Rumbek Rocks

Probably the best expat Rock band in Rumbek, Southern Sudan.

Why don’t aid workers pay tax?

If oil and aid were given directly to citizens rather than governments, then governments would presumably need to generate a bit of revenue through their tax systems to deliver some public goods.
Independent of these arguments - a good tax system is inherently a good thing: providing predictable funding for the government and a bit more accountability.
So why doesn’t the international community do more to support these systems directly by putting their (overpaid?) salaries through them? Hey donors - we’re giving aid anyway, does it really matter if some of it goes into developing country government coffers in a good way? Wouldn’t the increased volumes create demand for a better, more efficient tax system? Is it only Southern Sudan where the entire international community is exempt from paying any income tax?

Poverty Professionals

Via Chris Blattman, here is Ravi Kanbur on Poverty Professionals and Poverty

those of us, including me, who analyze poverty and discourse about poverty, seem to do rather well out of it.

Ravi’s concluding proposal is that

each poverty professional should engage in an “exposure” to poverty (also known as “immersions”) every 12 to 18 months.

That sounds a bit weak to me. Especially when he also briefly hits upon what could potentially be a more significant problem.

How many poverty professionals could really and truly get an equally well paying job in the private sector, say, even allowing for the specific human capital they have built up in the organization in which they work? This is an empirical question, of course, but I advance the hypothesis that pay among poverty professionals is better explained by distribution of economic rent than by a market process (or any process) that selects talent for poverty reduction and rewards it by results. There are, of course, individuals who have demonstrated that they could thrive in alternative settings, and have come to the calling of poverty reduction after achievements elsewhere. But as I noted earlier, increasingly, in agencies, in academia, in think tanks, in foundations and in NGOs, poverty professionals are on a cradle to grave career path within an organization

Perhaps reforming the cradle to grave career path would do more good than just assuaging some middle-class guilt?

My part in Sudan's downfall

Here is Harry Rud whining about his expat guilt in Afghanistan. TH thinks we are also guilty here in Juba. I'm not so sure. I'll take Harry's points one by one.

1. Living in a house modest by many expat standards but that has still helped lead to a huge rise in house prices in Kabul, benefiting a few but forcing out many more from affordable housing in their own city.
Yeah maybe, but I'd like to see your evidence. Supply constraints are probably more important here in Juba.

2. Tempting qualified Afghans out of service to their own government with hugely better pay at an INGO.
I agree completely, but then I don't work for an INGO...

3. Failing to build the capacity of those people, in a position that will be filled by another expat rather than someone I have trained to replace me.
Capacity-building is difficult, it takes time. Also the government of what is probably Africa's most successful country was pretty relaxed about this:

"In stark contrast to most other African countries after independence, the BDP [Bechuanaland/Botswana Democratic Party] resisted all calls to 'indigenize' the bureaucracy until suitably qualified Batswana were available. thus they kept in place expatriate workers and freely used international advisers and consultants. The initial development plan of 1966 conservatively phasing out all expatriate by 1991, a target that has not been achieved... In his first speech as President Seretse Khama announced that "My Government is deeply conscious of the dangers inherent in localizing the public service too quickly."

quote from Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson, An African Success Story: Botswana , from Rodrik's In Search of Prosperity

4. Failing to even have the common decency of learning the local languages, and having only the scantiest knowledge of a country on which I am experimenting with ill-informed development projects.
Arabic is really hard!

5. Taking a large cut of the budget of those development projects as my salary, most of which I will take home with me.
International staff work in an international job market. If you want them you have to pay them the going rate, that's just the way it is, nothing to feel guilty about.

6. Treating my life as more valuable than those of my staff.
Not really.

7. Drinking in an Islamic country and generally being a bad influence as well as an example of the debauchery and gross-oppulance of the West. Not good for long-term cross-cultural understading that one.
You mean spreading the universal values of liberalism and human rights, right?

8. Flying about too much and demanding electricity from the generators and generally contributing to a lot of carbon emissions in a country that will probably be devastated by climate change.
Blah blah, I refuse to be guilty about flights, they're only 1-5% of global emissions, and technological innovation will save the day anyway (insh'allah!!!).

9. Eating scarce food when others around me starved.
Bollocks. Amartya Sen. Exactly. So shut up. All your food is imported so it's not exactly scarce is it?

10. Bitching about all and sundry, how various policies will lead to the downfall of this country, but doing nothing to suggest better alternatives.
Because anyone would listen to your better alternatives?