My own market experiment: where I am IN or OUT

Last week, some people wanted to meet up with me at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) meeting in New York. I was a little embarrassed to tell them I was not invited to CGI, and in fact have never been invited to CGI. Actually, there is a long list of distinguished groups wise enough to have never invited me to anything. I think each of us who makes some kind of public comment on anything have some places where we are welcome (INs) and others where we are not (OUTs). I thought it might be entertaining if I told you mine.

Coincidentally, I’m also working on a paper with some co-authors about export specializations that occur by destination country market, where there does not seem to be much rhyme or reason to which country markets a given exporter penetrates compared to other similar countries they do not. Maybe the same is true with intellectual markets.

Indeed, with some exceptions, I can’t detect much pattern in my INs and OUTs. It does not break down neatly by ideology or political spectrum, for example. There are many possible explanations: (1) my work is stupid, and some people are clever enough to figure this out, (2) my work is brilliant, and some people are too dumb to figure this out, (3) I’ve offended important people at some places but not others, (4) I have messages that are welcome at some places but not others, (5) some of my OUTs may have stricter standards than my INs (although I would NOT say that about those INs so kind as to invite me).

Some interesting exceptions to my IN and OUT pattern are (1) aid agencies, and (2) universities. Invitations to (1) and (2) include a representative spectrum and I don’t detect any OUTs in either category (although feel free to nominate yourself as an OUT if you have disinvited me without my knowledge).

I hope my example will cause others to come out with lists of their own INs and OUTs.

Anyway, in some awkward mixture of self-promotion and self-abasement, here they are:

- The INs that have invited to belong or speak or write, sometimes on multiple occasions (although other times only once and they might have changed their minds since: I have low standards to count myself IN).

- The OUTs where the invitations to write or speak or belong somehow got lost in the mail.

	IN	OUT
Think tank	Brookings	Council on Foreign Relations
International affairs magazine	Foreign Policy	Foreign Affairs
Ideas festival	Aspen Ideas Festival	TED conferences
Academic organization	National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)	Bureau of Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD)
Book Reviews	Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Financial Times, New York Review of Books	New York Times Book Review
Software philanthropy	Google.Org	Gates Foundation
Fashionable confab	Davos	Clinton Global Initiative

Our Critics Are Starting a Bill Easterly Watch

We received a request by Bryan Turner to submit a post on Aid Watch critical of this blog’s approach. Since we are in favor of debate, we accepted his proposal and here is the blog post he submitted yesterday--Eds. by Bryan Turner, founder and coordinator of Students To End Extreme Poverty and Youth Engagement Coordinator of Make Poverty History Canada

I actually agree with much of what Professor Easterly writes and he does some great things. I also believe that he could make more of a constructive difference in the debate on poverty alleviation than he is now.

Several colleagues and I from Students To End Extreme Poverty have launched a blog called Bill Easterly Watch: Just Asking that Bill Stop Blowing Over Straw Men. In our opinion, NGOs and governments should be accountable – and so should Professor Easterly.

Criticizing is at best one third of the equation, and typically the easiest third. Criticizing can be the first step in positive change. The next is figuring out – searching – what to do about it, the third is doing it, seeing what works and what doesn’t and if applicable how it can happen elsewhere.

The aid system is broken. That is the start, not the end. It’s easy to criticize, much harder to propose alternatives. If there were enough people focusing on the “solutions,” then criticizing alone would be sufficient -- but there are not. So unless you are proposing alternatives, evidence suggests you may be discouraging more people than you are encouraging.

If this is not the goal of Professor Easterly, then he should amend his approach.

I’ve spoken with countless people that cite Professor Easterly’s arguments as reasons for inaction, not just on aid but on the entire gamut of issues facing the world’s poorest.

We need internal and external emotional harmony to be happy people. If we believe we are good (which most of us do) we need to reconcile our actions with our exterior environment. What does this mean? Good people do not ignore 9.2 million children dying every year from poverty related causes. But if there is no infrastructure in place (which there isn’t) allowing people to make a difference, then people will become cynical about change. And if you criticize an approach without suggesting a feasible alternative, chances are people will give up on being involved.

We are concerned that some of Easterly’s arguments are not fleshed out, based on oversimplifications of complex issues and sometimes even miss the point.

For example: the dichotomy between searchers and planners is a false one and a lot of planning is born out of searching.

A second example: the criticism of celebrities. The transformation of aid that Easterly advocates won’t happen without a critical mass of informed citizens who are willing to take actions. Celebrity involvement can be crucial for getting people involved on an introductory level – usually the starting point for deeper engagement – facilitating a tipping point towards mass action.

A third example: You should not hold aid given for non development purposes accountable for development outcomes, but that’s what the $2.3 trillion ($15 per person per year) in wasted aid argument does. We want to talk about that.

Students To End Extreme Poverty is all about healthy debate, accountability, innovation, searching, and most of all, solutions. We believe, as is demonstrable, that aid can work, and there should be more of it that does work – more and better aid. We think this is something that, with a little bit more prodding, Professor Easterly can support as well.

In which I don’t care about genocides that kill only .01 percent of the population

My WSJ review on Tracy Kidder’s book on the Burundian genocide survivor generated this comment from a reader (abbreviated here, the full version is posted as a comment on the blog): Mr. Easterly,

You point out that "only" 0.01% of Africans have been killed by war and genocide... each year... for the past four decades. This is only slightly higher than the percentage of Europeans who died in the Holocaust each year between 1940 and 1945, meaning that Africa has merely suffered something like a 40-year Holocaust.

In fact, 0.01% is significantly lower than the percentage of Americans killed each year in the second world war (0.08% or so, on average), a minor conflict barely mentioned in writings of the time. During the Vietnam conflict we were losing only about 0.002% of our population each year for about 16 years and people would barely shut up about it.

Thus I propose that we adopt 0.01% of the population as the Easterly Threshold, requiring that any discussion of a conflict failing to achieve this level of decimation include a disclaimer that most of the population has not, in fact, yet died. Where populations are suitably difficult for us Americans to distinguish from one another, this percentage will be calculated on an arbitrarily continental or sub-continental basis. This immediately puts the whole history of the 20th century in a much rosier light: using the Easterly Threshold, a group like the Khmer Rouge barely clears the hurdle, massacring just 0.012% of Asia's population in a year.

Regards,

Jonathan Custer

Lakeland, Florida (soon Birmingham, England)

Dear Mr. Custer,

Congrats on your tour de force demolishing my argument that nobody should care about genocides that kill only 0.01 percent of the population or less.

You force me to admit that if a genocidal soldier killed one of my own loved ones, I myself would get only moderate comfort from the statistic that this corresponded to an American death rate of only 0.000000333 % (1 out of 300 million).

Your argument is so skillful, let’s not get pedantic that my article never made the “only” argument; it actually said that the .01 percent statistic is also “of no comfort to Africans today who are victims of still much too frequent horrors; bless anyone who can stop the horrors or help the victims.”

I was foolishly hoping the .01 percent number might induce the casual reader to re-examine his belief that the typical African family consists of a wife-beating alcoholic male and starving refugee females raped by child soldiers, soon after massacred by the janjaweed just before they would have died of AIDS anyway.

On correcting stereotypes, consider the Willie Horton ad of the presidential election of 1988 of the George Bush, Sr. vs. Michael Dukakis. A political group allied with Bush ran an ad featuring a scary picture of Willie Horton (see also the video), a black man in prison for murder whom Dukakis granted a weekend furlough. He then raped a woman while on furlough. The ad is partially credited with winning the election for Bush.

I would argue that white voters over-reacted in their fears of black crime. The propensity of black males to commit crimes is lower than the general public thinks, and other whites, not blacks, commit most crimes against whites. According to your interpretation, my attempt to correct a stereotype means I don’t care about the victims of Willie Horton. So this is a good opportunity to clarify I am not, in fact, in favor of rape and murder. I'm not that keen on genocide either.

Actually, I can do two things at once: (1) argue against exaggerated stereotypes and (2) care about the victims of crimes regardless of whether they fit stereotypical patterns. But thanks for your argument forcing me to clarify this.

Satirically Yours,

Bill Easterly

Survey Results Are In: A Dialogue with Our Supporters and Critics

Our Sally Field moment: (Most of) you (mostly) like us! 83 percent of you gave us a 5 (26 percent) or 4 (57 percent) out of 5 overall. About 15 percent of you gave us an “eh, you’re all right,” 2 percent of you gave us a 2 out of 5, and one person gave us a 1 (you really hate us!) Also on the plus side, three-quarters describe the blog as both “informative,” and “constructively skeptical,” 58 percent as “encouraging of constructive dialogue and debate” and 53 percent as “entertaining.” Only 1 percent of you think that we are “harming global efforts to help the poor.” In the improvements-to-be-made category, 33 percent of you find us “too predictably negative,” and 17 percent said we are “too confrontational.”

You want more of everything.

All topics had an excess of those who want more on that topic over those who want less. The largest margins were for 1) analysis of aid policies and approaches, 2) analysis of how to achieve economic development, and 3) critical evaluation of specific aid programs or agencies.

You want more positive stories on “what works.”

Another big theme to what you want more of, and what you would change about Aid Watch is—as one of you put it—more “analysis of aid programs that are actually working (there are some, right??)” Well, we hear you, and our response to that is two-fold:

First, the pushback. We wish it weren’t true, but good people in the aid industry do some dumb (ineffective, non-transparent, wasteful, arrogant) things! To identify dumb things to STOP doing is still positive change. When we run positive stories, you correctly sense that we are perhaps a little too arbitrary in our choices of “what works.” We’re trying hard, but the problem here is one of the central points of this blog—there is not enough transparency, evaluation, and accountability to know what’s working.

Second, the concession. We will seek out the positive stories in aid even harder, and we will profile more specific programs (or components of large programs) that have the demonstrated potential to improve the lives of the poor.

Sometimes we’re a little too snarky.

As we have said on this blog before, satire is the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. We deploy it often because the aid establishment is so impervious to change and so resistant to a course correction, no matter how reasonable the case for change is. Satire and sharp words are also a reaction to the bureaucratic buzzwords and evasive language that sometimes passes for real debate on this subject.

Having said this, it is a challenge to find the right balance—to calibrate our tone—and we take your point to be respectful of those we criticize. Although we are dissidents from a mainstream aid establishment, that’s NOT equivalent to thinking that we alone have the exactly correct view – another of our central points is that NONE of us know as much as we think we do. But we do pledge a better effort finding the positive (see above), being humble, even-handed, and giving the targets of our criticism a fair chance to explain themselves.

We could use a makeover.

Some of you commented on our less-than-bleeding-edge design and web functionality. Help is on the way: stay tuned for a redesign of the blog (and our parent page, NYU’s Development Research Institute) coming in early fall.

You don’t like being put in boxes.

Apologies to those of you who bristled at the narrow categories we provided for the ‘describe yourself’ question. We are pleased to discover our readership is even more diverse than we had guessed. In addition to a healthy percentage of students, economists, NGO workers, aid practitioners and consultants, your fellow readers also include entrepreneurs, aid recipients, congressional staffers, journalists, attorneys, technology consultants, bankers, missionaries and “interested bystanders.” Some categories we did not foresee: “Easterly groupie,” “Mets fan,” “hack bureaucrat,” and “Canadian.”

In closing, a sincere thanks to all of you who participated for your feedback and many helpful suggestions.

Aid Watch goes Lite for August

Since many of you downshift for August and we do also, Aid Watch will be posting shorter, less frequent blog posts this month, perhaps some with more entertainment value than substance. You can participate by submitting entries in a category we will have this month: Weirdest Aid Stories Ever. Please send them to Laura.Freschi@NYU.edu.

Meanwhile, you still have a chance to participate in our Reader Survey, if you have not already, to give us feedback on how we can make Aid Watch better. The survey closes at 5pm today, Eastern Daylight Time. We will post the results soon.

Make Aid Watch Better

That Aid Watch blog — you must be thinking — always insisting on accountability and responsiveness from others. When are we going to see a little accountability and responsiveness from them? Well . . . how about now?

Please help us improve this blog by taking our 3-minute, completely painless reader satisfaction survey. The survey closes this Monday, August 3rd at 5 pm EST.

We try to make comprehensible the incomprehensible responses from those we criticize

Our targets for criticism have evolved a new tactic of writing longwinded unreadable responses (at least Vernon Smith had brilliant ideas underlying his unreadable book reviewed today). So the Global Development Network wrote us a bureaucratic reply to the charge that they were too bureaucratic. World Vision’s reply to our charge that they were inappropriately manipulating our feelings towards children generated a similarly long-winded reply. To avoid the “tl;dr” comment we got on the GDN response, we did World Vision the service of extracting the high points of their response below. (We posted their letter in full here.) On a far more positive note, we are always grateful when organizations take the time to respond and we think it is a good sign of organizational health and accountability.

Thank you for inviting us to respond…

…World Vision does not focus on children in order to 'tug at the heart strings' and gain greater support for our campaigning and fund-raising work. Rather, World Vision focuses on children as, globally, more children than adults by far live in poverty … and are generally much more

susceptible to the effects of poverty than adults, especially during infancy…

…In response to the comment concerning children's participation at international meetings such as the G8, World Vision, in line with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, strongly believes that children have a right to express their views in all decisions that will affect them….

…However, we recognise that children's participation, particularly at large national or international events can often amount to little more than tokenism. As such, in 2008, World Vision worked with Plan International, Save the Children, UNICEF and others to develop minimum standards for children's participation at these events in order to ensure that their engagement is both meaningful and beneficial to all present…

Yours sincerely,

Philippa Lei Senior Child Rights Policy Adviser World Vision UK

I face my own critics

It’s only fair that I respond to my critics, in the same way I ask others to respond to my criticisms. A comment by Jeff on the poverty tourism controversy was particularly negative, but also succinct and eloquent, and his concerns seem to overlap with those expressed by other, so I will respond to Jeff directly. I put his comments in bold and my response in italics. The main take away from this blog in general seems to be this:

1) for the sake of your reputation and the world, steer your career clear of anything other than making money for yourself.

The intention with criticism is to induce change from bad aid behavior to better aid behavior. You are right, Jeff, that criticism could scare away some people from engagement in aid at all. I could do better in making clear that this is the LAST thing I want.

2) especially if you're famous, be selfish. If you care about problems like poverty, keep your mouth shut.

I think that it is ridiculous that celebrities have a major voice on aid. But you are right that I could do better in recognizing the possibility of more modest and constructive celebrity engagement. I did do an event with Natalie Portman once.

3) only about 5 people in the world know anything about development and aid. Everyone else trying to do something is borderline evil.

That many? (joking)

I am a dissenter from the aid establishment (and not the only one); it badly needs dissent because there is too much group-think. There is a difference between dissent and arrogance, especially when my dissent often takes the form of questioning whether outsiders (including me) know enough to perform social engineering in other societies. But you are right I could do better showing respect to those I am dissenting from.

4) If you think you're part of the solution, you're really part of the problem.

Since you criticized arrogance in the previous point, Jeff, it’s probably worth it for all of us to double-check ourselves on (4).

5) private sector take heed: doing a little to help is usually worse than doing nothing at all.

The private sector should not get a free pass from criticism when they mix social and private enterprise, but social enterprise is often a good thing.

6) misguided good intentions should be dealt with harshly, with righteous indignation, rather than nudged toward more effective paths.

You are right, Jeff, I have to be careful about self-righteousness, particularly when it comes to moral/ethical issues like poverty tourism. I still strongly disapprove of poverty tourism, but I certainly do not get rich-poor interactions perfectly right all the time either. Based on yours and other feedback I have gotten, I think my tone was too harsh in response to Dr. Michael Grosspietsch on the Rwanda Millennium Village project. I apologize to him and to the others involved for my excessively harsh tone.

I'm a Twit!

The final conversion of an absent-minded, balding, middle-aged male born in 1957 in West Virginia into a 21st century techie: I'm going to start Tweeting. Check out @bill_easterly

Sachs attack! Help!

Jeff Sachs uncorks a personal attack on me, grossly distorts my position to make me look bad, and he definitely knows this from POSITIVE aid statements of mine that he has quoted in the past, wow this gets more fun every year! Anybody have any inside contacts at Huffington Post to give me a chance to defend my lame self?

Reader survey

Dear Readers, Can you indulge me with a little survey? Please tell me which you think is more probable:

(A) a country succeeds at economic development, or

(B) a country succeeds at economic development with a wise and capable leadership.

Please answer ONLY whether you think (A) or (B) is more probable, with no elaboration, just post a comment on this post saying "(A)" or "(B)."

Thanks, Bill Easterly

Dani Rodrik responds to "How ethnic profiling explains Dani Rodrik’s fondness for industrial policy"

by Dani Rodrik Hmmm. I think you misconstrue the nature of the debate and the argument. If my priors were that no Moslems are terrorists ("industrial policy never works") and then I found that some are, I would think the evidence pretty compelling and alter my priors. (With apologies for the nature of the analogy, but I am following Bill's line of thought...)

My point is to get people beyond their refusal to accept that industrial

policy could ever work, so we can actually debate the conditions under which it can or does. Now that would be a healthy debate!

Response to "Why Does British Aid Favor Poor Governments over Poor People"?

By Owen Barder, the Addis Ababa-based director of aidinfo.org, an initiative to accelerate poverty reduction by making aid more transparent. Aidinfo is part of Development Initiatives, a UK-based development consultancy. Bill Easterly and Laura Freschi at Aid Watch lay in to British Government aid for giving financial support directly to governments:

In 2007, the UK gave 20 percent of their total bilateral ODA in the form of budget support to 13 countries: Tanzania, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Ghana, Uganda, Mozambique, Vietnam, Malawi, Zambia, India, Sierra Leone, Nepal, and Nicaragua. Of this list, only Ghana and India were classified as “free” by the annual Freedom House ratings on democracy (according to either the 2007 or 2008 rating). For the 11 other countries that did get British budget support, how much is there “country ownership” when the government is not democratically accountable to the “country”? ... There is nothing that says you have to give aid meant for the poorest peoples directly to their governments, if the latter are tyrannical and corrupt. With the examples above, which side are UK aid officials on, on the side of poor people or on the side of the governments that oppress them?

With all due respect to Aid Watch, I don't think they have got this right. For example, they say:

Ethiopia’s autocratic government, which is inexplicably the largest recipient of UK budget support in Africa, won 99% of the vote in the last "election".

Nice point, except:

a. according to the official results of the 2005 election, the ruling party won 59.8% of the votes; the Coalition for Unity and Democracy got 19.9% and the United Ethiopian Democratic Forces got 9.5%. I have no idea if those accurately reflect how people voted, but it is nonsense to say that the government received 99% of the vote;

b. the UK does not give budget support to the Federal Government of Ethiopia. Through the Protection of Basic Services scheme, which was introduced after worries about the election, the UK Government provides finance to local government (albeit through the existing financial transfer mechanism via central government). As well as funding health and education, the project includes significant components to increase transparency and accountability of federal and regional parliaments.

Aside from getting the facts wrong, Aid Watch seem to be criticising this form of aid by slinging mud rather than by way of a proper analysis of the advantages and disadvanges. We should be asking what benefits arise from giving aid through government, and what harm may come from it. Aid Watch acknowledge the possible benefits: lower transaction costs, more coherence in development policies, building capacity of government. There is another crucial possible benefit: putting money through government budgets is also a way to make the government more accountable to its own citizens, rather than to a bunch of foreign donors.

But Aid Watch don't try to spell out what the harm might be if aid is given to governments with unpleasant records on human rights or corruption. I personally think there is a case to be made against giving money to many governments, for example if there is reason to believe that the money will not be spent on poverty reduction, or if it will sustain in power a government which might otherwise be booted out of office. But let's set out these reasons coherently, and let's try to assess their importance relative to the possible benefits. Aid Watch seems to suggest that guilt-by-association is enough to damn the whole enterprise.

As it happens, the governments mentioned in this piece (Ethiopia, Vietnam and Malawi) all make demonstrably good use of the money they have received. Here in Ethiopia the expansion of public services such as free education and publich health workers financed by Protection of Basic Services is transforming the quality of lives across the country; and Vietnam has made quite staggering progress in bringing down poverty. Personally I think there are important questions to be answered about the quality of democracy in both countries: but that doesn't mean I want to kill some of the citizens of those countries, or deprive them of basic services, by giving less effective aid. The British Government's approach of giving some aid in the form of budget support (too little, in my view) is motivated by evidence that in some circumstances this is an important way of building more effective, responsive and accountable institutions.

Developing countries don't want to receive aid forever, any more than industrialised countries want to give it forever. Building effective and accountable public services is a way of financing the delivery of public services in the short run, while at the same time making it more likely that countries have an exit strategy from aid in the long run. That is not preferring governments to poor people: it is preferring poor people to giving aid in a way which maximises the publicity you get and covering your back but doing little to build accountable and sustainable public services. Giving aid as budget support should not be promoted ideologically: it should be used where the advantages (in terms of better service delivery and the long term benefit to accountability and institutions) outweigh the disadvantages (such as the risk of sustaining a bad government in power). Equally it should not be opposed ideologically. Budget support has not been shown to be at any greater risk of corruption or of fungibility than other forms of aid (these are the two main arguments that are offered against budget support). It should be assessed case-by-case. Where it can be used, it represents a very powerful mechanism for both the short term benefits of service delivery and the long term benefits of institutional development. Where it cannot be used, donors should be focusing on what they can do to help create an environment where it can be used in future.

If Aid Watch want to be taken seriously as an aid watchdog, then (a) they'd better get their facts straight and (b) they need to do some proper analysis of the costs and benefits of different choices for aid delivery in different contexts, rather than simply asserting that it is wrong to give aid to and through governments of which they disapprove. Incidentally, last year Easterly and Pfutze ("Where Does the Money Go? Best and Worst Practices in Foreign Aid.") ranked the UK as the best bilateral donor. That doesn't mean that the UK is perfect, by any means, and it doesn't mean that they get every judgement right; but it does suggest that UK aid officials might not deserve the allegation in this blog entry that they prefer poor governments to poor people.

Declaration of interest: I used to work for the UK Department of International Development.

Guest bloggers with different points of view

Aid Watch will invite guest bloggers from time to time to represent a variety of points of view about aid. Today, we host Owen Barder, who is the Addis Ababa-based director of aidinfo.org, an initiative to accelerate poverty reduction by making aid more transparent. Aidinfo is part of Development Initiatives, a UK-based development consultancy. Owen disagreed strongly with our post last Friday on British aid favoring bad governments through direct budget support.

NYU’s Aid Watch Initiative Held Conference on “What Would the Poor Say? Debates in Aid Evaluation”

By William Easterly During last Friday's conference, participants and speakers leveled a variety of criticisms at aid agencies for lacking accountability and transparency, but also suggested new ideas and expressed hope for a new way forward. Here are some highlights; check back soon for more details and some video footage. Click here for the full conference agenda.

Yaw Nyarko (NYU): “No nation has ever developed because of aid and outside advice.”

Esther Duflo (MIT): “Field experiments have a subversive power.” Find her presentation here.

William Easterly (NYU): The institutions of a free society make it possible to answer "what would the people say?" Can we imitate this in aid to know "What would the poor say?" Full presentation here.

Laura Freschi (DRI) on Aid Watch: “We want to act as ONE OF MANY catalysts in the open marketplace of ideas about aid evaluation: inspiring connections, and helping to convert good ideas into opportunities.” Find the text of the Aid Watch launch announcement here.

Andrew Mwenda (the Independent): “Aid money makes African governments accountable to the aid agencies rather than to their own people.”

The power of accountability for African governments is shown by some examples when political elites faced a threat to their very existence, like in Rwanda after the genocide or Uganda after Musevni’s takeover in 1986, when both governments instituted pro-development policies.

Nancy Birdsall (Center for Global Development): Cash on delivery aid “traps the donors so they are forced to have poor country governments accountable to them and accountable to their own people.” Find her presentation here.

June Arunga (BSL Ghana Ltd.): "Aid money is diverting African skilled professionals away from private enterprise to writing proposals for NGOs.”

When June pitched her idea of using cell phones to facilitate financial transactions to Western investors, one well-known philanthropist expressed disbelief that poor Africans (whom she had seen mainly in pictures begging and starving) had cell phones: “Who do they call?” she asked.

Dennis Whittle (GlobalGiving): “Put up a billboard in each community saying what aid money is supposed to be going towards.” Click here for his presentation.

Lant Pritchett (Harvard University): "Is this information you are gathering from us just to help you write your report or can you really be helpful to us?" - a woman in South Sudan.

Evaluation can help make politically successful development movements into effective ones. Find his presentation here.

Ross Levine (Brown University): “Aid agencies are insufficiently evaluated on advice…financial survival depends on distributing money.” The right advice often violates the imperative: “Don’t interfere with lending!” Click here for more.

Leonard Wantchekon (NYU): "We African professionals want to be the ones advising our own governments rather than foreign aid professionals!" Find his presentation here.

Karin Christiansen (Publish What You Fund): “In Afghanistan, the government does not know how one-third of all aid since 2001 – some $5bn – has been spent…Liberian civil society organizations couldn’t get basic information [which foreigners could.]” Find her presentation here.

William Duggan (Columbia School of Business): “I wasted 20 years of my life on aid efforts, but now I see some hope for change.” Click here for his short paper (co-authored with Lynn Ellsworth) on "Evaluation, the Poor, and Foriegn Aid."

DRI to Host Conference on Aid Evaluation

On February 6th, NYU's Development Research Institute (DRI) will host What Would the Poor Say: Debates in Aid Evaluation, a one-day conference with the leading thinkers in development economics. The conference will take place at New York University, where participants from universities, NGOs, the independent media and the private sector will add to the dialogue on how to make aid agencies accountable for the most effective solutions to global poverty. A list of speakers and panelists follows, but for a complete schedule of events, go to DRI's website. The conference is free and open to the public, but space is limited and filling up quickly. To reserve a place, RSVP to aidwatch@nyu.edu with your name and affiliation.

--

Yaw Nyarko (NYU), Welcome and Introduction

Esther Duflo (MIT), The Evaluation Revolution and the Aid Providers

William Easterly (NYU), The Big Picture on Aid Accountability

Panel 1: Evaluation: Issues in Transparency and Accountability

Andrew Mwenda (The Independent, Uganda), Independent Media in Africa and Foreign Aid

Nancy Birdsall (Center for Global Development), New Methods for Motivating Results in Aid

Dennis Whittle (Global Giving), Accountability in Decentralized vs. Centrally Planned Aid Systems

June Arunga (BSL Ghana Ltd.), Foreign Aid from the African Business Point of View

Lant Pritchett (Harvard), The Political Economy of Evaluation

Panel 2: Issues in Evaluation

Leonard Wantchekon (NYU), Independent Evaluation and the Reaction of Official Aid Agencies

Ross Levine (Brown University), Evaluating the Economics: Finance and the Aid Agencies

Karin Christiansen (Publish What You Fund), Aid Transparency as a Prerequisite

William Duggan (Columbia Business School), Pragmatic Learning from Success and Failure

How Nice Should Aid Commentators Be?

I wanted to respond today to your very helpful comments on yesterday’s launch, but of course I have to be very selective. To summarize a few areas of agreement and disagreement: I agree with:

(1) Those who said they liked the new blog. You get a free cup of coffee made with my hand-powered $20 espresso maker next time you are in Greenwich Village.

(2) Lucas who said I do need positive examples of aid working. Yes! Please send me more documentation on the Filipino example you gave, and I am happy to feature it. Positive examples are welcome from everyone reading this (but some kind of evidence and documentation is required.)

(3) Michael Clemens of the Center for Global Development on the counterproductive fixation with “0.7 percent of GDP” as an aid target. He is too modest – what he says is based on a killer article he did with Todd Moss also of CGD. The journal summary practically burns up the page:

First, the target was calculated using a model which, applied to today's data, yields ludicrous results. Second, no government ever agreed in a UN forum to actually reach 0.7 per cent – though many pledged to move toward it….The 0.7 per cent goal has no modern academic basis, has failed as a lobbying tool, and should be abandoned.

Clemens and Moss might have been a good reference to check before two opeds by Mr. Zoellick that mentioned “0.7” five separate times.

I disagree with:

(1) Jim, who said I was being too mean to Mr. Zoellick. First, I won’t be mean to YOU, Jim, I’m happy you gave me some tough criticism, debate is a GOOD thing.

Which is also my response to your criticism, which is that debate is a GOOD thing. Debate is good in academia, and it’s good in politics, and both kinds are usually fierce. It wasn’t a personal attack on Mr. Zoellick, it was a big disagreement about big issues.

We fiercely debate domestic spending bills that waste affluent taxpayers’ money with a few millions on a bridge to nowhere, so why should we be NICE when the head of the world’s premier aid agency outlines virtually zero accountability for helping the world’s poorest people?