African Election Super Sunday

32m people are heading to the polls today in Tanzania, Cote d’Ivoire, and Niger. Good luck to all involved, and lets hope it all goes smoothly. For more see the Typerighter blog.

International Thief Thief

Global Witness drop some UK development-policy-beyond-aid wisdom.

British banks have accepted millions of pounds from corrupt Nigerian politicians, raising serious questions about their commitment to tackling financial crime.

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Without access to the international financial system it would be much harder for corrupt politicians from the developing world to loot their national treasuries or accept bribes. By taking money from such customers, British banks are fuelling corruption, entrenching poverty and undermining international development assistance.

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The UK regulator, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) needs to do much more to prevent banks from facilitating corruption. As yet no British bank has been publically fined, or even named, by the regulator for taking corrupt funds, whether willingly or through negligence. This is in stark contrast to the U.S., where banks have been fined hundreds of millions of dollars for handling dirty money.

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The UK’s aid to poor countries has been ring fenced against budget cuts. Meanwhile, banks - themselves propped up by taxpayer’s money - are getting away with practices that fundamentally undermine the effect of aid. This is not just illogical, it is immoral

RIP Gregory Isaacs

Kudos to the World Bank

The clear winner of Publish What You Fund’s new aid transparency ranking. The US clearly needs some work (vindication for AidWatch?).

Poverty Porn

Don’t read this. Really don’t. You have been warned.

Microfinance Impact & Innovation Conference 2010

I’m attending the Microfinance Impact & Innovation Conference 2010, on the 40th floor of the Moody’s building in New York. This is the view from the window. Quote of the day so far goes to Abhijit Banerjee: “This is the fanciest room in which I’ve ever spoken about the poor.” For more, check out the IPA blog.

Mash-up Indices

Martin Ravallion has more to say about “mashup indices” such as the Multidimensional Poverty Index. Here is the choice quote:

“A colleague pointed to a medical analogy. While many things impinge on your personal health, you would not want your doctor to base your check-up on a composite index. Similarly, a mashup index of all those dials on your car’s dashboard may fail to reveal that you are about to run out of fuel.”

How to make Dutch friends and influence people

“Osborne predicted that this [increase in aid] would make Britain the first "major country" to cross that [0.7% of GNI in aid] threshold.” The Guardian. Better luck next time Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg,  Netherlands, and Denmark.

Facial Scarification

This is a fairly common practice. Southern Sudanese people are tough.

More amazing photos from George Steinmetz at National Geographic.

Prendergast and Clooney's 'Peace Mission' More Like A War Mission, Says Embassy of the Republic of the Sudan

(Source)

"Your face is more like a war mission" respond Prendergast and Clooney.

New in Southern Sudanese Media

So apparently the Citizen now has a website. They used to be my second-favourite newspaper in Juba (after SS Business Week). That is all. 


HT: Karuna Herrmann

What do economists do?

Stefan Dercon investigates….

Economists study the most important problems facing the world. At least that is what I thought.

Using data put together by Jishnu Das and Quy-Toan Do (at the World Bank), Stefan created this Wordle showing the countries which articles in the top 5 economics journals focus on.

There are actually 54 countries there but you can probably only read United States and United Kingdom.

Of course, this does not mean that there is a bias in the editorial policy of the top economics  journals. It is perfectly possible that those countries are not very interesting, or that those economists writing papers on these other economies are not very good or that they just don't submit to these journals. And I just saw a pretty pig flying outside my window.
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Fortunately, development economics has plenty of good journals, such as the Journal of Development Economics.

This is the Wordle for JDE articles which are focused on one country:

Latin America is somewhat overrepresented with 30%, India gets 12%, China 11% and Africa 18%.

For more details about the data see here.

“Machine Gun Preacher” disowned by SPLM

Remember him? So it turns out he’s probably a fraud.
John Ashworth comments:

This is a very strange case of a former US evangelical missionary who makes extraordinary claims which do not seem to be backed up by evidence on the ground. He has been disowned by the local church in southern Sudan and now also by the SPLA. It appears he is raising money on the back of these claims.

What do the latest experimental psychological research and the British talent show the X-Factor have in common?

This cross-posted at the IPA blog

They both have important implications for how we think about engaging citizens of rich countries with the world’s poor.
An experimental game conducted by James Andreoni and Justin Rao shows that communication triggers increased altruism. A result which has been seen for real in the British tabloid newspapers, as a normally fiercely anti-immigration press has developed a bit of a soft-spot for Zimbabwean migrant and frustrated X-Factor star Gamu Nhengu (who, is awesome, by the way).
Chris Dillow draws out the implications:

The world’s poorest do not communicate with us, which causes us to give less to them than we otherwise would. By contrast, we are bombarded with messages from the well-off, which - on its own - tends to dispose us to be altruistic towards them.

and

there are huge costs to being out of sight. Whether it be benefit claimants in the UK or the poor overseas, the mere fact of being anonymous means people are meaner towards you.

And so the challenge: if we want to increase altruism towards the world’s poor, how to create a space for communication between them and the citizens of rich countries? Poverty porn? Slum tourism? Fasting? How do we create this engagement whilst respecting the dignity of all involved?