sectors, dig a little deeper and you’ll find thousands of influential and hard-working bankers who care deeply about good banking and – like Oxfam – want a pro-poor financial sector that is inclusive, sustainable and responsible.

Both internally and externally, many ask why this is relevant to Oxfam.

On the negative, predatory land investments in the world’s poorest countries have made thousands of people homeless and hungry; commodity speculation has driven volatile food prices; the City finances arms companies and corrupt mining companies; and facilitates tax avoidance that starves poor countries of much needed tax receipts.

On the positive, there’s more low carbon and climate financing; new technologies make funds available to poor people in remote rural areas; and bridging loans provide upfront funding needed for humanitarian disasters. And in my short time at Oxfam, I have met many financiers who are focusing their efforts and expertise in innovative products and business models designed to meet the most urgent social and environmental challenges of our time.

The financial services are central to this. But arguably, there is the subtle but more important concept of financial stability. I remember a senior trader once told me that “as long as you don’t mess with people’s lives, finance is ok”.

But even the far removed credit default swap market messes with people lives. Credit default swaps replicate the risk of trading bonds, but whereas bonds are paid for upfront, sellers of credit default swaps pay in arrears. And as we found out, nobody had the money to pay. As the markets tanked, more payments were triggered needing yet more scarce cash, so the markets tanked some more. And thus began a credit crunch which affected everyone, particularly poor people.

Take the LIBOR scandal. LIBOR is the benchmark interest rate for pretty much every floating rate trade that exists. So when it was kept artificially high, interest rate payers paid too much, including poor countries servicing debt payments.

Finance is everywhere. Banks, central banks, international finance institutions and governments are a public private hybrid, controlling national wealth, capital allocation and redistribution (or not).

We believe 2013 presents a unique opportunity to place Oxfam’s voice at the heart of financial reform as the City rebuilds its business and reputation in the wake of the credit crunch and the ongoing Eurozone crisis.

As you read this, the World Economic Forum is being held in Davos. As ever, the titans of global finance will be prominent in the corridors of Swiss resorts, trading ideas over cocktails and canapés. It is a good day to reflect on what positive engagement with the City might look like. As with Oxfam’s first foray into the sector, the policy document “Better Returns in a Better World”, we are looking to divide the City; to challenge the status quo and to identify, support and encourage progressive, sustainable and pro-poor financial services.

The detail is still to be decided. Here are some of our ideas:

• We feel it’s necessary to start with a map. Who does what where in the City, and more importantly, how and why?

• We will pioneer public “City” workshops to move beyond a bank’s CSR department and reach an audience of finance experts with anuntapped interest in development. We want better banking, not token hand-outs: “we financed a biofuels project which displaced 1000s of people, but not to worry, we built a health clinic in the neighbouring village.”

• We will ask banks and other investors to share their research and provide access to their trading and operation desks. And in the same way that Oxfam hosts trips for policy makers to visit our programmes, we will extend such invitations to those with influence in the financial sector.

• With a greater understanding of the City’s power-base and having built a wider network of City professionals, we will root our work in Oxfam’s priority campaigns; on land, food, tax and climate change. We will publish a series of “investor briefings” in a language and style consistent with the City: more graphs, fewer words.

• Finally, through active campaigning we will hold financial organisations to account; exposing and challenging harmful practices and supporting and encouraging policies with clear and demonstrable development impacts. We seek to end the business-as-usual approach which disproportionately hurts the world’s poorest and contribute to the rise of sustainable and responsible investment as the new mainstream of financial markets.

But to what extent should Oxfam work with the City? Is a pro-poor financial sector a distant dream? What’s your experience of bankers and banking? How can we measure progress? And which issues should Oxfam – a global aid and development charity with a mission to end poverty and suffering – prioritise within the City?

My colleague Rob Nash and I would welcome your suggestions, comments and concerns as we engage with this complex and powerful sector.

What does Bill Gates’ leaked report say about aid, tax and development?

Take a look at the leaked report by Bill Gates to the G20, which got a good deal of media coverage because of its positive noises about the Financial Transactions Tax. Actually, the rest of the report is at least as interesting.

Firstly, it’s not actually the final report, but a 7 page ‘technical note’ on the key financing proposals. The report itself is going to talk much more about innovation systems. But the financial content in the technical note is fascinating. Some highlights:

A big focus on ‘domestic resource mobilization’ – poor countries raising their own revenues by improving their tax systems and getting more from extractive industries (oil, gas, mining). Gates argues for an extension of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative both to include more developing countries, and to introduce disclosure requirements in extractive companies’ home countries (along the lines of the US Dodd-Frank legislation).

As you’d expect, Gates argues that rich countries have to stick to their aid promises and that their ‘fiscal books cannot be balanced off the backs of the poor’.

On new sources of revenue, he puts potential cash from an FTT at $48bn a year (if introduced across the G20) or $9bn (major European economies only) and argues for ‘a substantial allocation for development’, presumably in response to the European Commission’s desire to grab all the income to fund its own operations.

But he also advocates two other cash cows: expanding the tax on tobacco to the WHO target of 70% of the pack price, which he reckons would raise a colossal $170bn a year (not clear from the text if this is the additional revenue, or includes the tax already being raised on tobacco). A ‘Solidarity Tobacco Contribution’, which he puts at $9bn a year, would then be allocated to global health initiatives.

His third revenue proposal is on climate change, where he supports World Bank and IMF (and Oxfam) proposals to fund adaptation costs with new taxes on shipping and aviation fuels , which he says could raise $30bn a year from shipping and a bit less from aviation.

Another sensible suggestion is tapping into the estimated $350bn a year in remittances from migrant workers, by driving down transaction costs and encouraging pro-poor investments through things like ‘diaspora bonds’ aimed at overseas workers and entrepreneurs.

Finally, he puts the amount of money now held by ‘Sovereign Wealth Funds’ built up by China, Abu Dhabi and others at an eye-popping $4 trillion and rising, and wonders how that could be harnessed for infrastructure or other essential investments (perhaps using conventional aid to make such investments more attractive to the SWFs).

Comprehensive, and very interesting, not least because of the identity of the author. Does Bill Gates’ protagonism mark a further shift of the big philanthropreneurs (and their foundations) from an insistence on sticking to the relatively straightforward world of ‘stuff’ (vaccines, infrastructure, seeds, microfinance) to the more complex business of influencing systems and policies, which are every bit as crucial to development? Hope so.

Why do we know so little about how poor people ‘do’ development?

I’ve just been reading the draft of a review by Charlotte Sterrett of climate change adaption experiences in South Asia. It’s great, and I’ll link to it when it’s published, but one conclusion set me thinking more widely:

‘While autonomous adaptation is likely to become more common and widespread than planned adaptation, most research and policy dialogue so far has focused on the latter. Research across a number of related areas to better understand the drivers of autonomous adaptation would benefit the region’.

This observation crops up again and again – people and communities take action for themselves on a range of issues from finance to livelihoods to dealing with shocks or climate change, but we know little about how they do it. Often the key players are barely on the official development radar – families, neighbours, religious institutions or grassroots organizations such as burial societies and savings groups.

Some examples, in addition to climate change adaptation:

Finance: a fascinating study of how poor families in Bangladesh, India and South Africa manage their money found that even people living on $1-$2 a day typically save about 25% of their income and none of the 250 households studied used fewer than four types of financial instrument over the course of the year (most of them invisible to the eyes of either the authorities or finance companies, let alone aid donors).

Research on the food price crisis shows that during an actual shock, state initiatives are often much less important to poor people than their own social coping mechanisms as individuals, communities or through local institutions like churches

The same is true in most natural disasters – by the time the guys with sniffer dogs fly in, tailed by the TV cameras, local people and organizations will have already done most of the life-saving.

Why does this matter? Firstly because it would help correct the negative stereotypes of passivity and aid dependence that so misrepresent the reality of poor people’s lives. But also because if we understand what people do for themselves, we can design aid responses to strengthen and complement (and not undermine) them. Portfolios of the Poor, the wonderful book that emerged from the finance study, sought to identify the financial products lacking from the indigenous ‘portfolio’ of poor people, so that financial institutions could fill the gaps. We need to replicate that approach on a range of other issues.

But why do we know so little about what poor people do for themselves? Probably because we don’t ask or try to find out – the money and energy goes on evaluating aid donor and NGO performance, i.e. the official part of the story, largely to the exclusion of the (often more important) autonomous part.

Surely we could change that fairly easily, e.g. by insisting that any evaluation also studies what people and communities do when the official aid world is absent? I’d be interested in hearing other examples of this phenomenon, along with examples of Portfolios of the Poor-style research into autonomous action on ‘our’ (i.e. official development) issues.

Ending the Doomsday Cycle of global finance

‘Each time the system runs into problems, the Federal Reserve quickly lowers interest rates to revive it. These crises appear to be getting worse and worse.’ So begins a sobering analysis by Peter Boone and Simon Johnson in the CentrePiece, the journal of the LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance.

The argument is contained in the two graphics. First the  historical record – as private sector credit has grown relative to the economy, the Fed (US Central Bank) has been forced to socialize bad debts and drop interest rates lower to dig the economy out of each successive crisis and start inflating the next bubble. ‘When the bailout is done, we start all over again. This has been the pattern in many developed countries since the mid- 1970s.’

But in the latest crisis, the interest rate has pretty much hit zero – there’s nowhere else to go – and ‘The real danger is that as this cycle continues, the scale of the problem is getting bigger. If each cycle requires greater and greater public intervention, we will surely eventually collapse.’

‘So what should be done? First, consider the regulatory problem: there are two broad ways to view past regulatory failure that has helped us arrive at this dangerous point. One is to argue it is a mistake that can be corrected through better rules. That has been the path of successive Basel committees.’

But it won’t work because of politics – the second graphic: ‘In our view, the long-term failure of regulation to check financial collapses reflects deep political difficulties in creating regulation. The banks have the money, they have the best lawyers and they have the funds to finance the political system.’

So what might work better? Something so crude that the lobbyists can’t mess with it: ‘We believe that the best route to creating a safer system is to have very large and robust capital requirements, which are legislated and difficult to circumvent or revise. If we triple core capital at major banks to 15-25% of assets, and err on the side of requiring too much capital for derivatives and other complicated financial structures, we will create a much safer system with less scope for ‘gaming’ the rules.’

And get stuck into the incentives system: ‘Second, we need to make the individuals who are part of any failed system expect large losses when their gambles fail and public money is required to bail out the system…. This requires legislation that recoups past earnings and bonuses from employees of banks that require bailouts.’

And a wonderfully simple way to overcome the ‘too big to fail’ syndrome: ‘We could impose rising capital requirements on large institutions over the next five years, thus encouraging them to develop orderly plans to break up and shrink their banks.’

The alternative is truly scary: ‘With our financial system now well-oiled to take on very large risk once again, and to gamble excessively, can we be sure that we can continue this cycle of bailing out eventual failures? At what point will the costs be so large that both fiscal and monetary policies are simply incapable of stopping the collapse? Last year, we came remarkably close to collapse. Next time, it may be worse. The threat of the doomsday cycle remains strong and growing.’

This may all sound an insider City/Wall Street argument, far removed from the gritty realities of shanty town and village in developing countries, but as the current crisis has shown, the chaos of the rich world’s casino capitalism casts a long shadow. It matters who wins this one.

Between microfinance and big bank lending there is…. a Missing Middle

Credit is the lifeblood of farming – you need cash to plant seeds, buy fertiliser and stay alive long long enough to reap and sell your harvest and pay off your loan. But you can’t always get it when you need it. A new Oxfam research paper identifies one of the main market failures resulting from the retreat of the state in agriculture: the dearth of finance for producer associations and other forms of SMEs (small- and medium-sized enterprises) in agriculture, for transactions in the size range £5,000 to £500,000. While microfinance has at last begun to add some poor rural households to its traditional urban customer base and formal financial institutions work for the big farmers and companies, this ‘missing middle’ is largely neglected.

The problems are on both the supply and demand sides. On the supply side big national lenders don’t delegate to rural branches and enable them to assess the risks and get credit flowing. One bright spot, weather insurance, is under jeopardy as climate change steadily increases risks. However, there is some good news: a range of philanthropic foundations and international financial institutions are offering partial credit guarantees to lenders, helping reduce their risks and boost the flow of credit.

On the demand side, only one third of smallholders are aggregated in some form of group enterprise, appropriate for larger transactions, while individual farmers are usually reluctant to take on such big debts. Women farmers suffer from educational discrimination, limited mobility, lack of land rights, and restrictive social norms. They are virtually excluded from agricultural credit and extension services, despite heading up one in five farms, and being capable achieving large productivity gains.

What to do? The report identifies some useful institutional development that can get credit markets working better, including:

Strengthening independent services recording legal ownership of items and their location

Improving the working markets for land in rural areas

Persuading financial institutions and their regulators to allow the collateralisation of debts owed to the enterprise, crops in various stages of processing, and personal property such as jewellery – important for women farmers.

Setting up credit information bureaux to improve the flow of information to potential lenders

Encourage ‘apex organizations’ of small lenders to pool risk and get access to emergency liquidity if things go pear-shaped

Reform national agricultural development banks (the report is even agnostic on the merits of privatisation – very daring for an NGO!)

It’s very different from the normal run of NGO research papers, written by finance professionals for their peers, but worth a skim even if you’re a financial illiterate like me.

Portfolios of the Poor – a great new book

Portfolios of the Poor gave me the same feeling of excitement as the World Bank’s epic ‘Voices of the Poor’ study. Both of them are the fruit of intense scrutiny of the real lives of poor people that uncovers insights and destroys stereotypes. Poor people are most definitely not financial illiterates, but often sophisticated managers of complex financial portfolios that are essential to their survival.

Portfolios of the Poor is a financial fly-on-the-wall account of how poor people manage money. To find out, the researchers set up ‘financial diaries’ with 250 households in selected communities in 3 countries (Bangladesh, India and South Africa). For a year, researchers visited every fortnight and picked over people’s financial affairs. The book then assimilates the findings, and intersperses them with unmistakably real-life examples from among the 250 households (‘Pumza is a sheep intestine seller living in the crowded urban hostels of Cape Town……’)

The first and perhaps most striking finding is the sheer complexity, scale and variety of poor people’s financial activity. People living in poverty need financial skills more than the better off. Just to get by from day to day, they borrow, save, and exchange cash with a huge variety of friends, family, neighbours and institutions, both formal and informal. These last include savings clubs, savings-and-loan clubs, insurance clubs, microfinance institutions, and banks. ‘At any one time, the average poor household has a fistful of financial relationships on the go.’ Every one of the 250 households had both savings and debt of some sort, and no household used fewer than four types of financial instrument over the course of the year. Rural households have turnovers (i.e. total cash flows in or out) between 10 and 30 times greater than their asset value at the end of the year.

This constant activity is needed to deal with three broad challenges:
1. Managing the erratic cash flow of poor homes to make sure there is food on the table every day
2. Dealing with the health and other emergencies that can derail families with little in reserve. In South Africa, funerals (frequent because of HIV and AIDS) cost between 5 and 10 months household income – a huge sum for people living on the edge.
3. Raising lump sums to seize opportunities (typically to buy land) or pay for big ticket expenses like weddings (which in India took up over half the yearly income of a typical household).

The authors bring to life the importance of psychology in the financial lives of poor people: something economists have largely ignored until recently. For instance, South African women in the study joined several monthly “savings clubs” in spite of having bank accounts that would have paid them interest on their savings. They found that the extra discipline the clubs provided was valuable in itself, because it compelled them to save, no matter what. For similar reasons, poor people regularly seek out money collectors who pass by daily to pick up small amounts of cash, and then return it, minus a fee (effectively a negative interest rate), at the month’s end. Both make complete sense in human terms, but baffle more orthodox economists.

In what seems a very fair appraisal of the ways poor households meet these challenges, the book assesses the strengths and weaknesses of their current financial arrangements in order to try and spot ‘gaps in the market’ – opportunities where banks and microfinance institutions can design products that genuinely address unmet needs of poor people. This is essentially a financial ‘bottom of the pyramid’ exercise. They identify three weaknesses of existing arrangements:
- unreliability (whether loans will be forthcoming, savings lost or stolen, or informal savings clubs will disintegrate);
- inflexible repayment schedules imposed by microcredit providers who insist on one year repayment periods when poor people often want loans for weeks rather than months
- terms that can be too short: some financial needs (pensions, or saving really big sums, demand years of savings, but informal institutions are too unstable to provide this kind of timespan)

If formal institutions are to remedy these gaps, they need to pay attention to poor households’ needs to save and borrow in very small amounts, on a regular basis, but with flexibility in payment schedules to match their unpredictable cash flow. The authors are big fans of ‘Grameen 2’ which has moved away from the traditional role of the microcredit lender. They identify 3 top tips for the kinds of financial products that could take off in this kind of approach:

1) a cash-flow management facility that allows poor households access to small, irregular payments of both savings and loans to tide them over the day to day variability of their cash flows

2) long term savings products

3) large lump sum general purpose loans (i.e. not just for business start-ups as many microcredit institutions have traditionally demanded) – this is the biggest potential market among the poor

Interestingly, the researchers come down against insurance, because it requires each risk to be separately insured, and ‘low income households are unlikely to want to spend money on multiple policies, knowing that only some of them will bring returns.’ Access to emergency lump sums instead acts as a kind of ‘general purpose insurance.’

Most startling finding? Even people living on $1-$2 a day typically save about 25% of their income. Amazing. For their data, book reviews, etc see the book’s website.

What impact will the book have? It feels a bit like the work of Hernando de Soto, in that it can be read in both a progressive and regressive way: progressive: poor people are active financial agents, and governments and financial institutions need to work to their needs. Regressive: a ‘private not public’ agenda that sees financial institutions piling into slums and villages to lend money to poor people so they can pay for a pile of services like education and healthcare that are often better provided by the state.

The UN lays into finance, speculation and the IMF: UNCTAD’s Trade and Development Report 2009

Another day, another UN report, this time the Trade and Development Report 2009, from the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), released last week. It’s surprisingly forthright. Set up in 1964, in the table-thumping days of the New International Economic Order, in recent years UNCTAD had become markedly more cautious, not least under its current secretary general, the distinctly un-fiery Supachai Panitchpakdi, (a former WTO boss). The global crisis seems to have changed all that. Some excerpts from the overview (italicised subheads are my attempt at a summary):

The origins of the crisis lie in financial deregulation:

‘Policymakers also failed to draw lessons from the experiences of earlier financial crises. Like previous ones, the current crisis follows the classical sequence of expansion, euphoria, financial distress and panic….. What makes this crisis exceptionally widespread and deep is the fact that financial deregulation, “innovation” of many opaque products and a total ineptitude of credit rating agencies raised credit leverage to unprecedented levels. Blind faith in the “efficiency” of deregulated financial markets led authorities to allow the emergence of a shadow financial system and several global “casinos” with little or no supervision and inadequate capital requirements.’

Speculation is driving commodity price volatility and needs to be curbed:

‘It is true that deteriorating global economic prospects after September 2008 dampened demand for commodities; but the downturn in international commodity prices was first triggered by financial investors who started to unwind their relatively liquid positions in commodities when the value of other assets began to fall or became uncertain. And the herd behaviour of many market participants reinforced such impulses. Financial investors in commodity futures exchanges have been treating commodities increasingly as an alternative asset class…. In order to improve the functioning of commodity futures exchanges in the interests of producers and consumers, and to keep pace with the participation of new trader categories such as index funds, closer and stronger supervision and regulation of these markets is indispensable. In the first half of 2009, commodity prices rose again, reflecting the return of financial speculators to commodity markets, which appears to have amplified the effects of small changes in market fundamentals.’

Developing country governments have responded well to crisis, but the IMF is holding them back:

‘A number of developing and transition economies also launched sizeable fiscal stimulus packages. On average, their size was even larger than those of developed countries: 4.7 per cent of GDP in developing countries and 5.8 per cent in transition economies, extending over a period of one to three years. The authorities in China were quick to announce a particularly large fiscal stimulus plan, amounting to more than 13 per cent of GDP…. By contrast, some developing and transition economies have had to turn to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for financial support to stabilize their exchange rates and prevent a collapse of their banking systems. IMF lending has surged since the outbreak of the current crisis, extending to nearly 50 countries by the end of May 2009. However, the scope for expansionary policies to counter the impact of the crisis on domestic demand and employment has been severely constrained by the conditionality attached to IMF lending….. Several announcements were made to the effect that the IMF would recognize countercyclical policies and large fiscal stimulus packages as the most effective means to compensate for the fall in aggregate demand induced by debt deflation. However, in reality, the conditions attached to recent lending operations have remained quite similar to those of the past. Indeed, in almost all its recent lending arrangements, the Fund has continued to impose procyclical macroeconomic tightening, including the requirement for a reduction in public spending and an increase in interest rates.’  

A debt moratorium is needed to avert a new debt crisis:

‘The fallout of the global economic crisis is impairing [low income countries’] ability to service their external debt without compromising their imports…. A temporary moratorium on official debt repayments would allow low-income countries to counter, to some extent, the impact of lower export earnings on their import capacity and government budgets. Such a moratorium would be in the spirit of the countercyclical policies undertaken in most developed and emerging-market economies…. the total amount of such a temporary debt moratorium would be modest, amounting to about $26 billion for 49 low-income countries for 2009 and 2010 combined.’

Financial integration needs to be reconsidered, and the IMF should actively encourage the use of capital controls:

‘The realization that in a globalized world “shocks” emanating in one segment of the financial sector of one country can be transmitted rapidly to other parts of the interconnected system raises some fundamental questions about the wisdom of global financial integration of developing countries in general. The experience with the current financial crisis calls into question the conventional wisdom that dismantling all obstacles to cross-border private capital flows is the best recipe for countries to advance…. Assertions that capital controls are ineffective or harmful have been disproved by the actual experiences of emerging-market economies…. the IMF should more actively encourage countries to use, whenever necessary, the introduction of capital controls as provided for in its Articles of Agreement.’

The TDR also calls for a new international exchange rate system and reserve currency to replace the dollar, a role that could perhaps be played by the IMF’s ‘special drawing rights’ (SDRs). In a short additional section on climate change (every report needs one), it comes up with the new (to me) idea of extending the use of compulsory licensing for climate-friendly technologies, allowing governments to override patents (as they currently can in public health emergencies).

Meltdown Miscellany: stats and soundbites on the development impact

Here are a few of the things that have crossed my screen on the impact of the meltdown on developing countries. I would really appreciate suggestions for more sources on this – especially on the distributive impact within and between countries. Read More …

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 …