Development as Burritos

This one has been sitting in my drafts folder for months, but Hausmann just got me thinking about it again.

"Meze Fresh" is probably one of the best places to eat in Kigali. Certainly one of the fastest. It's a Chipotle-style Mexican place, with a range of salads, meats, salsas, and sauces in a bar at the front that are thrown together in a tortilla in no time at all. Plus they do margaritas. The owner, I'm told, is a young American guy in his 20s who worked in a Chipotle back home in California, and basically borrowed the entire concept and replicated it here. A similar thing is going on with the Office, or with the young Americans in Kigali setting up their own gyms and solar energy businesses.

To some extent, that is what development is. Borrowing ideas. At least that's what catch-up growth is. At the world technological frontier you need to invent new ideas to get economic growth, but for most developing countries you can get a long way just copying other ideas.

Hausmann's point is that it takes people to transfer ideas, because it's really hard to teach people things that depend upon learning by doing. Which resonates with the experience of all these expats in Kigali who came to do traditional aid work, decided they liked living there, and started spotting all these business opportunities based on ideas from back home. The policy implications of this? For developing countries, one is to make it really easy for people to come visit and live in your country. Rwanda is doing this. The kind of bureaucracy and visa fees you find in many other countries is just incredibly short-sighted.

I'm also reminded of another Hausmann contribution - growth diagnostics. In a place like Rwanda, having got the basics of physical security, macroeconomic stability, decent government administration, and infrastructure under control, one of the things that might start to bind as a constraint to growth is "information externalities."

Any suggestions for what any of this implies for donor policy? Can we and would we want to increase subsidies for foreign investment?

"Nature is not on our side"

I enjoyed this riposte from Rob Rhinehart to critics of his new chemical liquid food which fall prey to the "appeal to nature" fallacy;

Nature is not on our side. Most of it is trying to kill us. Nature abounds with neurotoxins, carcinogens, starvation, violence, and death. It is technology that makes our lives so comfortable. We have a responsibility to protect the environment, but it feels no such responsibility for us. Technological innovations should be thoroughly tested and verified to be safe, and they are. Besides being an arbitrary distinction, being "natural" is absolutely no guarantee of safety, usefulness, or practicality. Today it is often the opposite. I think it's a little weird to eat food that comes from a tree. Do we still use leaves for clothing? Like diet, balance is key. I am glad to drink fluoridated water for the same reason I prefer the natural sky. It's healthier.

I'm looking forward to trying some.

Taking Sen Seriously

Another development report on hunger, another puzzling failure to take Amartya Sen, the power of markets, and simple cash transfers, seriously.

We have known for over 20 years, since Sen wrote the book on famine in 1981, that hunger comes not from there not being enough food being produced, but from some people not having access to that food (either through their own production or through the market).

And yet again and again we hear a weird underpants gnome-esque non-sequitur, in which

1. The problem: There is already enough food in the world to feed everyone
2. ?????
3. The solution: Produce more food!

Not that the 8 proposals are necessarily bad ideas. But the evidence supporting public investment in agriculture is decidedly mixed. We had hunger a long time before land grabs existed. And attacking tax loopholes seems a pretty indirect route to reducing hunger.

Especially when there is one very simple, scalable, cost effective policy, which has a direct impact on food consumption, can help to ensure that everyone can participate in the market and get a stake in the food that already exists (as well as create demand for new production), which has a very strong evidence base behind it, and gets no mention whatsoever.

Givewell summarise:

"Cash transfers are one of the most-studied development interventions ...  

There is very strong evidence indicating that cash transfers lead to large increases in consumption, especially of food... 

Bottom line: Cash transfers have the strongest track records we've seen for a non-health intervention ..."

Of course cash is not a silver bullet. But it is surely part of the solution, and on a much bigger scale than at present. So I'm continually mystified by how something so obvious gets so overlooked. The only conclusion I can come to is that the reason we continue to ignore all the evidence, and in fact the very reason why there has been so much research to begin with, and hence why the evidence base is so strong, is that our industry has such a deep suspicion of actually trusting poor people to make any decisions for themselves. Which is sad.

The sky is falling!

Amongst dire warning of pending global vegetarianism, the Guardian notes

"The UN predicts that we must increase food production by 70% by mid-century"

What on earth does that mean? Is that a big number or a little number? A little context maybe? Handily I've just finished reading Tyler Cowen's excellent "An Economist Gets Lunch," in which he notes:

"during the period 1949-1990, new technological innovations boosted agricultural productivity by an average of 2.02 percent a year. From 1990 to 2002, this same rate of improvement fell to 0.97 percent"

Where would those rates get us? By my calculation, we would need a roughly 1.35% annual rate to get to that 70% increase target by mid century. A significant increase on the present rate, but certainly achievable in the context of past gains.

(Note also that this is just pure productivity gains from technological innovation - meaning no additional land inputs required)

Chart of the Day: Hunger and Food Waste

This is from a TEDx talk by Simon Moss, and gave me one of those brief confused child why-the-fuck-is-the-world-so-absurdly-unjust moments.

Ending world hunger

Duncan Green is right on point in the Guardian:

Some 850 million people (one in eight of the world's population) go to bed hungry every night. Many of them are children, for whom early hunger leaves a lifelong legacy of cognitive and physical impairment. The human and economic waste is horrifying ... 

Damaged bodies and brains are a moral scandal and a tragic waste of economic potential. That hunger exists at all shows the urgency of redistributing income and assets to achieve a fairer world. Providing the additional calories needed by the 13% of the world's population facing hunger would require just 1% of the current global food supply. That that redistribution has not already taken place is truly something to be ashamed of.

The good news is that there's no need to just sit around railing against the system - YOU can make a real difference right now - there is data, there is evidence, there are really good reliable opportunities for you to totally change someone's life. Or rather, lots of people's lives. And for a sneaky selfish bonus, giving money away makes you happier. Go to Givewell, check out the analysis, and make a donation. 

Socialism makes a come-back

By @thrh

“Food Systems Planning is a nascent field in the planning profession. Until recently, planners have largely ignored the food production, distribution, and consumption sectors, considering them to be issues of the free market. However, bolstered by growing societal concerns about the equity and environmental sustainability of the global food system, planners are becoming increasingly engaged in local efforts to analyze and address food system challenges and opportunities.”

A call for papers from The Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development. Apparently they did not hear about the Russian officials who were taken to London to see how a free-market economic worked and said “It is very important for us to meet the official who is in charge of ensuring bread supplies to London”.

The Economics of Marmite?

people often retain very strong preferences for the kinds of food they grew up eating. Just ask the expatriate Britons who flock to “Tea and Sympathy” in New York’s Greenwich Village for pots of Marmite, a yeast-based spread whose delights baffle other nationalities (and many of their own compatriots).

So what you might say? Well,

the effects of habit formation in consumption may also lead economists to rethink the way they calculate the gains from trade. This is because opening up to trade is in some ways akin to migrating. It changes the composition and prices of the goods that are available to a person. In particular, it can raise the relative prices of the goods that a region or country has a comparative advantage in, such as crops that the country’s climate or soil favour. These are the things that would have been relatively cheap and common in a closed economy and therefore the things that people might have acquired a taste for. To the extent that such preferences persist, people will benefit less from the increased variety of goods and altered relative prices that trade brings about than they would do if habits were not a significant determinant of consumption.

And the bottom line: for internal migrants within India:

As a consequence, migrant families consume fewer calories per rupee of food expenditure than non-migrants do.

That is fine Mr. Economist journalist, but how much fewer? 50 percent fewer calories? 0.00004 percent fewer calories? Don’t magnitudes matter? For that I had to go to the original paper by David Atkin.

holding total food expenditure constant, there will be an average caloric loss of 2.7 percent coming from the correlation between tastes and price changes (about 54 calories per person per day) … In geographic terms, the negative caloric impacts that come from tastes correlating with price changes will not be spread uniformly across India … with poorer regions more likely to suffer caloric losses on the consumption side, with predicted caloric losses of 20 percent in some of the poorest regions.

So yeah then, er, 20 percent is pretty big.

I’d better go pack some marmite in my suitcase.

Tyler Cowen on the World Bank Dining Room

Overall you could do worse than to eat here, which implies donor opinion is a constraint on raising WB salaries explicitly.

The rest here.

The value of everything and the price of nothing

The World Food Programme runs a school-feeding programme in Southern Sudan.

In a country where primary enrolment is well below 50% this is clearly a fantastic initiative. However for government to effectively plan for its own activities it needs to know what its partners are doing.

WFP has not reported this programme during the government's planning process, because it DOESN'T KNOW HOW MUCH THE FOOD IS WORTH. And this despite being actively involved and attending meetings for the planning process. Presumably the food is donated in-kind - but seriously the WORLD FOOD PROGRAMME can't put a best guess on the cost of a quantity of FOOD?!!!

FAO are not much better. They have designed a survey on farming and fisheries, which includes a question on the respondent's preferences for types of fish. They questionnaire then lists 35 species of fish, along with their scientific names. The sampling strategy is also terrible. Their plan to sample more areas than exist in some counties is apparently due to the Census being incorrect, not their strategy.

Its time I moved to France

"PARIS (Reuters) - True to their reputation as leisure-loving gourmets, the French spend more time sleeping and eating than anyone else among the world's wealthy nations, according to a study published Monday."

Juba Food Blogging

I'm pretty sure this could be a world-first.

God I'm terrible with names though. Anyway the new coffee place in Malakia on the main road (there is only one) has started doing some decent food. The coffee (actual real cappucino! in Juba!) and cake is already pretty impressive, and I've had their pizzas before which really aren't bad and cheap by Juba standards (around SDG 15 or $6), although everywhere seems to be doing pizza these days. Anyway they do a really good curry. Not quite the same selection as Hotel Salaam - there is a choice of "chicken curry" or "fish curry" - but both are genuinely really really tasty.

Highly Recommended.

A Sudanese delicacy

So the rainy season is just getting started in Juba. Maybe twice a week we are treated to an insane monsoon-style tropical rainstorm. Last week lightning struck right outside the office window and it was like a bomb just went off.

The rain also means the proliferation of insects. Hoards of little flying bugs have been swarming around the external lights of the house. Jimmy the guard and Anna the cleaning lady both say these bugs are very tasty when fried. People pay 3 SDG (£1) in the market for a cup of them. Jimmy was collecting some in a plastic bucket when I got home the other day. So last night I asked him how his bugs were, but he hadn't cooked them yet so he ran off to prepare some so I could try them.

Now it would be rude not to right? And they're actually not bad. A bit like popcorn - with that soft yet slightly crunchy consistency - similar to sugar puffs cereal. Only with a slightly meaty taste.

Yum.