Roving Bandit

Are private school fees in India "inflated"?

2013-05-16T15:27:00.002+01:00

Adventures in fact-checking exfam lefties

Swati Narayan on Duncan Green’s blog celebrates a new law passed in India reserving 25% of private school places for underprivileged kids. As part of the deal, the government reimburses private schools, but only at the level of government per pupil funding rather than necessarily the fees charged by private schools. Swati writes:

The Act is categorical that the state will reimburse private schools only based on what it spends per pupil in government schools, which is typically much less. For-profit private schools are therefore keen to pass on the burden and increase their already inflated fees for the remainder of the class.

Are those fees really inflated? It is possible that high-end elite schools are getting a raw deal here, but most private schools are not high-end elite schools. Here are some numbers from Karthik Muralidharan, who is possibly the global expert on the economics of education in India. In his survey of rural primary schools in Andra Pradesh, spending per pupil at government schools is typically five times more than at private schools.

Average spending per pupil at government schools: 7680 rupees ($140) per year

Average fees at private schools: 1330 rupees ($24) per year

Right then. I don't have a strong opinion about this new law, but let's maybe have less demonisation of private schools in poor countries where the public education system is pretty dysfunctional yeah?

PFM in Myanmar: do you have to choose between coordination and flexibility?

2013-05-16T12:00:00.000+01:00

This is a guest post from Ben French (a policy adviser formerly based in Juba)

Following two short recent visits to Myanmar where I was looking at the Public Financial Management (PFM) and Planning aspects of Myanmar’s reforms, I kept encountering the same question: How to balance coordination between donors with the need for a rapid and flexible response to reform?

The PFM reform programme in Myanmar has strong government leadership and appears to be off to a good start. In line with best international practice, development partners, under the leadership of the World Bank, have taken the initiative to coordinate amongst themselves. This has been followed by the establishment of a donor-government PFM working group. Almost all donors interested in the sector have aligned behind this which is very much to the credit of both the government and the World Bank. The working group has been the locus for coordination of PFM activities with the recent PEFA (Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability Review) and the PER (Public Expenditure Review) to show for it. This coordination sets an impressive and important precedent for government leadership and donor cooperation in PFM. Moreover, it shows that the international community has been learning from experience and is prioritising planning and coordination (as discussed in this report by ODI).

At the same time, Myanmar is changing rapidly and has only 24 months to deliver on its reform agenda before the election period takes hold in the run up to 2015. Within this period there is a need to embed the government’s reform process into its day-to-day functioning, in order to limit backsliding and to strengthen the hand of reformers. Given this, a more immediate, direct and flexible package of support is essential and critical in direct contrast to a more measured approach focused on laying the foundation for future work through planning and studies.

As an observer looking in, there is considerable tension between the ongoing planning and coordination for future larger scale programming, and the immediate support needed by the government in order to prepare the ground. I wonder how to strike a balance between coordination and planning and a rapid, flexible response? Is it a zero-sum game between the two? A balance is clearly called for as running in too quickly without a coordinated, joint government-donor plan leads to poorly sequenced, uncoordinated reforms that are poorly understood at the national level. However, if those reforms aren’t supported right now they could die on the vine before any of the future planning gets a chance to take root.

In the context of Myanmar, and other countries with both immediate and longer term PFM needs (usually conflict-affected, post-conflict, fragile states as well as countries in political transition) it seems that the government and donors can become stuck in a cycle of ‘planning to plan’ at the expense of delivering a quick, flexible programme of support. Granted, immediate support will not resolve all issues but they do ‘soften the ground’ for the long term and are complimentary to that long term planning.

Obviously, context and circumstance are essential for determining the balance between the two. However, the balance must be considered and there are a number of ideas worth considering.

First, delivering quickly and rapidly builds trust between partners which is important in and of itself but is also critical for the success of any cooperation long term. The concept of building trust through short term support that supports basic skills and processes within government demonstrably achieves the objective of building relationships between various stakeholders – and not just at the senior policy level but down in the trenches where support for long term programmes is most critical. In other words, keep it simple stupid. Provide focused training and support to the current reform process with the aim of making the government an intelligent customer which is able to determine what it needs and wants from the range of options it will be presented.

Second, recognise that even if short-term support is limited it can be clearly and easily linked to future programme development and planning. Rapid implementation should not be allowed to evolve into full implementation but it can, and should, provide useful experience and information to inform the long-term full implementation. In practice this will mean that flexible, upfront, support will need to focus on basic training, simple implementation and refinements to systems and process (see some other interesting work from ODI here, and here).

This balancing act is starting to take place in Myanmar with the EU and JICA placing technical advisors in the Ministry of Planning who will build government capacity and understanding on how to effectively coordinate and engage with other government agencies and development partners across a range of sectors (health, education, electricity, etc.). This short-term approach will be implemented prior to and whilst a longer term plan takes shape, both meeting the government’s need for reform support and allowing the development partners to demonstrate rapid success.

And finally, a warning. Any short term, flexible support should be designed in such a way that it co-opts as many stakeholders as possible Short-term support parachuted in, acting in isolation, and with no tie to long-term goals undermines the balancing act. At minimum this should mean that the short term support is part of the coordination process and reports to all the actors involved in coordination. Various World Bank and regional development bank trust funds do this reasonably well when there are funds available.

These general observations should, by no means, detract from the on-going successes in coordination in countries such as Myanmar especially as these pockets of coordination are islands of sanity in a larger and more complex donor environment. Instead, this coordination should be fostered, incorporating both quick short-term support as well as long-term planning and research. Both are critical to confidence building between stakeholders, success of current reforms and PFM in the future. Finding, and striking, the right balance between planning and flexible support through good coordination is essential to long term positive outcomes.

On Immigration

2013-05-07T23:49:00.003+01:00

I need to get some of this stuff out of my head to make some space in there for my actual day job. Since the clusterfuck David Goodhart ~~book-copy-and-pastes~~ op-eds started coming out a few weeks ago my head has been all fogged up with rage. Half of the frustration is simply how poorly he structures his arguments.

So here is some structure.

At the highest level there are two things to care about
1. The impact of policy (this is the utilitarian, consequentialist angle)
2. The Kantian ethics (what is a just process? we should care about the means as well as the ends)

Point 2, made repeatedly by Michael Clemens and others in the open borders camp, is that regardless of what the consequences of immigration are, individuals have rights, and states shouldn't be able to prevent people from leaving countries. As a Brit with some education, I have the right basically to live wherever I want. The same does not apply to smarter and harder working people than me who happen to be born in South Sudan, or most developing countries. In technical terms, this is called "fucked up."

Back to point 1 - there are three areas of concern
1.1 - The impact on the receiving community
1.2 - The impact on the migrant
1.3 - The impact on the sending community

Now, the strongest evidence is clearly on 1.2 - there are massive overwhelming positive impacts for the migrants themselves, who can increase incomes by orders of 1000% overnight.

The weakest evidence is on the other two points. There are reasons, theoretical and empirical, to think that immigration can have both positive and negative impacts on communities at large.

On 1.1 - perhaps the strongest evidence amongst the lot, is that the labour market impacts on receiving communities are not large (they did not took our job). There isn't a lot of evidence on the impact on public services and the like - though on average the foreign-born living in Britain are larger net contributors to public finances than the native born. So we are left with something vague about identity and community (more on this in another post).

On 1.3 - there is strong evidence of positive impact through remittances - remittances are substantially larger than foreign aid flows. There isn't much evidence of a brain drain, and actually evidence pointing the other way towards a "brain gain." Neither is there any evidence of a damaging impact on political reform. On the contrary, there are reasons to think that diaspora can help fund and influence reform movements more effectively from outside a country where they are not subject to political oppression. More from Claire Melamed here.

So to conclude, strong positive evidence of positive impacts for migrants and receivers of remittances, and then a bunch of weak vague stuff about community and governance. Add to that, the ethical or rights-based arguments.

And finally back to Goodhart, and his line that we should not care about people from Burundi more than people from Birmingham. But do we really need to care about them more to be in favour of immigration? From my reading of the evidence, I don't think that immigration does impose a net cost on Britain, but even being generous and assuming it did, I would weight that impact to be of the order of 1/10th of the positive impact to the migrant. Caring about people from Birmingham is fine, but the question is how much more should you care about them than someone from Burundi. I would image that there is some ratio at which Goodhart would support imposing a cost on a Brummie for a gain to a Burundian. What if we could make a Brummie worse off by £1 to increase the welfare of a Burundian by £10 billion? Or is it really never acceptable for British government policy to reduce the welfare of a British person by any amount, no matter how small, in order to increase a foreigner's welfare, no matter how large the gain? Not even for £10 billion? Martin Wolf does make the case for a zero weight, which is at least a coherent and explicit position on the issue, even if I do think it is abhorrent. Elsewhere, in a long and math-y blogpost YouNotSneaky estimated that for Mexican-US immigration, you have to value a Mexican at less than 1/20th of an American to be against immigration.

Do you care about foreigners less than locals? What's your number? Exactly how much less? Are foreigners half a local person? A tenth? A hundredth?

So what exactly just happened to the economy of South Sudan?

2013-05-07T23:02:00.001+01:00

Some analysis from the Sudd Institute: (via John Ashworth)

Barely three months after the oil shutdown, the whole nation started to feel the resultant pinch of economic hardships. Salaries of civil servants were no longer coming regularly and the monthly allowances that used to cushion up the low salaries of the civil servants were discontinued. The dollar appreciated against the South Sudanese pounds and was in unprecedented shortage, forcing the market into an abrupt shock; prices rose; and the purchasing power weakened. As well, violent crimes increased, with armed robbery becoming the order of the day. News about common citizens and business people being shot dead injured, and/or robbed were making headlines on almost daily basis. In a sense, these consequences are attributable to the economic hardships facing the nation.

The political economy of Nigeria and Indonesia

2013-05-02T16:19:00.000+01:00

A Nigerian and an Indonesian attend a foreign university together in the 1960s and become friends. After graduation, each returns home to join the government. Several years later, the Nigerian visits his colleague in Jakarta, and finds him living in a big, luxurious house with a Mercedes car parked outside. ‘How can you afford such a nice house on a politician's salary?', asks the Nigerian. ‘Do you see that road?', replies the Indonesian, pointing to a magnificent highway outside. ‘Ten per cent.' Some time later, the Indonesian goes to visit his Nigerian friend, and finds him living in a vast palace with ten Mercedes cars parked outside. Amazed, he asks where the money had come from. ‘Do you see that road?' asks the Nigerian, pointing to a thick tangle of rain forest. ‘A hundred per cent.'

From the Economist (old, but good)

Paul Collier's Migration Book

2013-04-29T11:29:00.002+01:00

Drawing on original research and numerous case studies, Collier explores this volatile issue from three unique perspectives: the migrants themselves, the people they leave behind, and the host societies where they relocate. As Collier shows, those who migrate from the poorest countries, primarily though not exclusive the young, tend to be the best educated and most energetic in their cultures. And while migrants often benefit economically, the larger impacts of mass migrations remain unsettling. The danger is that both host countries and sending societies may lose their national identities-- an outcome that Collier suggests would be disastrous as national identity is a powerful force for equity. Collier asserts that migration must be restricted to ensure that it helps those who remain in sending countries and also benefits host societies that make the investment on which migrant gains rely.

This might just be the point at which I stopped being a fan of Paul Collier. I was quite excited about this book because I presumed that naturally it would be pro-immigration. I suppose his old white man demographics have outweighed all his education? I'll probably still read it, as presumably he will at least have a better grasp of at least some of the actual evidence on the issue than Goodhart. Still, it makes my skin crawl. I understand that we aren't going to win around the UKIP racists and get open borders any time soon, but it is deeply depressing when even development people and/or supposed lefties harbour this fear and suspicion of poor foreigners. Maybe brown people threaten your national identity Paul, but they don't threaten mine.

Anyway for now I'll stick with the simple chart which debunks the line that "national identity is a force for equity." Actually, two-thirds of global inequality can be found between countries rather than within countries. So even a perfect income distribution within countries would still leave two-thirds of global income inequality intact.

Branko Milanovic, (via Tim Worstall). Incidentally, surely - surely, Collier should have read Milanovic?

The Routledge Handbook of African Politics

2013-04-29T00:13:00.002+01:00

If you were looking for a definitive overview of African Politics, you could probably do worse than this new volume, edited by Nic Cheeseman, David Anderson, and Andrea Scheibler. 32 chapters covering the State, Identity, Conflict, Democracy, Development, and International Relations.

For more, here is Andi writing at Democracy in Africa:

The Handbook, published last month, is the product of a collaboration between 35 established and emerging Africanist academics. Three years in the making, the Handbook is arguably the most comprehensive overview of African politics currently available on the market and we hope it will become a standard reference book for students seeking to understand the development of, and transitions within, contemporary Africa. ...

Self-recommending. (And a 20% discount here)

Build on the greenbelt now

2013-04-27T16:30:00.000+01:00

the true enemy of our threatened wildlife like the nightingale is not housing but agricultural intensification ...

There is now more bio-diversity in back gardens than on English farms. ...

Intensively farmed land has a negligible - even negative - environmental value and is almost sterile from the point of view of wild life; take a look at the 2011 National Ecosystem Assessment. That is the sort of land we should be allowing houses to be built on. The vehement opposition to building on any intensively farmed greenbelt land fails to recognise it for what it is – almost worthless from a social, environmental or amenity perspective.

Paul Cheshire, Emeritus Professor of Economic Geography at LSE

From the department of baffling headlines

2013-04-26T00:08:00.000+01:00

It's been a while since I've beaten on the Guardian (I love you really Guardian, you're* still my main newspaper, despite the typos in 3 out of 3 articles I read the other day).

But really:

Stowaway from Angola highlights airport security problems

Police continue to try to identify man who fell from BA plane on to London pavement, the second African stowaway in recent weeks

Personally, I'd say that the story of a young man in his 20s, wearing a grey hoodie, jeans and trainers, who was so desperate for the chance of a better life that he risked and lost his life by sneaking into the hold of an aeroplane bound for London, mostly highlights the utterly grotesque global inequality that we choose to tolerate because they are mostly out of sight and out of mind, and we are worried about the impact of all these foreigners on our precious "community" or some other vague bullshit. Not fucking airport security.

(*embarrassing typo here fixed but whatevs, I can and will continue to beat on the Guardian for typos, because this is not a national newspaper it is a BLOG. Thanks as ever for the vigilant editing though K)

Goldin on Global Governance

2013-04-25T16:27:00.001+01:00

Almost as scary is his insider’s view of international organisations’ lack of readiness to deal with such threats. He questions the future effectiveness of the UN, and the legitimacy of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, created at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference. “The picture of global governance today is one of duplication, ambiguity, overlap and confusion,” he concludes. Tax-free salaries and comfortable career paths encourage entrenched views and organisations out of step with modern working practices.

Pretty damning, from the FT review of Ian Goldin's new book.

Nightingales not neighbours

2013-04-20T10:47:00.004+01:00

Oh and just to add additional insult, Simon Jenkins thinks we should be prioritising habitat for 180 nightingales over houses for around 15,000 people, valuing each nightingale at nearly 100 people. I've got nothing against nightingales, but do they each really get priority over a hundred people?

Why aren't young people in England angry about housing?

2013-04-20T10:40:00.001+01:00

Apologies for being such a bore, but it drives me nuts that we aren't building enough houses in this country. Every year there are twice as many new households as there are new houses built. Every year. This is the first lesson of economics - prices are set by supply and demand - if demand continues to outstrip supply twofold every year then prices will continue to increase and houses will continue to be split into ever smaller fragments. I rented a beautiful apartment last month from a young married couple, both Oxford graduates, one of them a doctor. It was beautiful, except it was also quite symbolically the converted basement of a much more beautiful house above it. Even the most successful people of my generation are doomed to living in the basements of our parent's generation.

And yet simply building more houses, in the places that people want to live, and yes occasionally on some muddy field in a part of the greenbelt, would create jobs, reduce prices, reduce the housing benefit bill, and create all sorts of new positive dynamic externalities as places like Oxford are allowed to follow their natural economic geography and increase in density of smart people. But when the university does try to build more housing, on brownfield land next to the railway in the centre of town, campaigners complain about ruining the skyline. Not even building on "greenbelt," not destroying animal habitat or some beautiful piece of land itself, but obscuring the view of a church spire. Why aren't young people angry about the miserable hovels we are forced to live in? Most of us have been lucky enough to escape Britain at some point in our lives - we've seen the possibilities of better cheaper housing that exists in almost any other country in the world. Where is the angry youth pro-building lobby?

And now in addition to already having the smallest and most expensive houses in Europe to choose from, my search in Oxford is thwarted by "Housing in Multiple Occupation" rules. Any rented house with more than one "household" in it needs to be registered, with increased legal obligations on the landlord, which means lots of landlords just don't want to bother registering, and so can't or won't rent to a group of young professionals instead of a family. So after being priced out of getting our own houses and basically forced to share because of government planning regulation, we're now thwarted in attempts to find a house which the government will allow us to share because of yet more well-meaning but utterly self-defeating regulation. Here's a better way to take power from landlords and give it to renters: Build. More. Houses.

Higher Education in Africa

2013-04-17T12:30:00.001+01:00

Ugandan journalist Daniel Kalinaki posted this exam from the Kampala International University on his twitter feed a couple of weeks ago, and it has been a bit stuck in my head. Is this really real? Is this normal? Their wikipedia page says that KIU is ranked 58th out of African universities. It's deeply sad if true.

UK Public Spending

2013-04-05T11:08:00.002+01:00

I don't think I've seen any proper discussion of the composition of UK public spending amongst the current debates on cuts and benefits, so here are a few charts from the IFS.

From a 2009 survey of public spending you can see what the main categories are - social security, NHS, education, and defence.

Then this observation compares mid-Labour pre-crisis spending in 2003 to estimated spending by the end of the current government in 2007. They aren't all that different, except for increases in health spending, pensions, and debt interest.

Finally this 2012 survey of the benefit system breaks down the largest category, social security, into recipients. Unemployment benefits make up just 2.6% (though people out of work will also claim some of the low-income benefits such as housing allowance, and there are no doubt some people on sick and disability who could manage some form of useful paid activity, even if the reforms to the testing regime have been poorly handled and very unfair on some people). Nevertheless, 60% of social security is for the elderly and for children.

More Disappointing Labour Market Policy Outcomes

2013-04-04T09:00:00.000+01:00

This new from Jordan:

Wage subsidies and soft skills training are two popular types of policies that governments are turning to around the world as part of their efforts to deal with high youth unemployment. Our experimental analysis shows these policies do not appear to have had large impacts on generating sustained employment for young, relatively educated women in Jordan. Short-term wage subsidies generated large and significant increases in employment while the subsidies were in effect, but most of these jobs disappeared when the subsidies expired. High minimum wages may be one reason, with firms saying that graduates were not productive enough to be affordable without subsidies.

Groh, Krishnan, McKenzie, and Vishwanath, The impact of training and wage subsidy programs on female youth employment in Jordan

I don't see much cause for optimism in getting any solid positive results from labour market interventions. Am I missing something?

Bad Graphics

2013-04-03T10:10:00.000+01:00

This is a guest post by Sean Fox at the LSE

This infographic, which came to my attention a few weeks ago on International Women’s day, has been on my mind because it is one of the WORST visual presentations of data I have seen in years:

So what? Well, it contains information on an interesting and important topic (attitudes about domestic abuse) in a UN report. It should inform. Instead it confuses and distorts the facts. It violates almost every rule outlined in the bible of infographics, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte. Let me just name a few.

It looks like a quasi-pie chart. As such it implicitly suggests to the viewer that the slices represent portions of a whole. They do no such thing. They represent survey responses from a relatively small and arbitrary selection of countries around the world.
The sizes of the ‘slices’ do not correspond to the numbers they purportedly represent. Just compare the Rwanda slice to the Vietnam slice. Huh??
It uses multiple colours. This is a great way to pack more data into a small space, but in this case the colours actually contain no information at all. They’re just randomly assigned. More visual confusion.
It uses a lot of ink to represent a small amount of data. Rule number 1 of good info graphics is to maximise the data/ink ratio. Less is more.

So, how should it have been presented? There are many better ways, but a very simple one, which took me about 5 minutes in Excel is this:

While the first figure confuses the brain and obscures the significance of the data, this simplified version immediately throws up all kinds of interesting questions. Why do the women of the post-Soviet nations of Serbia, Georgia and Kazakhstan seem to have some of the lowest tolerance for domestic abuse in the world? How is it that the women of Jordan, which has a relatively liberal and modernising king and a female role model in the politically active and globetrotting Queen Rania, seem to largely accept domestic violence? What accounts for the wide gap in attitudes between women in the East African nations in Ethiopia and Rwanda? Is it due to “culture” or government policy and discourse?

These are interesting and important questions that are revealed by a simple improvement in the presentation of the data.

Come on, UNICEF. You can do better.

Aid and religion

2013-03-28T18:56:00.001Z

I'm generally enough of an aid evangelist that I can put aside my rabid atheism when it comes to religious aid organisations. I suppose that makes me a bit of a consequentialist - when the need is so great, I don't really care about people's motivations as long as they are doing good.

But are they really doing good? A new paper by Niklas Bengtsson in Economic Development and Cultural Change looks at a village-level education project run by a church in Tanzania. They find substantial positive impacts on literacy and education attainment - but - only for the children of Protestants. The children of Catholics living in the same village were unaffected.

Now this wouldn't necessarily be a problem if these programs were all being funded with private donations, but close to a fifth of NGOs receiving support from USAID are Christian organisations, with apparently similar proportions from official donors in Europe. All of which is quite worrying.

Now maybe the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania is not typical of most religious aid organisations, and others are much better at providing assistance to people of different faiths, but it does raise some serious question marks.

The solution to Britain's housing crisis

2013-03-28T13:27:00.002Z

I just had a great idea inspired by David Goodhart. Clearly the reason that poor countries have monstrous governments is that all the smart liberal citizens who might have otherwise overthrown them have chosen to use their exit rather than their voice and left the country, so we should force them all to stay.

Similarly, the reason that Britain has absurd policies, such as the housing policy that leads to the smallest and most expensive houses in Europe, is that everyone who might otherwise have complained has left - about 1 in 10 Brits or 5-6 million people live abroad. So there's a simple solution, ban emigration from Britain, forcibly repatriate the 5 million, and all our political problems will naturally be solved. The "post-liberal" political solution. Sounds great huh?

Chasing Misery

2013-03-25T16:15:00.000Z

My friend Kelsey is creating a book of essays by women who work in humanitarian aid, and the Kickstarter campaign has just gone live. She needs to raise $11,690 to cover the costs of design, editing, formatting, printing, and building a website. She's a really good writer, as her woefully neglected blog attests, with lots of stories to tell from South Sudan, Darfur, and elsewhere, so if that's your kind of thing (which it really should be if you're reading this kind of blog), you should make a contribution to the campaign, and share the link with your networks.

What are the barriers to work for women in developing countries?

2013-03-20T09:00:00.000Z

Bob Rijkers and Rita Costa have a really interesting recent paper looking at gender differences in rural employment in developing countries, something I've been thinking about a lot in Rwanda over the last 3 months. In Rwanda the government has an ambitious goal to increase off-farm employment, and if this goal is to be reached there needs to be a big shift in female employment. Young women are currently much less likely to start their own businesses than men, and more likely to get "stuck" at home or running the family farm.

Bob and Rita document that in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, women are also much less likely to establish a rural non-farm business, and that the businesses they do establish are less productive.

The reason that the businesses are less productive is not down to education or access to capital, but the sectors that these businesses are in. And this is where their quantitative story ends. They conclude that "Collecting panel data would help us better understand the causal mechanisms underlying the patterns documented in this paper and would permit a richer representation of the dynamics of rural labor markets"

But actually I think some qualitative work could get you a lot further a lot faster on those crucial policy questions of why women are less likely to start a business and why, when they go, it is in a less profitable sector.

An American who worked in Rwanda for several few years told me that teenage girls often aren't allowed out of the house as much as boys, for both security reasons and that they have more housework duties. Which means they get less exposure to the people and places around them, and less chance to think about what kind of market opportunities there are out there.

I also think that there is a strong cultural element around gender norms and what kind of work is acceptable for women. The New Times in Kigali tells the story of Nadine, one of only four female moto drivers in a city where there are hundreds. She quit tailoring because it didn't make enough money, and now driving a motorbike taxi she takes home enough to pay for rent, school fees, and childcare.

Naturally, challenges have come her way, the biggest being lack of support from some of her relatives who insist she is in a male field.

“Nobody in my family approved of my choice to be a motorcyclist. In fact, they accused me of being a prostitute because I was joining a ‘male’ job. It was hurtful and discouraging but I decided to go with it anyway,” she narrates.

Presumably actually there is loads of sociological / anthropological research out there on this, anyone got any ideas? In England it took a world war for women to finally get access to "male" fields. What will it take to achieve such a cultural shift in developing countries?

Kigali to Oxford

2013-03-19T12:55:00.000Z

This draft has been sitting here since I got back a week ago, because I wasn't sure how passionate and emotional and angry I was comfortable with being in public. The short story is, as I sat in the coffee shop at Kigali airport waiting for check-in to open, a man who I'd met a couple of days earlier asked me with total sincerity to take one of his children with me back to England so that they could get a better education and a chance of a better job, which for some reason really got to me. A man who totally seriously wanted a total stranger to take one of his children thousands of miles away because he knows that living standards are so much better in rich countries. And he couldn't move himself because of our totally self-absorbed immigration policies. So I'll skip the rant, but sometimes it just breaks my heart that we live in a world where such desperation is so mundane.

In other news, 3 months away is probably too short for any proper reverse culture shock, but I do admit to being mystified by the battery-powered electric salt and pepper grinders in the apartment I am renting, which make absolutely no sense whatsoever. Also a few people have commented that I've lost weight, which I hadn't noticed at all, but seems plausible following a typically overwhelming first-trip-to-the-supermarket-following-a-period-of-developing-country-living. Seriously, no wonder we have so much obesity when food is this cheap and easy.

How (and why) to do a corporate blog

2013-03-19T12:26:00.002Z

Jason Fried and David Hansson of 37Signals argue in their book Rework (and the video above, HT: my favourite business writing blog) that companies should "emulate chefs." Why do you know some chefs better than others? Not because they spend money on advertising, but because they teach you their secrets - they explain recipes on TV and they publish their recipes in books. And all of this is free advertising for their restaurants. Why don't businesses do this? Because they are scared of competitors stealing their ideas. But the truth is it isn't about the ideas as about the execution and the mastery. Chefs aren't worried about someone stealing all of their recipes and opening a new identical restaurant next door and putting them out of business, it just doesn't work like that. Nobody is going to steal your idea and put you out of business. But when you share your ideas, you teach people something for free and you build an audience and a relationship based on trust and openness rather than marketing and selling. This is both more interesting for the reader, as well as being a strong signal of confidence, that you are good enough to let it all hang out. It's countersignalling, that you are so good you don't need to really bother with marketing, and that you are so confident in your expertise that you can teach others how to do it and not need to worry about whether people will keep paying for your services, because you are confident that you can do it better.

And you see this in the development blogosphere. The best blogs are written by experts in their field who are being open about their process and teaching you something with honesty. Look at Chris Blattman's advice posts or field stories, Development Impact's super-technical stats posts, or Duncan Green's internal Oxfam wrangling. All of these guys have built massive audiences who trust them and are interested in what they have to say because they are open and not just trying to sell you something. Most corporate blogs suck because they are all marketing and promotion, and readers smell that in a second and turn off. It is the opposite of countersignalling, it's trying too hard, like using complicated words in an attempt to sound clever when writing simply is actually harder and it shows. Smart writers write clearly and let their ideas do the talking, and let the words get out of the way. Smart business bloggers open up and say something of value that isn't directly selling and is playing the long game, building an audience and building trust. And once you have an audience, they will forgive you a bit of promotional guff.

All of this may or may not be written a prospective new OPM blog in mind.

ChatBasket

2013-03-11T12:14:00.001Z

Alex Andon just sent me the link to his new venture ChatBasket linking up developing country artisans with US consumers via an online chat room. It's a cool idea - maybe we can increase the value of trade if western consumers value and will pay for that personal connection and narrative behind a product (see also http://significantobjects.com, in which consumers paid around $45 for a $1.50 object that comes with a totally made-up background story). You can support the crowdfunding campaign and/or buy a handmade Guatemalan iPad case here.

British attitudes to immigration

2013-03-10T06:06:00.001Z

Analysis of the electorate's view of immigration, by the anti-racism campaigners Searchlight, the thinktank British Future and others, shows there is a majority for sanity and solidarity out there, which could be coalesced. A quarter of the population are hardline anti-immigrant – some of them racist. But another quarter, essentially Guardian and Economist readers, support multiculturalism. The remaining 50% are up for grabs, but can be won over.

Neal Lawson in the Guardian

The political economy of slums in Africa

2013-02-27T09:23:00.000Z

This is a guest post by Sean Fox at the LSE

Popular accounts of life in African cities typically portray a Dickensian squalor in the tropics: unkempt masses struggling with poverty, disease and violence. While such accounts overlook the dynamic nature of African cities and the resilience of their residents, they do reflect an important truth. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rate of ‘slum incidence’ of any major world region, with over 60% of the region’s urban population—roughly 200 million people—living in settlements characterized by some combination of overcrowding, tenuous dwelling structures, and deficient access to adequate water and sanitation facilities. However, there is wide variation in slum incidence across countries within the region (see Table 1). Why do so many Africans live in slums, and what accounts for the wide variation in slum incidence across countries in the region? I address these questions in a recently published working paper.

Table 1 – Slum incidence by region and for selected African countries

	Slum population as % of urban population
	2000	2005	2010
Region
Developing Regions	39.3	35.7	32.7
Sub-Saharan Africa	65.0	63.0	61.7
Southern Asia	45.8	40.0	35.0
South-eastern Asia	39.6	34.2	31.0
Eastern Asia	37.4	33.0	28.2
Western Asia	20.6	25.8	24.6
Latin America & the Caribbean	29.2	25.5	23.5
Northern Africa	20.3	13.4	13.3
Selected African countries
Ethiopia	88.6	81.8
Tanzania	70.1	66.4
Nigeria	69.6	65.8
Ghana	52.1	45.4
South Africa	33.2	28.7
Zimbabwe	3.3	17.9
Source: UN-Habitat (2008)

Social scientists have traditionally portrayed slums as a natural and temporary by-product of economic modernization. But the scale and persistence of slum settlements in developing regions in recent decades presents a serious challenge to this notion. A variety of theories have been advanced to account for this apparent deviation from the assumed path of modernization. Put together they tell a fairly simple story: urban population growth in developing regions has outpaced economic and institutional modernization. I refer to this as the ‘disjointed modernization’ theory of slums and test it empirically using regression analysis. In support of this theory, I find that nearly 70% of cross-country variation in slum incidence can be accounted for by variation in urban population growth rates, measures of income and economic diversification and a measure of institutional quality.

However, identifying the contemporary correlates of slum incidence does not amount to a convincing causal explanation for the scale and diversity of the phenomenon. Why did the process of modernization become more disjointed in some countries than others? To answer this question I trace the origins of divergence in urban development trajectories back to the colonial era. Generally speaking, colonisers stimulated urban population growth but laid a poor foundation for urban economic development and effective urban governance. But colonial experiences varied widely across countries in Africa. Where economic and political interests were strong, towns and cities received significant investment and institutional development; where economic and political interests were relatively marginal, towns and cities received minimal investment and were left with ad-hoc governance structures. I demonstrate that this variation is correlated with contemporary slum incidence. For example, Figure 1 below plots slum incidence against a measure of ‘British indirect rule’—i.e. the number of court cases adjudicated by indigenous as opposed to colonial authorities. The figure shows that slum incidence in 2005 is closely correlated with the measure of British indirect rule (a proxy for institutional investment) in 1955, supporting the hypothesis that the colonial era represents a ‘critical juncture’ in the history of urban development in sub-Saharan Africa.

Figure 1. Colonial strategies of rule and slum incidence in 2005

Having identified the colonial origins of ‘disjointed’ modernization, I turn my attention to the mechanisms of path dependency that have served to perpetuate colonial patterns of urban investment and institutional development. Post-colonial African governments have had anywhere between 25 and 50 years to redress the failures of their colonial forebears. Why have they not done so? I offer two complementary explanations.

First, urban underdevelopment offers myriad opportunities for political and economic entrepreneurs. For example, politicians and bureaucrats often use the absence of formal property rights in urban areas to engage in ‘land racketeering’—i.e. offering squatters on ‘public’ land protection from eviction in return for political support or economic rents. Similarly, the absence of water infrastructure yields very lucrative opportunities for the private vendors who inevitably step in to fill the void. In other words, urban underdevelopment has proven very profitable for a range of actors in African cities, resulting in the emergence of a broad constellation of status quo interests opposed to investment and institutional reform.

Second, an anti-urbanization bias emerged in development discourse and practice in the late 1970s. Up to that point, towns and cities were seen as engines of prosperity and progressive social and political spaces. But a series of influential publications in the 1970s and 1980s portrayed urbanites as economic parasites feeding off the surplus produced by peasants in the countryside and exerting an undue influence in public affairs. Investing in urban development came to be seen as anti-developmental. As a result, governments across Africa implemented policies to restrict or discourage rural-urban migration and promote rural development. By 2007, 78% of African countries had policies in place to restrict migration; up from 49% in 1976. There was also a significant contraction in international development assistance for urban development projects. As Table 2 demonstrates, World Bank shelter lending in the region, which began in 1972, shrivelled to near insignificance by 2005.

Table 2. Trends in World Bank shelter lending in sub-Saharan Africa, 1971-2005

	1972-1981	1982-1991	1992-2005
Total shelter lending	$498 million	$409 million	$81 million
Equivalent per capita	$5.20	$2.74	$0.32
Notes: Shelter lending data from Buckley and Kalarickal (2006); per capita estimates based on total urban population in sub-Saharan Africa at the end of each period (i.e. 1981, 1991 and 2005) drawn from World Bank, World Development Indicators online database, accessed September 2012.

The proliferation of slums in sub-Saharan Africa in recent decades is de facto evidence of government failure to invest in urban development. But history is not destiny. As Africa’s urban population continues to grow, politicians are increasingly likely to find it in their inteest to address the basic needs of urban residents. And if they are committed to stimulating economic growth and diversification they will need to do so. Cities can serve as engines of economic development, but only if they have adequate infrastructure and their residents have safe, healthy and secure places to live. The international community could help facilitate this transformation by recognizing the urban potential and supporting (as opposed to discouraging) efforts to invest in urban development in the region.

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Fox, S. (2013) ‘The political economy of slums: Theory and evidence from sub-Saharan Africa’, Working paper series 2013, No. 13-146, Department of International Development, London School of Economics and Political Science.