Cassette tapes "cause" conflict

Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian published a very worrying paper in 2014 showing that US food aid causes conflict in recipient countries. Their research design used total US wheat production as a source of quasi-experimental variation in the amount of food aid countries received, to show causality rather than just correlation.

A new paper by Paul Christian and Christopher Barrett apparently debunks the study, showing that the "causal" correlation is spurious. Replace "US wheat production" with "US tape cassette sales" and you can almost exactly replicate the results.

Which reminds me of an earlier paper showing that "average male organ length" is a strong predictor of GDP growth. We only have about 200 countries, which is not a lot of observations to power a robust statistical analysis, so you should take most cross-country empirical analyses with a pinch of salt. These "male organ" and "cassette sales" papers are helpfully colourful reminders.

HT: Jeffrey Bloem

How to spend aid in fragile countries

The classic dilemma in figuring out how to spend aid money is the trade-off between:

     a) achieving scale and sustainability by supporting national government systems (but losing control), and

     b) keeping more direct control by working through NGOs, but sacrificing scale and sustainability.

This trade-off is less acute when the recipient government is an effective service provider and respects human rights. Often however the countries that most need external assistance do so in large part precisely because they aren’t blessed with well qualified governments.

One possible solution to this dilemma is providing mass cash transfers - a route to supporting poor individuals whilst side-stepping their government. Another (neglected?) route is supporting local service providers directly. An example of this is the Girl’s Education South Sudan provision of ‘capitation' grants to schools (full disclosure, I was hired to do some analysis). This pipe provides both government and donor (currently DFID) finance direct to the school bank account (held by the school’s governing/managing committee).

Here is a ring-fenced pipe, separate from the main government treasury, at scale, that can send money direct to every school (whether public or private) in a country, with receipts, full government engagement in delivery, in-person monthly reporting, and disaggregated real-time data. All of which potentially an exciting opportunity for donors if they want to fund education in emergencies.

What does the money do? Overall measured enrolment has been trending upwards over the last few years. My analysis suggests that at least some of this aggregate enrolment growth can be attributed to the grants. First, looking at the individual school level, schools tend to report higher levels of enrolment and attendance the year after receiving a grant, after allowing for school fixed effects by conditioning on past attendance or attendance. Second, I exploit a natural experiment whereby the government-financed component of the grants (not the donor-financed component) was arbitrarily held up by state governments for a set of (~control) schools that had gone through all the same hoops as some other (~treatment) schools that did receive the grants. The estimated effect of receiving grants on enrolment and attendance levels remains similar. Similar gains are found for schools that qualified to receive cash transfers for girls. The results are robust to measuring enrolment using the national remote SMS reporting system (sssams.org), or the smaller in-person sample survey.

What about learning outcomes? The focus of the cutting edge in global education research is rightly on what kids actually learn at school rather than just getting bums on seats. But there are still a few countries, including South Sudan, where access and enrolment in school is still a major issue. You should probably take most statistics on South Sudan with a grain of salt, but one estimate of the Net primary enrolment rate is just 43%, which is really pretty low.

However, one of things that does seem to really matter for student learning outcomes is how teachers are motivated and held accountable. Private schools tend to get more effort out of their teachers, largely because they are paid directly by the school and not by a remote government office. For example in Uganda, teachers in private schools spend more time in the classroom teaching than their counterparts in public schools. But this isn’t an inherent feature of the ownership and management of public versus private schools. In principle all public teachers could be hired and paid directly by schools, financed by a single central government school grant, rather than all teachers being put directly onto a single national payroll. This might inadvertently be happening in South Sudan anyway, as recent rapid inflation is reducing the value of local currency denominated teacher salaries, whilst the donor (hard currency) -financed school grants maintain more of their absolute value (and increase in value relative to teacher central payroll salaries). Shifting more funding directly to schools and allowing the list of eligible schools to include non-state providers could open the door to quality-focused international NGO chains such as Peas.

Table: Uganda Primary School Service Delivery Indicators

It’s very easy to just be incredibly depressed by news coming out of South Sudan, including warnings of a potential new genocide, but as ever, sanity lies in the stoic serenity prayer - we should focus on what we can change (and on the evidence needed to enable the distinction be made between what we can and can’t change).

Lampedusa Update

In 2013 the deaths of 366 migrants at sea off the coast of the Italian island Lampedusa caught the headlines. Last week another 300 died. Last year, it was an estimated total of 3,500. 

European governments, including the British one, are opposed to rescue missions on the grounds that this creates a "pull-factor" encouraging more people to make the trip. How does that claim stack up? We now have the first month's data since the end of the Italian Mare Nostrum rescue mission. 

In an interview with Mark Goldberg, John Dalhuisen of Amnesty International cites UNHCR figures that there were 60% more sea arrivals in Italy in January 2015 than January 2014, despite the widely publicised ending of the sea rescue mission. John cites this as evidence that it is push factors, such as the war in Syria, that have led to the large increase in refugees and migrants attempting the crossing, not "pull factors". You might want a few more data points if you wanted to be scientific about this, but 60% is a large increase, and those data points are human lives we are standing by and letting drown. I'm not sure this particular experiment would pass an ethical review board.

Blood cheese

Leading politicians and military commanders on both sides of the conflict own the cows that Eugene needs to make his cheese. 

... 

'So, in a way, your cheese is helping fuel the conflict? In the same way that conflict diamonds are called blood diamonds, we could call your cheese "blood cheese"?' I ask him with a cheeky smile. 

He smiles, too, and, leaning back, draws his arm in an arc towards the lake.
'What do you see?' 

... 

Eugene gently points out that all those villas, all the petrol stations, truck companies, this hotel, belong to warlords with ties to different militias or to the Congolese army. Nothing has really changed. The UN peacekeepers are the biggest customers in town for villas and petrol and vehicles. They are pumping the most money into Goma's economy, which keeps all these armed groups in business.  

'I am not into politics', he says. 'I am just a businessman. You cannot make or trade anything in Congo that does not somehow put money in the wrong hands.'

Fascinating stuff from Ben Rawlence's new book 'Radio Congo: Signals of Hope from Africa's Deadliest War'

Underpants Gnomes in Rwanda

One of DFID's many genuinely excellent initiatives is requiring a detailed business case for all of its new programmes, so that there is a carefully thought through theory of change before any money is spent on implementing something new.

However a friend-known-to-be-witty suggests by email that DFID's theory of change for suspending aid to Rwanda seems to be pure underpants gnomes:

1. Aid to Rwandan domestic programmes is stopped
2. Rwanda stops alleged support for M23

3. ??????

4. Peace in Eastern Congo, and free ponies for everyone!!!!

Any better ideas?

Mapping rebel groups in the Congo

A bit of perspective - if M23 totally disappeared from the face of the earth tomorrow, there would still be more than 25 armed groups operating in the eastern DRC. All Rwanda's fault?

via BBC - Hattip - someone on my twitter feed

War and Peace

Presidents Bashir and Salva Kiir met in Addis yesterday to finalise a peace deal.

Just two days earlier, Sudanese planes airdropped supplies, possibly weapons, to an anti-government militia deep within South Sudan. UN troops provided confirmation that planes dropped packages in the area. The Small Arms Survey also confirm the pattern through 2009-2012 of Chinese-made arms being supplied (in contravention of a UN embargo) by Sudan to militia in Darfur and South Sudan. 

Either Bashir is not serious, or perhaps more likely, he is not in control.

Nice one Hilda!

Hilde Johnson (Special Representative of the UN Secretary General for South Sudan and head of the UN Peacekeeping Mission) said yesterday

“I remind the parties to the conflict of their obligation to abide by international human rights and humanitarian law, take all measures not to harm civilians, and guarantee the safety of international aid organizations and United Nations personnel and assets,”

Hilda! Why didn't you remind them sooner! That Omar al-Bashir is so forgetful, he's always forgetting about the whole "not allowed to kill civilians" thing, like the time he did all the crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur that the ICC wants to arrest him for. And his generals are always forgetting that they aren't supposed to bomb civilians or United Nations bases, like the time when they did that last week. 

The Sudan Air Force actually seems to be really forgetful. Below is a spreadsheet, compiled by Eric Reeves, of bombing attacks between June and September 2011. There 73 separate attacks. Maybe we should help them set up a daily email reminder or something?

Key	Source	Lat/Long	Village/payam	Vicinity	County/Locality	Date	Type	Casualties
			(v) denotes vicinity
1	OHCHR	29°43'E   11°01'N	Al Massani	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	06-Jun-11	bombing	unknown
2	OHCHR	29°39'E   11°55'N*	Shivi	Dilling Locality	South Kordofan	08-Jun-11	bombing	2 killed
3	HRW	30°31'E   11°05'N	Kauda	Kauda Locality	South Kordofan	14-Jun-11	bombing	unknown
4	HRW	30°31'E   11°05'N	Kauda	Kauda Locality	South Kordofan	19-Jun-11	bombing	unknown
5	HRW	30°03'E   11°01'N	Um Sirdeeba	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	19-Jun-11	bombing	10 total casualties
6	HRW	30°31'E   11°05'N	Kauda	Kauda Locality	South Kordofan	22-Jun-11	5 bombs	1 killed
7	HRW	30°31'E   11°05'N	Kauda	Kauda Locality	South Kordofan	24-Jun-11	bombing	unknown
8	OHCHR	29°33'E   11°41'N	Julud	Kauda Locality	South Kordofan	25-Jun-11	2 bombs	unknown
9	HRW	30°03'E   11°01'N	Um Sirdeeba	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	26-Jun-11	bombing	2 total casualties
10	HRW	30°06'E   11°02'N	Kurchi	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	26-Jun-11	bombing	33+ total casulties
11	Amnesty International	30°15'E   11°15'N*	Tangale	Kauda Locality	South Kordofan	29-Jun-11	6 bombs	3 injured
12	Radio Dabanga	30°03'E   11°01'N*	Alahmeir	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	29-Jun-11	bombing	unknown
13	Radio Dabanga	30°03'E   11°01'N*	Abu Hashim	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	29-Jun-11	bombing	unknown
14	Radio Dabanga	30°06'E   11°02'N	Koroji	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	29-Jun-11	bombing	unknown
15	Radio Dabanga	30°03'E   11°01'N*	Um Sirdiba	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	29-Jun-11	bombing	unknown
16	Radio Dabanga	30°03'E   11°01'N*	Alhamra	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	29-Jun-11	bombing	unknown
17	Radio Dabanga	30°03'E   11°01'N*	Elatmor	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	29-Jun-11	bombing	unknown
18	Radio Dabanga	30°03'E   11°01'N*	Alabo	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	29-Jun-11	bombing	unknown
19	Radio Dabanga	30°03'E   11°01'N*	Tibla	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	30-Jun-11	bombing	unknown
20	Radio Dabanga	30°06'E   11°02'N	Koroji	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	30-Jun-11	bombing	unknown
21	Amnesty International	30°31'E   11°05'N	Kororak	Kauda Locality	South Kordofan	01-Jul-11	2 bombs	1 killed
22	Radio Dabanga	24°27'E   13°29'N*	Tibra	Kabkabiya Locality	North Darfur	Jul-11	bombing	unknown
23	HRW	30°06'E   11°02'N*	Saraf Jamus	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	02-Jul-11	bombing	4 total casualties
24	Amnesty International	30°15'E   11°15'N*	Tunguli	Kauda Locality	South Kordofan	08-Jul-11	6 bombs	1 killed
25	AFP	25°12'E   12°38'N*	Abu Hamara	Shearia Locality	South Darfur	09-Jul-11	bombing	3 total casualties
26	Radio Dabanga	25°16'E   12°38'N*	Mnoacy (v)	Shearia Locality	South Darfur	13-Jul-11	bombing	unknown
27	Radio Dabanga	25°16'E   12°38'N*	Marshenq (v)	Shearia Locality	South Darfur	13-Jul-11	bombing	unknown
28	Radio Dabanga	25°16'E   12°38'N	Khor Abeche (v)	Shearia Locality	South Darfur	13-Jul-11	bombing	unknown
29	Radio Dabanga	25°16'E   12°38'N*	Hamada (v)	Shearia Locality	South Darfur	13-Jul-11	bombing	unknown
30	Radio Dabanga	24°27'E   13°29'N*	Kerubino	Kabkabiya Locality	North Darfur	14-Jul-11	bombing	unknown
31	Radio Dabanga	24°27'E   13°29'N*	Abouhmrh Linda	Kabkabiya Locality	North Darfur	14-Jul-11	bombing	unknown
32	Radio Dabanga	24°27'E   13°29'N*	Abokora	Kabkabiya Locality	North Darfur	14-Jul-11	bombing	unknown
33	OCHA	29°45'E   11°01'N*	Miri	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	25-Jul-11	bombing	unknown
34	OCHA	30°31'E   11°05'N*	Moro	Kauda Locality	South Kordofan	26-Jul-11	bombing	unknown
35	HRW	30°03'E   11°01'N	Um Sirdeeba	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	Aug-11	bombing	3 injured
36	Radio Netherlands Worldwide	29°39'E   12°03'N	Koleli	Dilling Locality	South Kordofan	Aug-11	3 bombs	2 killed
37	Confidential source	29°59'E   10°18'N	Jau	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	10-Aug-11	8 bombs	unknown
38	Confidential source	29°59'E   10°18'N	Jau	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	11-Aug-11	bombing	unknown
39	HRW	30°06'E   11°02'N	Kurchi	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	14-Aug-11	bombing	unknown
40	HRW	30°06'E   11°02'N	Kurchi	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	19-Aug-11	3 bombs	unknown
41	Radio Dabanga	29°39'E   11°55'N*	Kajora	Dilling Locality	South Kordofan	21-Aug-11	bombing	unknown
42	Radio Dabanga	29°39'E   11°55'N*	Karko	Dilling Locality	South Kordofan	21-Aug-11	bombing	unknown
43	Radio Dabanga	29°39'E   11°55'N*	Mendel	Dilling Locality	South Kordofan	21-Aug-11	bombing	unknown
44	Radio Dabanga	29°39'E   11°55'N*	Toy	Dilling Locality	South Kordofan	21-Aug-11	bombing	unknown
45	Radio Dabanga	29°39'E   11°55'N*	Sepoy	Dilling Locality	South Kordofan	21-Aug-11	bombing	unknown
46	HRW	30°06'E   11°02'N	Kurchi	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	22-Aug-11	bombing	2 injured
47	Sudan Tribune	30°22'E   10°38'N*	Wirni	Talodi Locality	South Kordofan	Sep-11	4 bombs	1 killed
48	Radio Dabanga	30°22'E   10°38'N*	Warenne	Talodi Locality	South Kordofan	01-Sep-11	17 bombs	unknown
49	Radio Dabanga	29°58'E   10°35'N	Torgi	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	13-Sep-11	bombing	1+ total casualties
50	Radio Dabanga	29°58'E   10°37'N	Al Buram	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	13-Sep-11	bombing	unknown
51	Radio Dabanga	29°45'E   11°01'N	Kadugli	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	13-Sep-11	17 bombs	unknown
52	Radio Dabanga	29°45'E   11°01'N*	Ilbati	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	13-Sep-11	bombing	unknown
53	Radio Dabanga	30°03'E   11°01'N	Umser Dibba	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	13-Sep-11	bombing	unknown
54	USAID	30°33'E   11°02'N	Kauda	Kauda Locality	South Kordofan	19-Sep-11	4 bombs	3 injured
55	Radio Dabanga	30°27'E   11°39'N*	Cody	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	19-Sep-11	bombing	3 total casualties
56	OCHA	34°17'E   10°33'N	Kurmuk	Kurmuk County	Blue Nile State	21-Sep-11	bombing	unknown
57	USAID	34°17'E   10°33'N	Kurmuk	Kurmuk County	Blue Nile State	23-Sep-11	bombing	unknown
58	OCHA	34°17'E   10°33'N	Kurmuk	Kurmuk County	Blue Nile State	24-Sep-11	bombing	unknown
59	OCHA	34°17'E   10°33'N	Kurmuk	Kurmuk County	Blue Nile State	25-Sep-11	bombing	unknown
60	Sudan Tribune	28°15'E   09°58'N	Kajama	Abyei Locality	South Kordofan	25-Sep-11	96 bombs	unknown
61	OCHA	29°45'E   11°01'N	Kadugli (v)	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	26-Sep-11	bombing	unknown
62	OCHA	29°45'E   11°01'N	Kadugli (v)	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	27-Sep-11	bombing	unknown
63	Radio Dabanga	30°03'E   10°50'N*	Umm Durain (v)	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	27-Sep-11	bombing	1 killed
64	Radio Dabanga	30°27'E   11°51'N*	Abri	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	28-Sep-11	5 bombs	10 total casualties
65	Radio Dabanga	30°27'E   11°39'N	Korgy	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	28-Sep-11	2 bombs	unknown
66	Confidential source	30°27'E   11°51'N*	Tongoli	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	28-Sep-11	2 bombs	unknown
67	John Ashworth	30°27'E   11°51'N*	Sabat (v)	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	30-Sep-11	bombing	unknown
68	Radio Dabanga	30°27'E   11°39'N	Korgy	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	01-Oct-11	6 bombs	unknown
69	Radio Dabanga	30°15'E   11°15'N*	Tengil	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	01-Oct-11	3 bombs	unknown
70	Radio Dabanga	29°58'E   10°37'N	Al Buram	Kadugli Locality	South Kordofan	01-Oct-11	1 bomb	unknown
71	AFP	34°17'E   10°33'N*	Sali	Kurmuk County	Blue Nile State	Sep-11	bombing	1 injured
72	AFP	34°17'E   10°33'N*	Maiyas	Kurmuk County	Blue Nile State	Sep-11	bombing	6 killed
73	ACJPS	34°21'E   11°46'N	Al Damazein	Ad Damazin District	Blue Nile State	03-Sep-11	bombing	unknown

water reservoir destroyed

Breaking: Aliens invade South Sudan

Photo: REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic

Today local residents, military officials and a Reuters journalist observed planes dropping bombs in South Sudan.

"I can see market stalls burning in Rubkona in the background and the body of a small child burning," he said.

But it wasn't Khartoum

"we absolutely did not bomb anywhere in South Sudan," said Sudan's military spokesman, Al-Sawarmi Khalid.

and it wasn't Juba, who don't have any planes.

It must be aliens invading. Someone call NASA.

(Really though, given how successful the air strike campaign against Gaddafi seems to have been, does nobody else think that Khartoum and Bashir have lost their airforce privileges yet? How many more civilians do they need to murder?)

"South Sudan does not want war"

More from John Ashworth on the current hostilities.

I beg to add to what my friend Richard Downie says, quoted in article 4, below: the US "really need to be laying down the law to the government in Juba now... The U.S. has to be pulling out all the stops and get the South to withdraw from Heglig". This would be fine if the US had also been "laying down the law" and "pulling out all the stops" to get the government in Khartoum to withdraw from its illegal military occupation of Abyei, or its short-lived illegal military occupations of Jau, or its military attacks on its own citizens in the Nuba Mountrains and Blue Nile, or its bombing of refugee camps and other civilian locations well inside South Sudan, all of which happened long before the current round of fighting. This one-sided approach by the international community, which has basically condoned (at best ignored, at worst colluded with, as in the case of Abyei) Khartoum's actions over the last months and years but then comes down heavily on South Sudan when, after months of restraint, it is finally provoked into a very limited military response, will not bring lasting peace to the region. 

Articles 2 and 3, below, sum up part of the problem. President al Bashir has been treating South Sudan as if it is a recalcitrant province (which he can "discipline" and teach a "lesson") rather than an independent sovereign state. It has not really sunk in to the mentality in Sudan that they no longer control South Sudan. They (and the international community) seem to be somewhat surprised that South Sudan actually negotiates in pursuit of its own perceived interests. They are also shocked that, following months if not years of military restraint, South Sudan has finally asserted its sovereignty with a limited military response which has been remarkably successful. They may also not realise how popular this assertion of sovereignty is with the population. Nobody welcomes the economic austerity which will result from cutting off the flow of oil, and nobody wants a return to war, but nevertheless the population appears to be firmly behind their government in these measures which they consider a necessary response to Khartoum's attitudes and actions.

War in Sudan

It seems that South Sudan is losing the PR war. The decisions to shut down Southern oil production and now to take Heglig do not seem to have been viewed favourably by the international community.

I started trying to write something this morning, but I just got angry and frustrated. Just in time, here is John Ashworth, who for me is the best and most articulate political analyst on Sudan going, and who is frankly worth quoting in full. I would strongly urge anyone with any influence on the matter to read it. John is clearly like me very biased in favour of South Sudan, but this bias is based on considerable evidence rather than whimsy, not least of which for me the fact that amongst all this moral equivalence between the two sides, there is still an international arrest warrant out for the President of Northern Sudan for murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture, rape, pillaging, and intentionally directing attacks against civilians.

Here's John:

A senior international church leader said to me yesterday, "many statements, including those of AU and UN, seem to suggest that South Sudan just woke up one morning and decided to invade and occupy Heglig. And then they go ahead to apportion equal blame to the two states. We have to find a way of countering this perspective." The international discourse seems to be based on Khartoum's narrative. This must be balanced with Juba's narrative, not in order to support Juba's claim, but in the interests of resolving the problem. A one-sided approach will not lead to lasting peace. As Juba's Spokesperson Dr. Barnaba Marial says, “I think it is good that the Security Council first listens to the story of Heglig, and I think they have not listened adequately from our point of view" (article 6, below). 

Indeed South Sudan did NOT just wake up one morning and decide to occupy Heglig. It should be remembered that President Salva Kiir has always followed a policy of refraining from military action. In the run up to the referendum and independence, he specifically instructed his commanders not to be provoked by Khartoum's military aggression, and not to retaliate. This policy proved remarkably successful and helped to deliver a peaceful referendum and independence. 

The President then continued to pursue a similar non-military policy for 9 months or so after independence. Khartoum has walked out of negotiations, made unreasonable demands (eg demanding more than ten times the international standard fees for transit of South Sudanese oil through its pipelines), abrogated agreements which it had already signed (eg the peace deal with SPLM-N, the agreement on the status of South Sudanese in Sudan, to say nothing of the Abyei Protocol), continued its military occupation of the disputed area of Abyei, harassed South Sudanese in Sudan, continued to attack South Sudan's former allies in the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile, siphoned off (or stolen) a percentage of South Sudan's oil, attempted to build illegal pipelines, forcibly occupied the disputed area of Jau, bombed refugee camps and civilians well inside South Sudan, supported South Sudanese rebel movements (and allowed them to abduct and forcibly recruit South Sudanese in Sudan), stifled cross-border trade, and much more. As article 5, below, points out, "the Khartoum government has been launching ground and air attacks against [South Sudan] since it declared independence July 9 [2011]". During all of this, South Sudan's army did not retaliate offensively, limiting itself to pushing SAF out of Jau but stopping when it reached the current border (which is not the 1956 border). President Salva Kiir's policy of restraint was not popular in South Sudan; people were asking, "What is the matter with him?"

Now, after nine months of restraint in the face of intransigence and provocation by Khartoum, South Sudan has finally decided to assert itself a little, by following an SAF force which attacked South Sudan back to their base, the disputed town of Heglig/Panthou, and ensuring that it could no longer be used as a jumping off point for further aerial and ground attacks on South Sudan. It also made the political point that Heglig/Panthou is disputed, that the current border is not the 1956 border, and that it is erroneous to insist that a town is north or south of the 1956 border until the 1956 border has actually been demarcated to the satisfaction of both sides. It seems to be a very popular move amongst the people of South Sudan.

The result is that the international community leaps to blame South Sudan, which has been so restrained for so long. At the same time, President Omar Hassan al Bashir has now declared that his aim is to change the government in Juba, which he has described as "insects". Surely this is a rather serious matter, when a president declares that he will take military action to overthrow the government of another sovereign state? Can we now expect the international community to severely censure Khartoum and make it clear that any attempt to change the government of another sovereign state will be met with the strongest possible sanctions? Can we expect them to cease their "moral equivalence" and recognise that there is an aggressor here - and that aggressor is not the "insects" of South Sudan? Urging both sides to make peace is fine, but which is the side that has consistently refused to make peace, and which is the side that has acted in a restrained manner and genuinely tried not to be drawn into armed conflict? 

Note that South Sudan has offered to withdraw from Heglig/Panthou if the UN puts a neutral force there (articles 2 and 6, below), an offer which the international community is unlikely to accept because Khartoum will not agree. Again, which side is refusing to make peace in Heglig? 

I don't think I will ever understand the international community! 

The BBC makes two errors in article 1, below. Firstly, it is not true that Heglig is "generally recognised as Sudanese territory". Many analysts who actually know what they are talking about (as opposed to journalists, diplomats and politicians) argue that it is disputed. Millions of South Sudanese, Nuba and others "generally recognise" that Heglig belongs in South Sudan. Secondly, both sides do NOT "claim" Abyei. South Sudan claims that the residents of Abyei should have the referendum which they were promised in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement to decide whether Abyei should be part of Sudan or South Sudan; Khartoum has blocked the referendum and occupied the area militarily.

Why UNMIS failed

Not gonna lie, I opened this because I thought it was about social protection (cash transfers), but hey, a nice summary of what went wrong with the UN mission in South Sudan, based on fieldwork in Jonglei by Simon Harragin.

Opinions on UNMIS, on the rare occasions when local people expressed them, were often based on things heard on the radio or on seeing UNMIS convoys passing by in the distance. People noted that UNMIS acted in an ‘observer’ capacity without actively engaging with the problems they faced on a daily basis (particularly insecurity) ...

local people’s expectations that armed peacekeepers would defend them during periods of insecurity were not met. Time and again the presence of peacekeepers has been shown to be mainly symbolic ...

One of the biggest failures of UNMIS was that soldiers did not leave their bases in the State Headquarters to set up permanent bases in the Counties

British MPs on UNMISS

This comment from Tom is worth repeating:

It's worth quoting the whole of the section of the executive summary of the Commons International Development Committee on South Sudan: "UNMISS...has been slow to produce a peacebuilding strategy. UNMISS is also a hugely expensive operation, costing the UK taxpayer £60 million in its first year—two thirds of DFID’s annual development and humanitarian budget. UNMISS does not currently provide value-for-money and its resources have not been deployed most effectively. The UK Government should press the UN for an urgent review of UNMISS’s cost, mandate, assets and operations."

Here is the link to the full report.

What has UNMISS achieved?

That's a genuine question. The UN Mission in South Sudan cost £500 million in its first year, about half of the entire aid budget (link from Nick Travis). The activities that they are engaged in supporting: disarmament, governance, rule of law, and human rights, are clearly important. They are also some of the most difficult in which to achieve results.

My view is that these activities are a high-value high-risk bet. Whereas investing in health and education is a very safe bet - we can achieve measurable but modest results with reasonable certainty, investing in peace and governance is very risky but with potentially enormous returns. What matters is the expected value of the pay-off and our attitude to risk. So I'd like to see some numbers, even if they are totally made up.

~*Totally made-up numbers alert*~

So lets say that a £500 million aid investment in education and health has a guaranteed pay-off of £750 million.

We get a 50% return on investment.

And a £500 million aid investment in peace and governance has a risky pay off - either
     - a - 10% chance we successfully avert a war - massive massive return - maybe £25 billion* ?
     - b - 90% chance our investment has zero impact, and zero return.

The expected value is a 500% return on investment.

This is where our preferences for risk come in. Do you take the guaranteed 50% return, or do you gamble it all for a 1 in 10 chance of winning a 5000% return?** Or are my numbers totally stupid?

---

* Paul Collier does some guesswork on the costs of civil war in low-income countries - for a country with an average GDP of $19 billion, he estimates an average total cost of around $64 billion (in lost GDP for the country and its neighbours, wasted military expenditure, and loss to life and health). So for South Sudan's GDP of $12 billion, the cost might be $40 billion, or £25 billion.

** A poker player with enough chips to play with would obviously go for the highest expected value return no matter how risky. The decision gets trickier when you are running short of chips, and it becomes more costly to take low probability bets. So our rational attitude to risk depends on how many chips we have to play with. You might argue that the aid budget is small compared to expenditure needs for basic service provision, so we are really short stacked...

Addendum: Frontier Economics estimate the cost of war for all of Sudan (North and South?) at $75 billion.

Addendum 2: These numbers will change quite a bit when you consider that the £500 million peacekeeping investment is per year and the war costs are calculated over the lifetime of a war and its aftermath.

Addendum 3: All of this is besides the point I started with in my head, which is that UNMISS seems to have nothing on its website about any actual results. I'd like to see some explicit discussion of what they think that their outcomes are, or if there aren't any, if this is because there is an implicit calculation similar to the one above that they are doing, any a total lack of results is actually completely consistent with spending large sums of money on bets with very very large potential payoffs. 

The Political Economy of Fertility

I argue that fertility may be a strategic choice for ethnic groups engaged in redistributive conflict. I first present a simple conflict model where high fertility is optimal for each ethnic group if and only if the economy’s ethnic diversity is high, institutions are weak, or both. I then test the model in a cross-national dataset. Consistent with the theory, I find that economies where the product of ethnic diversity and a measure of institutional weakness is high have increased fertility rates. I conclude that fertility may depend on political factors.

I'm skeptical of the cross-national empirics without having looked at them, because ... they are cross-national empirics (see here for further explanation). But the theory is interesting and sounds plausible.

(And here's the link for the paper by Thorsten Janus, forthcoming in Public Choice)

Bit of a snarky rant about Mike McGovern. Might have overdone it.

After all the cooing from Chris, MR, Bill, and Loomnie (yes I believe in Oxford commas) about McGovern's article on Collier, I had rather higher expectations than what seemed to me like a familiar basic misunderstanding of economics and academic hesitancy for policy recommendations.

What follows is thus my attempt at an ethnography of the world—imaginative, discursive, but also technical and action oriented—of Paul Collier and, by extension, of the broader genre of popular economics, from Freakonomics to Dead Aid.

What on earth is similar in any way between the economics of Paul Collier's cross-country regressions and sweeping claims, and the precisely identified but largely irrelevant trivia of Freakonomics?

My aim in this essay is not to demolish Collier’s important work, nor to call into question development economics or the use of statistics. Many others have done a better job of exploring the emergence and growing power of statistics in the “low sciences” than I could.5 But the rhetorical tics of Collier’s books deserve some attention.

Right - the books are popular science. They are not academic research.

Paul Collier, William Easterly, and Jeffrey Sachs can all be tenured professors and heads of research institutes, despite the fact that on many points, if one of them were definitively right, one or both of their colleagues would have to be wrong. If economics really were like a natural science, this would not be the case.

Really? There have never been theoretical disagreements in the natural sciences? Come on.

there is an inherent selection bias in work like Collier’s because the model is built from existing cases of warfare, and thus tends to render counterfactual cases invisible. Places like Guinea, Tanzania, Ghana, and Senegal consequently don’t come in for much discussion while Chad, Sudan, Afghanistan, CAR, and the DRC do.11

Umm, except the work is based on a global dataset including all of the countries that have conflict and that don't. The model predicts the countries where conflict occurs and where it doesn't. I'm pretty sure he even says this in the Bottom Billion.

These are, however, human beings. There are no true control groups, least of all in the context of war or the daily scramble for survival that characterizes the lives of the very poor.

Umm, not really true.

In Collier’s depiction, we end up with two groups only—young men with guns, and the elite older men who lead, organize, fund, and instrumentalize them. Women are virtually absent.

Its a model. Models simplify things. That is the point of a model.

Development economics as a discipline has been systematically unsuccessful in producing desired policy results, at least in the countries where the bottom billion reside. Moreover, those countries such as China and India that Collier hails as truly and rapidly developing have been characterized to a large extent by their rejection of the ministrations of such institutions as the World Bank.

Oh right, yeah, because poor nations have of course just blindly followed every World Bank diktat to the absolute letter right?

I wish Paul Collier had opened The Bottom Billion with a passage like “In this book, I will present some intriguing and counterintuitive correlations between poverty and a variety of social and political phenomena. I will add to these correlations some insights from thirty-five years of experience as a development economist that may begin to explain some of the correlations. Some day, we may have a good enough understanding of these causal links in specific countries to make useful policy interventions there.”

And in the meantime.... let's all just sit and watch?......? Thank god nobody did anything about the Rwanda genocide huh, we clearly didn't understand the precise causal mechanisms right?

War! Huh (What is it good for) (Apparently PFM reform)

Or that was one of the more colourful* claims made by Stephen Peterson in a seminar a couple of weeks ago on his work over 12 years with the Ministry of Finance in Ethiopia. Apparently the war with Eritrea meant all the other international advisers left, leaving him alone to work with the government without the distraction of competing missions from different donors.** He was the only expat in the Ministry of Finance, compared to something like 282 at one point in Kenya.

Ethiopia now has the third best PFM system in Africa, after South Africa and Mauritius.

*Damn you America, for making me have to pause and think about the correct spelling of common words like this
**Just to be clear, I'm really not trying to imply that war is in any way a good thing. War is still bad yeah?

The Price of Peace for Southern Sudan

is $20-25 per barrel of oil transported, paid to Khartoum in oil pipeline fees, according to some back of an envelope calculations by Greg Snyders (or 30% of the value of Southern oil). Given that the North presently gets 50% of Southern oil, about half of that again would seem like a reasonable and easy to understand number to go for.

I have very little new to say about Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile. I continue to be an optimist about the prospect for peace between the North and the South, but just despair for those unfortunate enough to have opposed Bashir in the North. A no-fly zone seems to be totally off the table, which I think is a shame.

New rule - when indicted war criminals continue to flagrantly murder citizens within their own borders, they lose all of their military airforce privileges.

If you can bear the horror here is an anonymous eyewitness account of what is going on sent via Rebecca Hamilton. 

More on a Division of Labour for Aid, and Violence in Sudan

Thinking about division of labour depends on comparative advantage - who is (relatively) best at doing what. If there is something which only one organization can do, then they are likely to have a pretty strong comparative advantage in that area, and a pretty weak comparative advantage in any other areas.

So for example when Owen Barder makes recommendations about aid transparency, he suggests that the creators of data focus first on simply releasing the raw data and forget about doing fancy visualizations, because they are the only people who can do that part. Similarly more generally, there are good reasons for governments to focus first on providing public goods (and private goods that have large positive externalities), because the private sector will tend to underprovide those goods. Eventually the government might also want to get into providing some private goods, but there are strong arguments for it to first focus on those things that only the government can do.

When Nemat Shafik proposes a division of labour for aid, she says that 

"No other organisation has the legitimacy that comes from universal membership. This makes the UN uniquely placed to be the leading agency on politically sensitive issues like conflict, peace and security, humanitarian matters, peacekeeping and peace-building ... The UN has many able competitors in the delivery of more conventional development programmes."

 This doesn't mean that the UN should necessarily not do education or capacity-building programs within countries, just that to the extent that the UN is uniquely placed to do certain activities, it should focus on those activities first, before it gets to the other stuff. So a bit more competition in education is fine, but as there is not much competition in peace-keeping that should be a higher priority.

Finally, when citizens are being slaughtered in Sudan right now and UN peacekeepers are standing by idly, it gives this whole theoretical debate a rather real and immediate urgency.

Is Sudan heading back to war?

I'm still optimistic and think probably not, mainly due to the assumption that the SPLA could halt oil production or transportation altogether if they had to.

Jacob Akol, Chief Editor of the Gurtong media project worries about the possibility of Khartoum attempting to Annex the Southern Oil fields.

His next step is to invade the South and follow a line along the north bank of River Kiir (just below Abyei town) up to where it joins River Bahr al Gazal, continue along the north bank of that river all the way to its junction with the White Nile, and annexing Malakal northward, continue all the way to the border of Southern Blue Nile State with the South and Ethiopia. Such a border, which has been floated before, will include practically all the current functioning oil fields in South Sudan’s territory.

No doubt, President Bashir, armed to the teeth with latest weapons from China and Iran, must believe that his armed forces, alongside South Sudanese militiamen it has armed and continue arming to destabilise the South, will defend such a long border and continue to exploit the oil. If it were anyone else, not Omar Bashir, such a plan could never have been contemplated, leave alone executed; but it is Bashir, who by now must have come to believe that his long reign in power is blessed by Allah and will never end.

John Ashworth rules out oil in Abyei as an explanation for the recent Khartoum offensive, but offers a number of potential explanations;

Khartoum's motives for seizing Abyei, in direct contravention of the CPA, remain unclear. Perhaps it is simply that some elements within NCP feel that southern independence is as far as they can go and allowing Abyei to rejoin the South is a step too far (despite the fact that they have already agreed to it in principle in the CPA - "too many agreements dishonoured"). Perhaps it's a signal to the people of the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile how far this regime is prepared to go to crush dissent. Perhaps it's a reward to the elements within the Missiriya who have supported the NCP agenda (but who clearly do not represent all Missiriya opinion). Perhaps it's just to sow confusion and delay, an old and well-tried tactic of NCP which is usually to their benefit. Perhaps it's part of a negotiating strategy; that NCP will eventually make a "generous" concession and withdraw from Abyei (despite President Omar Hassan al Bashir's rhetoric in article 1 below), and demand in a return a huge concession from the South and/or the international community. As some media reports have noted, oil may not be the key factor, as the oil fields around Abyei have now been exploited for many years and may be becoming depleted, but also
because the Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling has already redefined the boundaries of Abyei in such a way that most of the oil fields remain in the North even if Abyei rejoins the South. What one can say with some certainty is that it has little to do with an attack on SAF forces a few days ago. The troop build-up has been going on for months, and sporadic fighting for years, leading up to this convenient excuse for breaching the CPA yet again.

Finally, Ken Opalo considers Bashir’s domestic political audience.

A part of me still thinks that Bashir’s sabre-rattling is designed for the northern public. After all he will go down in history as the president who lost the south. In order to avoid immediate ouster he must, at least, pretend to put up a fight. My other side, however, thinks that Bashir (and his generals) might actually want war. Oil and water are on the line.

Time will tell.