Iraq

Juan Cole provides the numbers on Iraq.

Population of Iraq: 30 million.

Number of Iraqis killed in attacks in November 2011: 187

Average monthly civilian deaths in Afghanistan War, first half of 2011: 243

Percentage of Iraqis who lived in slum conditions in 2000: 17

Percentage of Iraqis who live in slum conditions in 2011: 50

Number of the 30 million Iraqis living below the poverty line: 7 million.

Number of Iraqis who died of violence 2003-2011: 150,000 to 400,000.

Orphans in Iraq: 4.5 million.

Orphans living in the streets: 600,000.

Number of women, mainly widows, who are primary breadwinners in family: 2 million.

Iraqi refugees displaced by the American war to Syria: 1 million

Internally displaced [pdf] persons in Iraq: 1.3 million

Proportion of displaced persons who have returned home since 2008: 1/8

Rank of Iraq on Corruption Index among 182 countries: 175

Ride

A must read: Philip Gourevitch’s New Yorker piece on Rwandan road cyclists.

A remarkably moving story of a country’s unsteady recovery from genocide combined with a series of touching personal tales. Above all though, it is an unintentional and yet convincing ode to Amartya Sen’s idea of development as enhanced substantive freedoms.

A question?

If Dambasa Moyo, Helen Hughes and their like really care so much about the welfare of people in developing countries, why do they direct all of their ire at the ‘development industry’ and none of it at this industry?

Aid Can Work, and it Can Fail

Having defended aid a lot recently, I should also emphasise that I also think aid can fail. There are some tasks that are simply beyond it, and others that are beyond it in some circumstances. And if it’s given poorly, it will almost certainly not help.

I’m no expert on Afghanistan but this must read piece by Nir Rosen and Marika Theros in OpenDemocracy gives what seems to be a good example of (some) aid making things worse rather than better. Admittedly in an incredibly difficult environment. But I think that it’s likely that the way much aid in Afghanistan has been given, and the overreach in terms of objectives for it, has hindered rather than helped things there (with the caveat again that I’m most definitely not an expert on the place and so could be wrong in my assessment). From the article:

First, the international community must recognize that the money it is pumping into Afghanistan is a primary source of corruption and conflict.  Despite their very real needs, most Afghans consulted call for a reduction in aid to levels within the absorptive capacity of the country, because wasted aid assistance fuels corruption and predation.  Equally important, the international community must ensure that aid produces tangible results on the ground and not simply be measured by the metrics of money spent within the fiscal year and units of production.  The number of school rooms built is much less important than the number of children who complete the school year.

Whole-lotta-links

Ok so I missed Friday but here goes…

The Guardian covers recent criticism of Wilkinson and Pickett’s book the Spirit Level, while the authors have a page devoted to responding to the critiques.

Meanwhile, the British Medical Journal has a meta-review of studies of the impact of inequality on health. Summarised conclusion:

The results suggest a modest adverse effect of income inequality on health, although the population impact might be larger if the association is truly causal. The results also support the threshold effect hypothesis, which posits the existence of a threshold of income inequality beyond which adverse impacts on health begin to emerge.

On the subject of inequality, and following from my earlier post on inequality in Latin America, Arthur Ituassu has an interesting article at OpenDemocracy in which he examines the relationship between Brazil’s falling inequality and its rising democracy.

Speaking of democracy, Dani Rodrik a does good job of summarising the economic case for democracy at Project Syndicate.

And at VoxEu John Gibson and David McKenzie examine the economic consequences of migration, in particular the dreaded brain drain. Their conclusion:

Our findings question both the pessimistic view that high-skilled migration hurts development, and the optimistic view that most countries can benefit to the extent Taiwan, China and India have from trade and investment flows. For most countries, the first-order effects are mostly an individual phenomenon – individuals stand to gain a lot from migration, and the second-order effects on others are small in comparison and seem to at least balance one another out if not also be a net positive. In the absence of compelling evidence for massive externalities from their presence, we argue governments should not be so concerned about high rates of skilled emigration, but focus instead on the basics of providing the policy environment needed to foster growth and innovation at home.

On to aid, and a blast from the past in the form of a 1997 Foreign Affairs review by David Rieff of Michael Maran’s book the ‘Road to Hell’. No surprise to discover that people have been launching polemics at aid for a very long time. Rieff’s review is well worth a read both because, depressingly, many of the issues covered remain with us, but also because its evenhanded on the aid industry, criticising where it’s fallen short but also acknowledging the real dilemmas the aid workers face.

I wrote a while ago on the challenges for aid agencies when it comes to admitting they got it wrong. Meanwhile Johann Hari tries to do this on a personal level.

On Melanesian Politics, Phil Twyford writes of his time as an election observer in Solomon Islands, and in doing so provides a handy summary of Solomons politics.

And finally, Our Word is Our Weapon, one of the first blogs I encountered writing regularly about aid, is back. Or maybe it never went away and I just had the URL wrong? Still mostly only posting links; interesting links mind you…

Gone

The last US combat troops leave Iraq. For the time being?

And all of a sudden we were back in 2002 again…

I only got half way through this before I gave up in despair. A gung-ho US neo-con shouting down a timid liberal while extolling a preemptive attack in the Middle East. Just like 2002 all over again. Although, in this case, the attack in question is one by either Israel or the US on Iranian nuclear facilities.

Now I claim no particular expertise on the Iranian nuclear programme, but the threat it poses strikes me as about as large as that posed by Saddam’s illusory WMDs. If (and that’s a big if) Iran ever got the bomb I imagine it would be held as a deterrent (if you were part of the ‘Axis of Evil’ and you’d observed the respective fates of North Korea and Iraq, you’d probably be quite keen on one of those deterrent thingies too), and maybe as a leverage tool in negotiations. The reason I think this is the case, is that actually using the nuke against anyone else in the Middle East would lead almost certainly lead to Iran’s obliteration. And even the most despicable regimes tend to have an aversion to being turned into glass.

So an unprovoked use of a nuclear weapon by Iran is something I think unlikely. True, despite this, Iran getting hold of  a nuke is not a good thing – even a very small risk of someone in the regime loosing the plot and lobbing the weapon in the direction of Israel (or the Saudis, or Iraq) is not good. However, the alternative proposed by Reuel Gerecht – a preemptive strike on Iran by Israel or the US with quite likely major civilian casualties – strikes me as much worse still. Inflame tensions in a the Middle East tinderbox? (further) stoke anti-Americanism and anti-Israeli sentiment? kill innocent people? No thanks. We’re better off with the very small risk that is Iran getting a nuclear weapon and then actually using it. Infinitely better off.

But hey maybe I’m wrong. I’m open to being persuaded otherwise. Just not by a spittle-flecked, puffed-up, neo-con nut-bar who no doubt was banging the drums of War in 2002. That type of commentator’s credibility is in tatters. Or, at least, it ought to be, in a planet that was halfway sane. The sad thing is, we don’t live on such a planet. So here come the neo-cons again. <creepy horror movie voice> They’re baack. </creepy horror movie voice >

Diversity is not destiny…

A new, gated, NBER paper by Rachel Glennerster, Edward Miguel, and Alexander Rothenberg returns surprising results:

Scholars have pointed to ethnic and other social divisions as a leading cause of economic underdevelopment, due in part to their adverse effects on public good provision and collective action. We investigate this issue in post-war Sierra Leone, one of the world’s poorest countries. To address concerns over endogenous local ethnic composition, and in an advance over most existing work, we use an instrumental variables strategy relying on historical ethnic diversity data from the 1963 Sierra Leone Census. We find that local ethnic diversity is not associated with worse local public goods provision across a variety of outcomes, regression specifications, and diversity measures, and that these “zeros” are precisely estimated. [My emphasis.]

Surprising, but it would be a mistake I think to go as far as Chris Blattman in asking whether the “role of ethnic rivalry is exaggerated” in the existing literature*.What the combined weight of research seems to be indicating is that ethnic diversity within a nation has the potential to lead to under-provision of public goods but that the extent to which this potential is realised is a product of other factors. Diversity isn’t destiny in other words. Specifically, these other factors include:

1. The building of identity that transcends ethnicity. This can be the product of active efforts (think Nyerere in Tanzania) or historical ‘accident’ and expediency (i.e the findings of Danial Posner’s 2004 paper on Chewas and Tumbukas in Zambia and Malawi.)
2. The way history, particularly the slave trade, conflict and colonial rule, interacted with ethnic cleavages serving either to exacerbate tension or ameliorate it.
3. Strong functioning formal institutions which override some of the collective action dilemmas/issues of trust/issues of enforcement. This being a tricky chicken and egg problem, because in many cases the very problems of collective action resulting from ethnic diversity will undermine the establishment of such institutions. Interestingly, in their study Glennerster, Miguel, and Rothenberg find no evidence that the chiefly institutions of Sierra Leone succeed in negating the impact of ethnicity in Sierra Leone – either this is a result of methodological limits, or the answer is elsewhere.

One explanation that Glennerster et. al. offer is language:

While its exact origins are uncertain, the popularity of the Krio language throughout Sierra Leone is clear. Speakers of the leading indigenous ethnic languages have adopted Krio, and Krio has had a major impact on spoken Mende and Temne as well as other languages. The widespread knowledge of Krio in Sierra Leone – despite the fact that the vast majority of adults in the country have no formal schooling – facilitates trade, communication and potentially cooperation across ethnic lines, as well as a common feeling of national identity.

Maybe, although in Solomons and PNG Tok Pisin (Tok Pijin)  plays a similar role, apparently without success in promoting collective provision of public goods. While violence in the PNG highlands is often between speakers of the same (first) languages. So I’m inclined to think that language alone will do little.

*Seminal papers/books, I think, including:

Alesina, Alberto, Reza Baqir, and William Easterly. (1999). “Public Goods and Ethnic Divisions”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 114(4), 1243-1284.

Habyarimana, J., M. Humphreys, D. Posner, and J. Weinstein. (2007). “Why Does Ethnic Diversity Undermine Public Goods Provision?” American Political Science Review, 101(4), 709-725.

Habyarimana, J., M. Humphreys, D. Posner, and J. Weinstein. (2009). Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective Action. Russell Sage: New York.

Miguel, Edward (2004) “Tribe or Nation? Nation Building and Public Goods in Kenya versus Tanzania” World Politics 56:3, pp 327-362.

Miguel, Edward and Mary Kay Gugerty (2005) “Ethnic diversity, social sanctions, and public goods in Kenya”. Journal of Public Economics. 89:11-12, pp. 2325-2368.

Posner, Daniel. (2004). “The Political Salience of Cultural Difference: Why Chewas and Tumbukas are Allies in Zambia and Adversaries in Malawi,” American Political Science Review, 98(4), 529-45.

Habyarimana, J., M. Humphreys, D. Posner, and J. Weinstein. (2007). “Why Does Ethnic Diversity

Undermine Public Goods Provision?” American Political Science Review, 101(4), 709-725.

Habyarimana, J., M. Humphreys, D. Posner, and J. Weinstein. (2009). Coethnicity: Diversity and the

Dilemmas of Collective Action. Russell Sage: New York.

Miguel, Edward (2004) “Tribe or Nation? Nation Building and Public Goods in Kenya versus Tanzania”

World Politics 56:3, pp 327-362.

Miguel, Edward and Mary Kay Gugerty (2005) “Ethnic diversity, social sanctions, and public goods in

Kenya”. Journal of Public Economics. 89:11-12, pp. 2325-2368.

Posner, Daniel. (2004). “The Political Salience of Cultural Difference: Why Chewas and Tumbukas are

Allies in Zambia and Adversaries in Malawi,” American Political Science Review, 98(4), 529-45.

The Hurt Locker: a really, really short review

“He is wise who tries everything before arms” – Publius Terentius Afer.

Should ever you start to doubt the wisdom of this adage, watch the Hurt Locker. It will set you straight.

I know this is a blog not a note pad…

…but I’ve just been to a seminar on conflict and development and wanted to jot this down.

The causes of conflict in developing countries seem complex and case specific, but are they? I’d hazard a guess that a simple model can explain the occurrence of at least 90% of conflicts.

To get conflict you need:

1. Tension over resources. Either there’s not enough to go around or their distribution is unequal enough to offend people’s sense of fairness.

2. Overarching institutions which are either absent, or of insufficient strength and/or legitimacy to mediate the tension. Strength is required to bring parties to the table and enforce agreements. Legitimacy is required to ensure buy-in to the solution. Overarching institutions which very strong may be able to quash conflict even if they are illegitimate – however, the results with be despotic. Overarching institutions which are viewed by all parties as having real legitimacy may not need to be that strong to effectively mitigate conflict.

3. A pre-existing social cleavage. Not essential but it certainly helps. If people are from different ethnic groups, or tribes, or geographic areas, humanity’s innate suspicion of the other will make it much easier for items one and two to contribute to conflict.

Of course, even if explaining conflict is simple, resolving it remains very, very difficult.

I’m puzzled by conservatives…

…who seem to believe that we can’t trust the government to do anything, except wage war.

On one hand it’s heresy to say the government might be able to run hospitals or operate buses; on the other hand it’s treason to doubt its ability to successfully conquer and then reshape a country on the other side of the earth.

Puzzled.

Travels with Mao

An essay to read: Arundhati Roy travels in India’s Dandakaranya forest with Maoist insurgents. Elegant anger. And if you’re like me, who never met a Maoist other than the occasional ideologue at a university, it’s an eye-opener.

First lesson – it’s not ideology that’s powering the rebellion, it’s injustice.

Second lesson – if you don’t want Maoist insurgents in the countryside (and I certainly don’t) stop riding roughshod over the rights of the ordinary people who live there. It’s crazy after the horrors of the last century that anyone would take arms in the name of Chairman Mao. Crazier still though, the ways which the indigenous people in the essay have been shafted by the state.

It’s hard not admire Roy’s bravery and commitment. That being said, I’ve never agreed with everything she says. And there’s two things about the essay that seem wrong to me.

One, she underplays the atrocities of the Maoists. You could argue this is a counter to the way the rest of the media underplay the atrocities of the Indian State. But if you really want to get to the bottom of things the whole story must be told, I think.

Two, in the solidarity and gender equality of the peasant militia, Roy wants to see the makings of an alternative. A fairer and more equal way. She sees something in the camaraderie and simplicity of the lives lived in the forest. And it’s true; as she tells it, the militia are a model of equality. The trouble is, it’s not so hard to organise small groups with shared values and beliefs, and facing an external threat, around the principles of equality and cooperation*. But it’s just not possible to do this on a society wide scale.

I’m with Paul Krugman on this. Capitalism isn’t a moral way of running a country or the world. It’s not a particularly good way either. In fact it’s the worst way – except for every other system that’s ever been tried. I’m interested in alternatives to it, but I doubt we can do better in replacement than we can in reform. Aiming for a global Sweden if you will.

[Update: to be fair, having read the essay again, Roy does state that the alternative she sees is for the people in the forest; not for other countries or even New Delhi. This is much more plausible. I could imagine: regional autonomy; a ceasefire overseen by the UN; participatory democracy at a village level; gender equality (maybe mandated in the regional parliament); secure property rights for the villagers distributed in an egalitarian manner; non-corrupt regional institutions; aid funded health and education; and trade with the rest of India. That would be a radical alternative to what actually exists there. It wouldn't be a Maoist alternative though.]

*Actually, that’s not really true. It’s still damn hard, just not impossible.