According to the report of the Commission for Africa, in 2005, $3.2 billion was paid to one hundred thousand “experts” to provide technical assistance to Africa.
The offices of international organizations and NGOs are networked by means of huge satellite dishes atop new concrete buildings, with security guards and strict rules of access, all signs that mark them as places of privilege. Although physically present in Africa, Latin America, or Asia, mentally most of the bureaucrats working in these buildings remain firmly back in the developed world.
That’s Ashraf Ghani, the former finance minister of Afghanistan, writing in Fixing Failed States with Clare Lockhart.
Ghani is at his best when excoriating the international aid complex. His Chapter 5 will find it onto my Africa and the West syllabus, no question.
He’s also best when recounting tales of governing Afghanistan. Unfortunately, there’s too little such anecdote, as specific experiences are displaced by generic management advice. It’s as though Lee Iacocca wrote a book without mentioning Chrysler.
Ghani and Lockhart set out an ambitious agenda for what failed states should do. Too ambitious by far, if my limited experience with Liberia is any guide.
Rather, the book has started to push me in the opposite direction: perhaps the governors of failed states should keep their agendas focused: maintain security, justice, and the rules of the market first. Put resource management and infrastructure a close second, and leave social services to the community, non-profits, and private sector. At least at first.
Oh no, am I starting to think like a libertarian? My pinko street cred is eroding by the minute…
5 Responses
I agree that both health and education has a value in itself, hence, it is rational for both governments and aid-agencies to prioritize these issues. However, prioritizing these issues will not pull a country out of poverty.
Since you can not consume more than you produce, it is a change in the means of production that will bring a change in consumption, hence what we call economic development. If you do not have access to any productuvie assets, it does not matter how much education you have, or how good your health is, you won’t produce anything more. Hence, the investments in health and education are unsustainable, and unsuited to pull a country up from poverty.
So outsourcing health, education, and nutrition to NGO’s, and letting the government focus its scarce resources on improving the productive assets, is a very rational thing to do.
Accepting that institutions play an important role in determining the development of industrial structure and productive assets, it also make sense for the goverment to focus much of its capacity on institution-building. Whether that means to promote markets or not is a different question, which I suspect is very context dependent (see for isntance Rodrik: http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~drodrik/Second-best%20institutions%20paper.pdf).
So, Chris, perhaps you are not yet a libertarian anyway?
Actually, nutrition interventions (the ones addressing micronutrient deficiencies that hamper development of IQ) have proven to be an area where donor-supported programs have been relatively effective (I have in mind here esp. food fortification). REF: Darnton-Hill I, Nalubola R. Fortification strategies to meet micronutrient needs: successes and failures. Proc Nutr Soc 2002;61:231–41 So – some encouraging news on what rich countries can do to promote some aspects of development via health-related programs.
And Chris – there is some reasonably strong evidence supporting your proposed sequencing of priorities, in particular your idea about leaving delivery of (at least) health services to private providers. There are a number of successful examples of rapidly increasing access to health services in poor countries with weak health systems – and most of them come from post-conflict countries (e.g. Cambodia, Guatemala, Afghanistan) – where contracting with NGO providers was used. See this (sort of) meta-analysis of the evaluations of these experiences:
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673605671401/abstract
Chris,
Have you looked at the arguments from IQ and the Wealth of Nations? ( You can read a summary here). Even if the effect is mostly environmental, how can a country with an average IQ of 70 pull itself out of poverty? It’s a chicken and the egg problem. In order to develop the economy, you need a higher IQ. But in order to get a higher IQ, you need better nutrition that only a developed economy can provide.
Wasn’t that the essence of the Roman Empire’s approach? Bring in the Legion for order and magistrates for justice. Let the markets self-organize. Have the legionnaires build roads, which both fosters security and commerce, as well as keeping the troops busy and so out of trouble, and leave it at that. Worked too.
I think the comments at the end of this post point to an interesting research agenda: what are the minimal institutional requirements for economic development, or for economic recovery after war? In cases where we’re talking about moving national incomes from extremely low to low-middle, these requirements may be pretty minimal indeed. I assume there are people out there writing about this. Does anyone know whose work I ought to read?