Why Rwanda is like Apple?

Andrew Mwenda, who has been fierce advocate for democracy in Uganda, seems to be quite a big fan of Kagame;

Rwanda/Kagame has been branded by its achievements as a successful case of post conflict reconstruction. The more the positive Rwanda brand has grown, the more it has attracted opportunistic groups that want to ride on it to enhance their own brand. By attacking an attractive brand, you are able to generate attention to your own brand. Human rights groups therefore have little incentive to focus on some obscure - even though murderous regime like Equatorial Guinea - because it will not make them visible in the human rights advocacy market. 

Assume you have a consumer protection advocacy organization and you want to build your global brand. It does not give you sufficient visibility if you focus your campaign on some obscure company called Filiopa Cranta (what a difficult name!) that manufactures drugs and sells them in the rural areas of Papua New Guinea. However, if you can pitch your case against GloxoSmithKline, Novartis or better still Microsoft or Apple, you are likely to attract a lot of attention even if your case is weak. 

Rwanda’s greatest asset in this war is actually the people of Rwanda whom these groups claim to speak for. In all opinion surveys by the most respectable polling organizations like Gallup Poll and World Values Survey, Rwandans say they feel free to speak, associate and express themselves by a margin of 85% - as good as one finds in democracies like Norway and Sweden. It will be humbling to see the advocates for freedom in Rwanda being told by ordinary Rwandans that they are actually free.

Governance in Rwanda

Some interesting comments about Rwanda on my last post. I'm not going to touch this particular poverty vs human rights debacle with a barge-pole. In any case, I don't buy the argument at all that autocracy is in general in any way good for development (the data just doesn't support it). But I think you can make a reasonable case that you need to look at the change in governance as much as its absolute level in order to understand its impact upon the economy.

This chart shows trends in Rwandan governance, as measured by the Polity IV project. Positive on the scale is democratic and negative is autocratic. Above 6 gets you full democracy status and minus 6 full autocracy. Kagame came to power around 2000 (update: officially 2000, but effectively 1994?).   

The Revolution WILL be Televised

I was just thinking the last few days about how I should write something about Acemoglu & Robinson’s theory of revolution and how it applies to the Middle East.

Well Tim Harford got there first, and probably does a much better job than I would have:

What kind of concessions should protesters look for? According to the economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, who have built a detailed series of game-theoretic models of political transition, the answer is: ones that cannot be easily undone. Tunisia’s Ben Ali will surely not return, but already activists are concerned that democratic reforms may not be entrenched, and have returned to the streets to protest. Mubarak may be Egypt’s past, but Egypt’s future is unclear.

A fresh constitution, civil rights, and credible elections are all ways of safeguarding the gains so far. The revolutionary protesters are right to insist on them; it would hardly be a surprise to see feet being dragged by those who profited from the status quo.

It is intriguing to view events in the Middle East through this game-theoretic lens. For example, Saudi Arabia’s “royal gift” of $35bn does not seem to have satisfied activists in the kingdom. That makes sense: gifts can be withdrawn. If a dictatorial government can vent the revolutionary head of steam for a while, then the momentum for reform may be dissipated for many years - especially if the ringleaders are rounded up while all is quiet.

The one thing he touches on but does not quite make explicit is the importance of television. The trouble with revolution is that you have to solve a massive coordination problem in order to get everyone out onto the streets at the same time. Nobody wants to be the first one to the party and have to make awkward small-talk with the hosts. Better to arrive when things are in full-swing.

Much has been hyped about the role of Twitter and Facebook, but it seems to me that the real driving force has been the ready news of martyrs, accompanied by moving images, live evidence of the mass crowds out there, and the proven impact shown by the departure of Ben Ali and Mobarak. It was television, not Facebook, that did this.

In the words of the rather prescient-looking Charles Kenny:

Forget Twitter and Facebook, Google and the Kindle. Forget the latest sleek iGadget. Television is still the most influential medium around…

TV is having a positive impact on the lives of billions worldwide, and as the spread of mobile TV, video cameras and YouTube democratize both access and content, it will become an even greater force for humbling tyrannical governments

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Addendum:

In the course of finding that Charles Kenny quote, I came across this marvellous paper on the economics of Baywatch.

"aid and Baywatch may have about same value [to people in dev countries]"

Revolution and the Resource Curse in the Middle East

Chris Blattman quotes Arvind Subramanian (writing in the FT)

Even if the people of Libya and Bahrain join those of Egypt and Tunisia in overcoming their cursed political systems, the economic manifestations of their rent curses will remain.

The case for the resource curse certainly sounds persuasive, but I just don’t think the evidence is really there any more, with more and more recent studies debunking it. As Charles Kenny writes in Foreign Policy,

The curse is the type of counterintuitive idea that makes for a great newspaper op-ed. Nonetheless, the curse is also the kind of counterintuitive idea where intuition may have been right to begin with.

To the extent that it does exist, the curse is not destiny, and movement towards more open societies is the best way of fighting it.

Hold tight Bahrain, hold tight Libya.

UPDATE: I found the link to some of the main research disputing the claims

COULD WE PLEASE STOP SELLING GUNS TO DICTATORS

Despite long-running concerns among activists over Bahrain's human rights record, British firms were last year granted licences, unopposed, to export an arsenal of sometimes deadly crowd control weapons. Licences approved included exactly the kind of weapons and ammunition used by Bahraini riot police to clear the Pearl Roundabout protest encampment, including shotguns, teargas canisters, "crowd control ammunition" and stun grenades…

Sales to both Bahrain and Libya were actively promoted by the UK government's arms promotion unit, the UK Trade & Investment Defence & Security Organisation. (The Guardian).

How on earth is this still an issue? It is utterly despicable. What person in their right mind is ok with this? There are no good reasons for allowing let alone encouraging arms exports to dictators. We cannot be surprised when these weapons are later used against civilians.

You can join the Campaign Against the Arms Trade here.

The China Problem

"Alright then smart-arse, if democracy is so good for development, then what about China eh?"

Well, I see your canny Rodrik-rebuttal and raise you......more Rodrik.....who I will quote at length.

For every Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, there are many like Mobutu Sese Seko of the Congo.

Democracies not only out-perform dictatorships when it comes to long-term economic growth, but also outdo them in several other important respects. They provide much greater economic stability, measured by the ups and downs of the business cycle. They are better at adjusting to external economic shocks (such as terms-of-trade declines or sudden stops in capital inflows). They generate more investment in human capital - health and education. And they produce more equitable societies.

Authoritarian regimes, by contrast, ultimately produce economies that are as fragile as their political systems. Their economic potency, when it exists, rests on the strength of individual leaders, or on favorable but temporary circumstances. They cannot aspire to continued economic innovation or to global economic leadership.

At first sight, China seems to be an exception. Since the late 1970’s, following the end of Mao’s disastrous experiments, China has done extremely well, experiencing unparalleled rates of economic growth. Even though it has democratized some of its local decision-making, the Chinese Communist Party maintains a tight grip on national politics and the human-rights picture is marred by frequent abuses.

But China also remains a comparatively poor country. Its future economic progress depends in no small part on whether it manages to open its political system to competition, in much the same way that it has opened up its economy. Without this transformation, the lack of institutionalized mechanisms for voicing and organizing dissent will eventually produce conflicts that will overwhelm the capacity of the regime to suppress. Political stability and economic growth will both suffer.

Absolutely worth reading in full; The Myth of Authoritarian Growth.

All of which is completely besides my original point, which I will paraphrase as such; we know very little about how to take developed societies to where the poor people are, but we know a great deal about how to bring the poor people to where the developed societies are*, and yet we spend the majority of our time thinking about the former. 

*It's really pretty easy. A boat. Or a plane.

**If you noticed my use of TWO semicolons within the space of TWO sentences there, well this is absolutely to blame.

One Rule to Rule Them All

Ranil makes the important point that whilst we may be good at describing good institutions ex post, we ain’t so good ex ante.

the reality of how rules emerge and are enforced is far more complex than Romer and many advocates of good governance and institutional approaches to economics recognise. I’ve seen a lot of people write some variation of ‘we know what good rules are’ or ‘we have a good understanding of what institutions stimulate development’. Despite this, I’ve never seen anyone actually set down on paper exactly what the correct legal framework and institutional makeup for development is. If we really did know what worked, surly someone would have written a fairly uncontroversial but best-selling book about this, right?

Here’s the thing - we don’t need to set out the exact legal framework because as Rodrik has said, we have the “meta-institution” of democracy. I’m going to go out on a wild limb and make a universal prescription: constraints on the executive, an electorally accountable legislative, and rights and protections for individuals and minorities are always and everywhere good things.
Trouble is, as the Egyptians are ably demonstrating, and in the words of Claude Ake (via Cblatts),
“Democracy is never given, it is always taken.”