UK coalition government: development policy scorecard

Dirk Villem te Velde of the Overseas Development Institute delivers a scorecard on the new UK coalition government’s development policies. 
His verdicts are:

Aid: very good.
Beyond aid: promoting international finance: unknown.
Beyond aid: promoting Foreign Direct Investment: cautiously positive.
Beyond aid: trade: mixed, because unclear.
Beyond aid: migration: potentially bad.
Beyond aid: climate change: positive

And on new challenges:

the absence of concrete suggestions dealing with the new challenges- all of them critical to the development agenda - is a major concern.

The role of the private sector in development: few new ideas on the private sector and development (PSD)
Dealing with the new international powers: no analysis of the implications for development (and the UK) of the rise of emerging markets.
Reducing vulnerability to shocks: no mention of the need to make the development architecture better able to deal with such shocks as the global financial crisis.

What does all of this tell us? People are stupid. Aid and climate change are easy sells to the public, and therefore that is what the public knows and cares about, and therefore that is all that politicians know and care about. Everything else gets ignored. Even if the "everything else" is actually more important for, you know, development.

Which means we need some leadership from somebody, anybody, to promote this whole development policy agenda thang. Erm ODI…..?….Oxfam?…….

Duncan Green suggests that this new IPPR/World Vision paper might be making waves amongst tory policy wonks. The paper makes for the case for DFID behaving more like "Whitehall warriors", pushing their message across government. Which is fine. But I would guess that they'll be needing a bit of public support for that....

Robots and Development

I’m generally pretty excited by new technology. Not so much this one.

“As part of our ongoing support for the Samfya Resource Centre [Zambia], we have sent them robots.

robots in this context is an experiment for us. We don’t know how it will go. But it’s an experiment the young women of the Samfya Resource Centre are excited about.”

Aptivate International IT Development

Mo'vember

I told my housemate yesterday that he couldn't borrow my beard-trimmer because we need to grow "budget beards" as an austerity measure. There will barely be time for sleeping, so no shaving until the 2010 Budget is passed.

But later I had a better idea. It's almost Movember!

So readers what do you think - Budget Beards or Movember Moustaches?

Also - in the event of Movember Moustaches, we need a charity to donate some money to.

Current suggestions include:

1. Tyler Cowen's idea - give money to random individuals who look like they are working hard rather than asking for money.

2. Start an advocacy campaign and spend lots of money on flyers. I'm not particularly convinced by this one, especially as we don't know what we would be advocating for.

Dotty Data......5 Reasons why measuring GDP from Outer Space is a bad idea!

Everyone seems to be blogging about using night-lights to measure GDP (Marginal Revolution, Brad De Long’s blog, the Economist and WSJ blogs, and even here). It does sound uber-cool: Measuring GDP from Outer Space and has pretty pictures to go with it. But really, before we get too excited, here’s why it’s a dubious idea:

1. The major motivation of the underlying paper is that African countries have bad GDP data. But here’s a thought: a lot of Sub-Saharan countries get a LOT of their GDP from minerals and oil. The minefields don’t really create much light (at least not as much as the oil’s worth!) and often most of this wealth does not trickle into local consumption. Think here of all the usual stuff on political economy of resource curse etc. etc. emember President Obiang from Tropical Gangsters still rules Equatorial Guinea…… So basically underestimation seems built-in

2. It’s true we don’t have city-level GDP data. Yeah but first what you’re measuring is not production but expenditure (which is fine since that’s a perfectly valid way to get at GDP). But if you really want expenditure why don’t you just do a usual LSMS-type budget survey in the cities…? Far cheaper than usual African fieldwork (no rural logistics involved!) and guess what, we already know a lot about how to do them properly!

3. But the biggest problem is do we really know what it’s measuring? Does a low GDP estimate from night-lights, especially in Africa, just show a break-down or inadequacy of public provision, the usual way we get electricity???. Just look at Juba, would you? No city power to speak of (most areas of the town don’t even have connections) and generators are way more expensive, both as a fixed cost and to run, than a usual light connection. Of course, you’d see fewer lights…. And its not just the difference caused by the value of electricity !

4. How are lights and GDP related? Even the paper’s evidence shows there just isn’t a one-to-one relationship between growth in GDP and growth in night lights… Read this: In Hungary, Poland and Romania, where incomes rose by 41%, 56%, and 23%, the respective rises in lights were 46%, 80%, and 112%. The relationship doesn’t even seem STABLE!

5. And for the parting argument: Aren’t two error-prone measures better than one? Well, not if the measurement error in the second measure is just far worse than the first one (even if we did know what we were measuring with lights!).Keep everyone guessing which is the ‘right’ number! If you really want more measures, there are other options to choose from: smaller sample surveys possibly? You want local level estimates - how about some small area estimation stuff? Seriously there is enough to complain on the Penn World Tables and GDP estimates: Don’t make it worse!

P.S. This is not your usual correspondent. I’m his usual skeptical audience over beer most days…. Just decided to make the most of his absence from Juba

P.P.S. Lee, before you get to it, measuring population by huts where a Census exists is ALSO a bad idea! And this has nothing to with my love for my day job!!!