The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World. Synthesis > novelty in a big new UN report.

Of the big reports that spew forth from the multilateral system, some break new ground in terms of research or narratives, while others usefully recap the latest thinking on a given issue. Last week’s 2013 Human Development Report, The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World, falls into the latter category, pulling together the evidence for a tectonic North-South shift in global economic and political affairs, summarizing new thinking on inequality, South in the North etc and asking what happens next. If you’re currently sunk in the depths of Europessimism or US political stalemate, you may find such an upbeat story refreshing (or even disturbing). You can read the exec sum online, but it doesn’t seem to allow you to cut and paste (v annoying for lazy bloggers like me).

Some useful numbers to demonstrate the extent of the shift: From 1980 to now, developing countries’ share of global GDP rose from 33% to 45%, their share of world goods trade from 25% to 45%, and South-South trade as a % of the world total rose from 8% to 26%.

How has this happened and so what? The HDR’s approach is to learn from the success of 18 of the more than 40 countries in the developing world that have done better than expected in human development terms in recent decades, with their progress accelerating markedly over the past ten years. Not just China and India, but countries like Turkey, Ghana and Mauritius. Again, nothing new there – the Growth Commission had a go at that five years back – but still infinitely preferable to maths-led regression-tastic nonsense that ignores history and politics.

Compared to the Growth Commission, the HDR’s conclusions are more interventionist, and more political. The Report identifies 3 main drivers shared across the success stories:

1. A proactive developmental state

2. Tapping into global markets

3. Determined social policy innovation

On the role of the state, successful countries ‘share some key characteristics. Most were proactive “developmental states” that sought to take strategic advantage of opportunities offered by world trade. They also invested heavily in human capital through health and education programs and other essential social services. More important than getting prices right, a developmental state must get policy priorities right. They should be people-centred, promoting opportunities while protecting against downside risks.’

In case you missed it, that’s a not-very-subtle two fingers to the Washington Consensus and its preference for ‘getting the prices right’.

Oops, wrong South

The report points to some downside risks that threaten this progress: ‘short-sighted austerity measures, failures to address persistent inequalities, and a lack of opportunities for meaningful civic participation.’ But overall, as the South rises, the focus will shift to ‘long-term challenges shared by industrialized countries of the North’ – both commonly shared issues like ageing and jobs, and collective action problems like climate change.

Its recommendations for continuing this amazing progress include

1. Developing countries need to move their focus from ‘growth first’ to human development

2. Enhanced South-South learning and integration

3. Greater representation for civil society and the South in the international system. Global institutions have not yet caught up with this historic change (the international system’s loss rather than the BRICS’). China, with the world’s second largest economy and biggest foreign exchange reserves, has but a 3.3 percent share in the World Bank, less than France’s 4.3 percent. India, which will soon surpass China as the world’s most populous country, does not have a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. And Africa, with a billion people in 54 sovereign nations, is under-represented in almost all international institutions.

And in a nice table-turning touch, the report ‘urges the convening of a new “South Commission” where developing countries can take the lead in suggesting constructive new approaches to effective global governance.’

Nothing earth-shattering, but a useful exercise in synthesizing the evolving understanding of development and repositioning the multilaterals within it. So what have I missed?

And here’s the rather frenetic animated version

What does the UN’s first Africa Human Development Report say about food security?

A guest post from Ricardo Fuentes-Nieva (right), who is taking over from me as head of research at Oxfam in a couple of weeks, (I’m not leaving, just changing jobs within Oxfam – more on that later).

Over the past two years, I spent most of my time working on the first Africa Human Development Report (left), which was launched yesterday in Nairobi. It was about time for the first African HDR, especially given recent famine in the Horn and repeated threats of humanitarian food crises in the Sahel. The report focuses on food security – for a large number of Africans (some 220 million), hunger is a daily threat – and often one with permanent consequences.

The premise of the Africa HDR is simple: food security, through better nutrition, can improve education, health, productivity, and other important social and economic factors that allow people to have a good life (see figure).

In contrast, malnutrition can be a long lasting burden:

“The perverse dynamic between food insecurity and poor education, bad health and poverty can last generations. Hungry children with weakened immune systems die prematurely from communicable diseases such as dysentery, malaria and respiratory infections that are ordinarily preventable and treatable. They start school late, learn less and drop out early. Malnourished mothers are at greater risk of dying in childbirth and of delivering low-birthweight babies who fail to survive infancy. Undernourished babies who make it through infancy often suffer stunting that cripples and shortens their lives. As adults they are likely to give birth to another generation of low-birthweight babies, perpetuating the vicious cycle of low human development and destitution.”  

Recent evidence reveals a jarring paradox in Africa. Several countries have been progressing very rapidly in the last years – between 2004 and 2008, African economies grew on average 6.5% annually; child mortality is decreasing; school enrollment is improving; and the Human Development Index (a composite measure of health, education, and income) has risen faster than anywhere else since 2000. Yet Sub-Saharan Africa has not been able to turn improvements in human development into better nutrition indicators – especially compared to Asia’s progress in the last two decades. In sub-Saharan Africa the number of malnourished children increased by 55 million in the last 10 years. 

The stubborn persistence of hunger in sub-Saharan Africa is partly the result of a brutal neglect of the rural sector for decades, which led to widespread rural poverty, low agricultural yields, poor infrastructure, and limited basic services in rural areas:

- 93% of the arable land is rain-fed.
- African farmers use less than 20 kgs of fertilizer per hectare of arable land, compared to nearly 350 kgs in Asia.
- Since the early 1960s, production of cereals per capita has fallen 13% — the only region to suffer a decline. Today, cereal production in Africa is around 150 kgs per capita; in Latin America it is close to 300 kgs, and in Asia more than 350 kgs.
- Only 30% of Africa’s rural population lives within 2 kilometres of a road. In South Asia, 58% do.

This policy bias reinforced a vicious circle of high levels of inequality, skewed control over resources, and access to opportunities against certain groups – for instance, women have less ability to own and inherit land (figure). As the African Progress Panel Report (launched last week) mentions, the new wealth is not creating the necessary employment or reaching marginalized groups. Add to that the detrimental effects of some international practices – including the lingering effects of structural adjustment, lavish northern agricultural subsidies, the production of bio-fuels, and neglect of agriculture in official development assistance.

African governments face important policy decisions, mostly on how to transform the recent economic growth and advances in other development indicators into long-term opportunities. The report focuses on four areas of intervention: increase agricultural productivity, strengthen nutrition policies, build resilience, and empower marginalized groups. 

These are interventions that each African country will need to weigh against other national priorities. There is evidence that African people recognize the attempts that governments make to improve access to food. And they also notice when they don’t: about 60% of respondents on the 2009 Gallup World Poll special issue on food security in Africa disagreed with the statement: “The government of this country is doing enough to help people get food”.

Creating better institutions and investing more resources are part of the solution. But any real improvement in the food security situation of African societies will need to make sure that all groups participate actively in the decision-making process. Solving the food security conundrum in Africa requires strong public action. The role of the agricultural sector in development and poverty reduction has been explored at length. But the role of nutrition, social protection, and civic participation has not been duly recognized. Active citizens can play a critical role in ensuring that governments are held accountable and that any policy related to food is participatory and equitable (a very important issue given the recent spate of land grabs).

Too often in Africa (as well as other developing regions), governing elites do not reflect the public interest in their actions and policies. Issues of governance, agency, and democracy might seem unimportant for food security but, increasingly, we have learned that hunger and starvation are closely related to politics and political economy. This is why empowerment and resilience are important. Access to information, roads, and well-designed social programs allow people to make better decisions and better participate in markets and societies. The power structures that keep certain groups from accessing land or that bias public investment towards leaders’ constituencies must be clearly identified – and African governments, civil society, and other stakeholders will need to alter these power relations and give everyone a fair chance to avoid the perils of hunger and its negative consequences for human development.

And here’s the 6 minute launch video

How can we improve the way we measure poverty? The UN’s new poverty index (and groovy graphics)

Ask poor people what poverty is like, and they typically talk about fear, humiliation and ill health, at least as much as money. But can the non-income dimensions of poverty be measured in a way that allows policy makers to weigh priorities and allocate resources? If not, the danger (as often happens) is that decision makers and documents initially nod towards the many dimensions of poverty, but by paragraph two, you’re back in $ per day territory. And all too often, in policy terms, if it can’t be measured, it gets ignored.

The Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) has been working for years to try and develop such metrics, and they recently launched the ‘Multidimensional Poverty Index’ (MPI), which will feature in this year’s UNDP Human Development Report, celebrating its 20th anniversary. I’ll briefly summarize it here, before unleashing an exchange of guest blogs between the World Bank and OPHI.

The MPI brings together 10 indicators of health (child mortality and nutrition), education (years of schooling and child enrolment) and standard of living (access to electricity, drinking water, sanitation, flooring, cooking fuel and basic assets like a radio or bicycle). It’s thus a logical extension of its predecessor, UNDP’s pioneering Human Development Index, launched in the first Human Development Report back in 1990, which combined life expectancy, education (literacy + enrolment rates) and GDP per capita.

What were the results when they crunched the numbers? Here’s the blurb from the launch press release:

“OPHI researchers analysed data from 104 countries with a combined population of 5.2 billion (78 per cent of the world total). About 1.7 billion people in the countries covered – a third of their entire population – live in multidimensional poverty, according to the MPI. This exceeds the 1.3 billion people, in those same countries, estimated to live on $1.25 a day or less, the more commonly accepted measure of ‘extreme’ poverty.

The MPI also captures distinct and broader aspects of poverty. For example, in Ethiopia 90 per cent of people are ‘MPI poor’ compared to the 39 per cent who are classified as living in ‘extreme poverty’ under income terms alone. Conversely, 89 per cent of Tanzanians are extreme income-poor, compared to 65 per cent who are MPI poor. The MPI captures deprivations directly – in health and educational outcomes and key services, such as water, sanitation and electricity. In some countries these resources are provided free or at low cost; in others they are out of reach even for many working people with an income.

Half of the world’s poor as measured by the MPI live in South Asia (51 per cent or 844 million people) and one quarter in Africa (28 per cent or 458 million). Niger has the greatest intensity and incidence of poverty in any country, with 93 per cent of the population classified as poor in MPI terms.

Even in countries with strong economic growth in recent years, the MPI analysis reveals the persistence of acute poverty. India is a major case in point. There are more MPI poor people in eight Indian states alone (421 million in Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal) than in the 26 poorest African countries combined (410 million). The MPI also reveals great variations within countries: Nairobi has the same level of MPI poverty as the Dominican Republic, whereas Kenya’s rural northeast is poorer in MPI terms than Niger.”

My views on all this (largely stolen from my colleague Claire Hutchings)? It’s a step forward on the previous Human Development Index, but only a limited one. There are still many facets of poverty that it doesn’t touch on, such as conflict, personal security, domestic and social violence, issues of power/ empowerment, or intra-household dynamics. This is partly because it still relies on existing data sets, focusing on how to use differently the data we are already collecting, rather than proposing/ starting from a fresh conceptual framework on critical dimensions of poverty. That makes the proposal more practical, but less radical.

The comparison of extreme income poverty scores vs multidimensional poverty scores is interesting (see chart – the bar is the MPI score, the line is the income poverty score) – it would be great to see further research into possible explanations for the divergences, such as the role of social services and social protection- both formal and informal, and the potential implications for policy development.

Another advantage for policy development and assessment is that this index responds more rapidly than income to different policy interventions. A child feeding programme or scrapping user fees will have an immediate impact, whereas it may take years for government policies to filter through into income stats.

Great that it’s all open source – as with all measures there is scope to choose the mix of indicators to back up your particular argument, but at least making this data open source allows other people to challenge your analysis.

Finally, while it does allow for comparisons of groups within countries it is still a very aggregate picture, designed primarily to enable comparisons between countries.

See here  for a nice interactive map, and check out the coverage in the FT and Guardian

How important is growth to improvements in health and education? Not at all, says a new UN paper

The first batch of background papers to this year’s big Human Development Report has just been published. The one that caught my eye is by George Gray Molina and Mark Purser. “Human Development Trends since 1970: A Social Convergence Story” crunches a big dataset of Human Development Indicator (HDI) numbers and comes up with some pretty heretical conclusions. It finds that that the links between economic growth and improvements in health, education and life expectancy are not nearly as clear as people often assume (in fact the correlation between economic growth and changes in the non-income components of human development over their period of study is nearly zero). So there’s more to life (and development) than growth – like state action, for example. Here’s the highlights:

“We consider whether trends in human development are different from trends in economic growth. To answer these questions, we assemble a 111 country data set from 1970 to 2005 that makes HDI changes comparable both within and between countries.”

Findings: “There is evidence of poorer countries catching-up with rich countries, particularly with respect to life-expectancy and literacy. In addition, we find that the income and non-income components of HDI change are uncorrelated, thus undermining the common view that they occur jointly.

Only one country (Zambia) experiences a reversal in its human development level over the 35-year period; 110 countries experience advances. Achievements are faster for the pre- 1990 period, and are faster in Asia and the Middle East throughout the whole period. Progress on HDI achievements tends to be literacy-led, while progress in Asia tends to be life-expectancy-led. Improvements in Latin America and Eastern Europe are mixed. These results contrast with the conventional portrait of development progress, largely inferred from the economic growth literature.

We also contrast the top 10 performers in HDI with the top 10 performers for GDP per capita. The exercise highlights the differences between growth-led and HDI-led development. The most rapid improvements in life expectancy and literacy are not occurring in the fastest growing economies of the world. They are occurring in a subset of lower and middle income countries in Asia, the Middle East and northern Africa.

Three results emerge from the second part of the paper, focusing on determinants of HDI trends. First, we find evidence of convergence of human development over time. Does “income matter” as a driver of human development? We find that income is not a significant predictor of life expectancy… the drivers of improvements in health and education differ from the forces that lead to income growth.

Although correlated, we do not find evidence to suggest that human development trends can be explained by factors associated with economic growth…. social factors seem to be driving the aggregate human development story.”

I must admit, I’m a bit baffled by this, given the big literature that says growth is crucial to poverty reduction, and poverty reduction to improvements in health and education – anyone care to try and explain the discrepancy?

[update: seems like I missed another very important finding from the paper - 'changes in gender roles --proxied by female literacy and fertility-- are the best predictors of accelerations in life expectancy and literacy achievement' See comments from John Magrath and George Gray Molina]

Other background papers in this batch are:

Human Development Concepts

• Alkire, Sabina, “Human Development: Definitions, Critiques, and Related Concepts”

• Neumayer, Eric, “Human Development and Sustainability”

HD Data and Trends

• Pineda, José and Francisco Rodríguez, “Curse or Blessing? Natural Resources and Human Development”

HD and Governance

• Pritchett, Lant, “Birth Satisfaction Units (BSU): Measuring Cross-National Differences in Human Well-Being”

• Jayadev, Arjun, “Global Governance and Human Development: Promoting Democratic Accountability and Institutional Experimentation”

• Walton, Michael, “Capitalism, the state, and the underlying drivers of human development”

HD in Europe

• Stewart, Kitty, “Human Development in Europe”

HD in Africa

• Fosu, Augustin Kwasi and Germano Mwabu, “Human Development in Africa”

For  more on the Human Development Report - data bases, blogs etc go here

Want to help write this year’s Human Development Report?

2010 marks two decades years since the first Human Development Report was published by the UN Development Program in 1990. Besides subsequently spawning huge numbers of useful national and thematic reports, the global HDRs have become some of the most influential of annual development analyses, for many years providing an invaluable intellectual counterweight to some of the excesses and errors of the Washington Consensus, which was at its zenith when that first HDR was published.

The 2010 Report, Rethinking Human Development, will contain a conceptual restatement of human development. One of the contributors, Sabina Alkire of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) has drafted a 1.5 page discussion and definition of Human Development and is calling for feedback and suggestions for improvement by the end of January. Please respond to Sabina.alkire@qeh.ox.ac.uk

‘Human Development is a process of expanding people’s real freedoms – their valuable capabilities – and empowering people as active agents of equitable development on a shared planet.

People are both the beneficiaries and the agents of long term, equitable human development, both as individuals and as groups. Hence Human Development is development by the people of the people and for the people.”

We might explain human development in terms of four parts: capabilities, process freedoms, principles, and constraints.

Capabilities: Human development focuses on expanding people’s real freedoms. When human development is successful, people are able to enjoy activities and states of being that they value and have reason to value. With human development, people live long and healthy lives, enjoy education and a decent quality of life. They are able to be productive and creative at home or at work, shape their own destiny, and together advance shared objectives. With human development, people are able to enjoy human relationships and feel relatively secure. In human development the ‘focal space’ is people lives. Resources, income, institutions, and political or social guarantees are all vitally important means and policy goals; yet ultimately success is evaluated in terms of the lives people are able to lead, the capabilities they enjoy.

Process Freedoms: Human beings are not only the beneficiaries of development; they are also agents, whose vision, ingenuity, and strength are vital to advancing their own and others’ well-being. Human development supports people as agents, both personally within families and communities, and collectively in public debate, collective action, and democratic practices. While the spaces for agency will vary, human development empowers people for good, enabling them to have voice and to participate in the processes that affect their lives. Hence Human Development is development by the people of the people and for the people.

Principles: Policies to advance human development also consider a few principles such as equity, efficiency, the sustainability of outcomes across time and on this planet. Some applications of human development apply additional principles such as a priority concern for the poorest of the poor, and whether the processes respect human rights obligations and other responsibilities. By applying these principles it is possible to identify certain policies that are more expensive, less equitable, and less sustainable than others and rule them out. The HDRs have regularly introduced principles by which to evaluate human development. By identifying the principles that are often used to guide human development, the reports invite a wider discussion of these values in civil society and also a more explicit application of these concerns in policy.

Shared Planet: A particularly important principle is environmental sustainability. Nearly seven billion people now share our small planet. Some live in extreme poverty; others in gracious luxury. The limits of our common planet will shape human development more sharply in the coming years than it did during the first twenty years. The onset of climate change requires a fundamental reshaping of the behaviours and aspirations of many persons and of the institutions that produce the goods and services we enjoy.

Clearly different nations and communities will emphasise different dimensions, principles, and forms of agency than others, such that their human development carries the melody of their culture, values, and current priorities. Indeed the concepts, poems, and speeches of different intellectuals and public figures may be drawn upon to articulate human development in different contexts. Human Development is not one size fits all; it is flexible and responsive. However we suggest that the development of effective policies and actions to support human development requires consideration of these four components.’

Interesting to compare this with the definition in the 1990 report:

‘Human development is a process of enlarging people’s choices…. The three essential ones are for people to lead a long and healthy life, to acquire knowledge and to have access to resources needed for a decent standard of living.

But human development does not end there. Additional choices, highly valued by many people, range from political, economic and social freedom to opportunities for being creative and productive, and enjoying personal self respect and guaranteed human rights.’

The obvious changes are the greater focus on equity and environmental constraints and group, as well as individual, freedoms. There is also more of an emphasis on agency – people ‘doing it for themelves’.

Over to you for comments to Sabina. See here for her longer background paper (under construction).

Migration and Development: lead author of this year’s Human Development Report responds to my review

Jeni Klugman responds to my fairly critical review of this year’s HDR:

‘It is good to see interest from Oxfam GB’s head of research in the migration and development debate — however, this blog about the 2009 Human Development Report (HDR) misses basic and important aspects of the report’s analysis and policy recommendations. In particular, this critique appears to have missed the discussion about political feasibility in chapters IV and V of the report (see e.g. pp 89-92; 108-112). Overcoming barriers: Human mobility and development can be accessed here.

Our proposals to liberalise unskilled migration, with pathways to permanence, are both essential and feasible. If adopted, our proposals would do much for the world’s poorest and bring benefits to both source and destination countries. We also have a series of very strong recommendations that would significantly benefit migrants with irregular status – who are about one in four of the total number of international migrants and likely number about 50 million worldwide at present.

As a counter-proposal, this blog endorses a kind of World Migration Organisation (WMO). Yet countries cannot even agree to have any ongoing discussion about migration under the auspices of the United Nations. Hence, for example, the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) remains explicitly outside the UN despite repeated calls by civil society to the contrary. So the suggestion that the HDR should have instead recommended that the primary route forward be via a new international / UN organization seems quite ironic in light of stated concerns about political feasibility.

Our core package aims to overcome the barriers to movement and improve local, national and regional policies in ways that would especially benefit the people with low formal skills and few assets – and takes account of the large political and institutional constraints which exist.

In contrast to the foregoing blog, I am happy to say that we have had an enormously positive reaction to the report’s analysis and recommendations, from the media, governments, civil society and leading migration scholars. And downloads of the HDR09 are up more than 50 percent relative to the 07/8 report, with relatively much larger interest from developing countries.

The HDR09’s broad reach and reception, both online and in the press, often highlighting the policy implications suggests that we are indeed making important and constructive contributions to this important debate.

Jeni Klugman
Director of the Human Development Report Office, UNDP’

I’ve been back over the pages Jeni cites and there’s some useful material, eg ‘attitudes to migration appear to be more positive in countries where the migrant population share in 1995 was large and where rates of increase over the past decade have been high’.

The HDR acknowledges the political minefield and has four suggestions: link migration to job vacancy levels in recipient countries; be more transparent about how migrants can gain permanent status; public information campaigns to correct misperceptions of the ‘they take our jobs and houses’ variety and multi-stakeholder debates in recipient countries.

Fine as far as it goes. The suggestion for multi-stakeholder debates is good, but restricted to national level, when international debate is also essential (and indeed the HDR itself is a good contribution to it). Jeni’s right that calling for big new international institutions can be a waste of time, but the paper I reviewed (and preferred on the institutions side) did not actually advocate some vast new World Migration Organization, but a more modest and voluntary arrangement like a scaled up version of the Ethical Trading Initiative, which has proved a rather good forum for learning and exchanging ideas on how to strengthen labour rights in international supply chains. That to me sounds realistic, rather than naive or utopian.

I know it’s customary for the blogger to get the last word, but I think on this occasion I’ll defer to the comments. Over to you.

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.’

Cuba beats USA again, this time on child welfare

I’m no apologist for the Cuban government, but it’s noteworthy that despite its much lower GDP per capita, Cuba keeps beating much richer countries in social and environmental league tables drawn up by some highly respectable NGOs. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Oxfam America contrasted the carnage in New Orleans with Cuba’s extraordinarily effective disaster response. Then the Worldwide Fund for Nature’s 2006 Living Planet report identified Cuba as the only country that achieved high levels of human development while living within its environmental footprint. Now Save the Children UK has developed a new Child Development Index (CDI) and sure enough, there is Cuba at number 20, the highest placed developing country and three slots above the USA. Read More …