Exploiting Africa Academy Awards

Following the Academy Award nominations earlier this week, we introduce the Exploiting Africa Academy Award (EAAA) nominations to recognize films who do the best against stiff competition to portray the most insulting and exploitative images of Africans, usually being heroically saved by some white people. We include links to the trailers.

Machine Gun Preacher. This one is so exemplary that it inspired the EAAA in the first place. A commercial film based on a violent ex-con turned violent Christian who goes to central Africa to shoot bad guys and rescue any children still alive after the cross-fire. Principal white saviors : based on “true(?)” story of ex-biker-gang-member Sam Childers, supported in the movie by a beautiful model playing his ex-biker-gang-member-wife.

The Reckoning. About how the International Criminal Court protects African females and children against male African killers. Principal White Savior: Luis Moreno-Ocampo.

Darfur. About how Western correspondents protect African females and children against male African killers. Principal White Saviors: macho journalists supported by one attractive female journalist.

The Vice Guide to Liberia. OK it’s actually a web-based TV series from the Vice media empire, but it’s so horrifically exploitative (baby cannibalism, enough said), we had to include it. Principal White Savior: the Vice correspondent , although it’s very unclear how he’s saving anyone but himself.

An older classic:

Blood Diamond.  Educated the movie-going audience about the acronym TIA to be used whenever anything horrible happens in the movie -- “This Is Africa”. Principal white saviors: mercenary and smuggler Leonardo di Caprio supported by gorgeous journalist Jennifer Connelly.

Please vote for your favorite after a few minutes scanning the trailers - we will announce the winner after enough votes come in.

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Credits: we went outside of DRI/Aid Watch to consult the real experts: Kate and Amanda from Wronging Rights. DRI/Aid Watch contributors include William Easterly, Laura Freschi, Vivek Nemana, and David Rice.

The World Bank Clock

UPDATE V January 24, 2012: 123 days later, the CAO is on the case  Yesterday we heard from Oxfam that the World Bank has finally announced an independent investigation into complaints from two communities in Uganda who lost their land in forced evictions to make way for forestry plantations.

The Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman (CAO) reports directly to the President of the World Bank and examines cases brought by people affected by World Bank private sector lending projects, usually dealing with social and environmental problems.

This announcement comes 123 days after the Bank promised to investigate. Forgive us for being a tiny bit underwhelmed that it took so long to start an investigation that will now take another six months.  The CAO’s mandate is to make the Bank more accountable by responding “quickly and effectively” to complaints from affected communities. Allowing 123 days of obfuscation and confusion to pass instead was a disaster for such accountability.

UPDATE IV January 11, 2012: Everybody loses

The World Bank (through subsidiary IFC) has pulled $1 million in funding from New Forests Company, alleged to be responsible for the forcible eviction of thousands of people in Uganda. This is according to a statement from NFC, which announced a halt to new tree planting, prompted also by the loss of $14 million from a new, unnamed investor.

New Forests Company (NFC), Uganda’s biggest forestry group, announces today that it has suspended tree planting across the country for 2012 that will result in 560 job losses in the Mubende, Kiboga, Kyankwanzi and Bugiri districts.

NFC blamed Oxfam, and the negative publicity its report caused, for the suspension and resulting loss of jobs.

An Oxfam spokesman responded today, saying they were “disappointed to hear of the job losses” and that “[w]ithdrawing investment is not a solution to the issues we have highlighted. We think that existing investors should engage with the company to put things right.”

No word yet from the World Bank/IFC to explain their decision, or their position on how the evicted communities should be compensated.

This looks like the worst case scenario, with the communities displaced and no compensation for them, and the forestry company not even creating the positive benefits of job creation, renewed forests and new economic activity in Uganda.  In other words, everybody has lost out, all because there were no safeguards to protect the residents, and no procedures for NFC and the World Bank/IFC to respond promptly to allegation of rights violations.

UPDATE III, October 18, 2011: What investigation?

Okay, that Twitter post was a practical joke. If you read the post carefully, neither Justin Bieber nor Kim Kardashian announced a hunger strike of any kind as far as Aid Watch knows. We can only fantasize about celebrity activism so bravely challenging the unacceptable impunity of aid agencies. Today's real story of interest is an Oxfam America update about how the (self) investigation into World Bank-financed Uganda land evictions has so far issued threats to the poor  Ugandans who publicly complained about their homes being burned down. There is seemingly no end in sight for the Investigation Commitments Clock.

UPDATE II, October 9, 2011: The World Bank Responds 

The World Bank (through its subsidiary International Finance Corporation--IFC) finally followed up yesterday on their promise below to investigate -- by issuing another promise to investigate:

IFC is committed to ensuring New Forests Company undertakes an independent and transparent review. NFC is drafting a terms of reference that IFC and other stakeholders will validate before the review gets underway.

How would you rate their responsiveness at this point?

UPDATE I, September 29, 2011: Oxfam joins us, after we join them 

Oxfam joins us in our rebel alliance against the Empire.  They kindly overlooked that we neglected to highlight their critical role in documenting the misdeeds in the first place -- they did the report on which the NYT based the story.

ORIGINAL POST, September 22, 2011:

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This clock shows the time since the World Bank promised an investigation on Thursday, September 22 into the charges from an Oxfam study that they financed a project in Uganda in which poor people had their homes, cattle, and crops destroyed as the project forced them off their own land. Click the image once to reveal clock.

Laura Freschi and Alanna Shaikh's Gates Foundation Article Tops Alliance Magazine's Most Read List

Congratulations to  our associate director Laura Freschi and Alanna Shaikh, an international health consultant,  who topped the list of Alliance Magazine's most read articles of 2011. Their piece -- Gates - a benevolent dictator for public health? -- was published in the special 'Living with the Gates Foundation' edition in September.  Gates - a benevolent dictator for public health? Laura Freschi and Alanna Shaikh

The public health landscape today looks unquestionably different from how it did in the late 1990s when the Gates Foundation strode on to the field. To its credit, the foundation has brought about a resurgence of interest in global health issues at a time when the cause was running low on energy and funds. Before Gates, global health funding covered little more than HIV and emerging infectious diseases – a bare shadow of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Health for All[1] vision of the 1970s. But Gates’ support for global health also raises questions: is it pushing us too much towards simple technological responses to multifaceted problems? With its influence so far-reaching, who will be willing and able to offer objective feedback? Click here to read

The Gates Foundation edition, which was guest-edited by Philanthropy Action's Timothy Ogden, examined the foundation's impact on both philanthropy and the fields it contributes to. Watch footage from a panel discussion on 'Living with the Gates Foundation' at the Hudson Institute.

See the other most-read articles below, including this one on culture and philanthropy by Tim Ogden:

How much difference is it making? Tim Ogden

Every autumn, an American university publishes a list of once popular items and phrases that fell out of standard use before the new class of students were born. For instance, a few years ago the list noted that incoming students probably hadn’t ever used cassette players. The intent is to remind professors and administrators that young people do not necessarily share many of our perceived cultural touchstones. Today, a discussion of philanthropic foundations’ role in society always begins with the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation. But this shared cultural touchstone is being eclipsed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Click here to read

Interview - Jodi Nelson

In November 2007, Alliance talked to Fay Twersky, recently appointed to head up the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s brand-new Impact Planning and Improvement Unit. Three and a half years later, Caroline Hartnell asked her newly appointed successor, Jodi Nelson, to what extent Bill and Melinda Gates’ original aims for the unit have been achieved. And what challenges does she face in her new role? One thing she emphasizes is the need to measure selectively and only when the results will actually be used to do something. Click here to read

‘They want to save the world in 45 minutes’ Olga Alexeeva

This is a shorter version of an interview with Olga Alexeeva published by CAF Russia’s magazine Money and Charity on 25 May, less than two months before she died. Carried out by Matvei Masaltsev, this interview reflects the unique insights into philanthropy around the world that informed all of Olga’s work, and in particular her most recent venture, the Philanthropy Bridge Foundation. Alliance thanks Sue Rogers for translating this from the Russian original. Click here to read

Why does Bihar matter? Simon Desjardins

Long before Gandhi would use it as a launch pad for his campaign for independence, Bihar was an economic powerhouse, serving as the capital of India during Ashoka’s empire in the third century BC, when India’s boundaries stretched to include present-day Afghanistan and parts of Iran to the west and Bangladesh to the east. It is a state rich in history, home to one of the world’s oldest universities (Nalanda) and the oldest democracy, and they even say Buddha found enlightenment here. Click here to read

No Aid for Repressive Tyrants

We … call on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and America’s Western allies to publicly repudiate Ethiopia’s efforts to use terrorism laws to silence political dissent. We also urge the U.S. to ensure that our more than $600 million in aid to Ethiopia is not used to foster repression.

This is the call to action from a letter published in the New York Review of Books this month.

We at DRI are inspired by the courage of Eskinder Nega, an Ethiopian journalist, newspaper publisher, and dissident arrested on September 14th after writing a blog post demanding freedom of expression and an end to torture in Ethiopian prisons. Despite previous arrests, both Eskinder and his wife, Serkalem Fasil, have chosen to remain in Ethiopia and continue their work.

While we don't want to meddle in other countries' politics, we do want to speak out against aid that supports rights-violating regimes, in solidarity with Ethiopian citizens who are simply asking to exercise their own civil liberties.

From 2005, when Eskinder Nega was first imprisoned in the aftermath of Ethiopia’s parliamentary elections marred with rigging and violence, to the present, international aid to Ethiopia has more than doubled to well over $4 billion. The three largest donors are the World Bank, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

Although they acknowledge “concerns” about governance and the protection of basic human rights, aid agencies continue to increase aid flows, praising the Ethiopian regime for high national growth rates and improvements on some health and poverty metrics. Even if not entirely reliable, these figures allow Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles to capitalize on The Myth of the Benevolent Autocrat, under which a “strong leader” (in the tradition to Lee-Kwan Yew, Deng Xiaoping, and even Paul Kagame) is given undue credit for a period of high growth, and excused for whatever human rights abuses and press freedom repression was deemed necessary in the pursuit of economic growth. Unfortunately for Meles, recent DRI research has found that there is no empirical basis for a belief that unconstrained autocratic leaders outperform democratic leaders.

The Ethiopian predicament raises tough questions for people concerned with both poverty alleviation and human rights. The Ethiopian government uses aid to build schools, vaccinate children, and provide social safety nets for the poor. But a Human Rights Watch report found that the government also systematically uses aid as a political weapon to discriminate against non-party members and punish dissenters. The report found widespread evidence of village leaders withholding seeds, fertilizer, and loans from farmers not in the ruling party, and local officials denying emergency food aid to women, children and the elderly as punishment for refusing to join the party.

In Ethiopia, aid agencies should do all they can to make sure aid helps Ethiopians rather than their rulers. One (albeit imperfect) measure of this is “channel of delivery” – data collected by the OECD on whether country aid agencies route funds through the public sector, NGOs, private-public partnerships, or multilateral organizations. These two graphs show available data for the US and the UK.

Like the UK, the World Bank has long given its aid through direct budget support either to the central or local governments, insisting that social accountability mechanisms are in place to prevent misuse. But many observers and journalists tell a different story: that such mechanisms are either not present, or are not working because independent, third-party observers upon which such accountability measures depend are more often ruling party-affiliated NGOs.  Even a study commissioned by the donors found that two of the programs for Ethiopia’s most needy “face important challenges in their accountability systems” and “significant weakness” in safeguards and monitoring processes intended to detect distortion and produce evidence about whether or not the program works.

While it is logical to believe that the way donors deliver aid can strengthen or weaken the compact between rulers and their people in democratic countries, aid cannot create this compact where it does not exist. Empirical evidence does not support the idea that aid can cause dictatorships to become democracies, and in fact a new DRI working paper suggests that aid is more likely to push countries further down their existing path—so that aid to dictatorships makes them more dictatorial, not less.

Bad news for Eskinder Nega and other dissidents and journalists wrongfully persecuted and imprisoned, as aid agencies continue to empower the regime at the expense of the Ethiopian people.

LETTER: The Case of Eskinder Nega

By William Easterly, Mark Hamrick, Aryeh Neier, Kenneth Roth, and Joel Simon

Published in the New York Review of Books, January 12, 2012 edition

To the Editors:

On September 14, 2011, Eskinder Nega, an Ethiopian journalist and dissident blogger, was arrested by the Ethiopian authorities shortly after publishing an online column calling for an end to torture in Ethiopian prisons, a halt to the imprisonment of dissidents, and respect for freedom of expression. The charges against him are punishable by death, and carry a minimum sentence of fifteen years in prison[1], where both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch warn that he is at risk of torture.

Previous to his current arrest, Eskinder and his wife Serkalem Fasil, both newspaper publishers, were charged with treason following Ethiopia’s disputed 2005 elections, along with dozens of journalists, human rights activists, and opposition leaders, and spent seventeen months in jail. While in custody, Serkalem gave birth to their first child. Even after they were acquitted by Ethiopia’s Federal High Court, Eskinder and Serkalem were blocked from reopening their newspapers and the government continued to pursue civil charges against them.[2]

Eskinder also was detained earlier this year, after he published an online column asking members of the security services not to shoot unarmed demonstrators—as they did in 2005—in the event that the “Arab Spring” should spread to Ethiopia.[3]

Most of us would have fled into exile after such treatment—as have nearly all of Ethiopia’s significant opposition leaders and independent journalists since 2005. In all, eleven independent journalists and bloggers have been charged with terrorism this year, five of whom are behind bars. Ethiopia tops Iran and Cuba to lead the world in the number of journalists who have been forced into exile over the past decade, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.[4]

Having spent a large part of his childhood in suburban Washington, D.C., and being in possession of a US residence permit, Eskinder could have easily followed. That he has not is testimony to his commitment to democratic values that Western governments say they hold dear.

America and its Western allies have aligned themselves closely with Ethiopia’s government in the fight against radical Islamists in the Horn of Africa and in efforts to prevent a repeat of the 1984–1985 famine. Worthy as these goals are, we should not allow them to blind us to Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s increasingly authoritarian bent—as exhibited by his regime’s 99.6 percent election victory in 2010 and most recently the decision to prosecute Eskinder as a terrorist, along with seven other dissidents.[5]

We therefore call on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and America’s Western allies to publicly repudiate Ethiopia’s efforts to use terrorism laws to silence political dissent. We also urge the US to ensure that our more than $600 million in aid[6] to Ethiopia is not used to foster repression.[7]

William Easterly Professor of Economics Co-Director, Development Research Institute New York University New York City

Mark Hamrick President National Press Club Washington, D.C.

Aryeh Neier President Open Society Foundations New York City

Kenneth Roth Executive Director Human Rights Watch New York City

Joel Simon Executive Director Committee to Protect Journalists New York City

1. See charging document (Amharic), at www.ethioforum.org/document/Court.pdf.
2. See also "Ethiopia Reinstates Hefty Fines Against Publishing Houses," Committee to Protect Journalists , March 10, 2010, www.cpj.org/2010/03/ethiopia-reinstates-hefty-fines-against-publishing.php.
3. See also "Ethiopian Journalist Alleges Detention for Inciting Egypt-Style Protests,"Voice of America , February 17, 2011, www.voanews.com/english/news/africa/east/Ethiopian-Journalist-Alleges-Detention-for-Inciting-Egypt-Style-Protests-116412719.html.
4. "Journalists in Exile 2011," Committee to Protect Journalists. Available at www.cpj.org/reports/2011/06/journalists-in-exile-2011-iran-cuba-drive-out-crit.php.
5. "Ethiopia Charges Opposition Figures, Reporter With Terrorism," Voice of America , November 10, 2011, www.voanews.com/english/news/africa/Ethiopia-Charges-Opposition-Figures-Reporter-With-Terrorism-133638658.html.
6. See US foreign assistance figures at www.foreignassistance.gov/OU.aspx?OUID=171&FY=2012&AgencyID=0&budTab=tab_Bud_Planned.
7. See Helen Epstein, "Cruel Ethiopia," TheNew York Review , May 13, 2010, www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/may/13/cruel-ethiopia/. See also Human Rights Watch , March 24, 2010, "One Hundred Ways of Putting Pressure: Violations of Freedom and Association in Ethiopia," and October 19, 2010, "Development Without Freedom: How Aid Underwrites Repression in Ethiopia, www.hrw.org/news/2010/10/18/ethiopiadonor-aid-supports-repression.

Read this article on the NYRB website.

VIDEO: "Living with the Gates Foundation" by the Hudson Institute and Alliance Magazine

How influential is the Gates Foundation, and what impact do its sheer size and scale -- the foundation grants an average of $10 million per day and employs over 1,000 people -- have on both philanthropy and the fields in which it operates? While there are obvious benefits to Gates' massive expenditure on public health, and the foundation has a reputation for following effective practices, doubts linger about its domination of the global health agenda, the squeezing out of diverse approaches and the difficulties of obtaining objective feedback. In a special edition of Alliance Magazine, guest editor Timothy Ogden points out the power dynamics between Gates' and other players in the fields where it operates. Among other contributors, DRI Associate Director Laura Freschi and global health consultant Alanna Shaikh questioned the Foundation's amenability to feedback, while Duke University's Edward Skloot discussed how the Foundation's scale makes it qualitatively different from any other charitable organization.

These questions were further explored at the Hudson Institute, where Tim Ogden, Laura Freschi and Edward Skloot were invited to a panel discussion on December 6 -- joined by Darin McKeever, Deputy Director for Charitable Support at the Foundation, and the Hudson Institute's William Schambra, who moderated.

Watch highlights of the event below:

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Laura asked whether an organization as influential as the Gates Foundation, which funds not only health research and interventions but also the media sources that cover them, could be held accountable. Her segment begins at (13:23) in the full event video below. Read more about the discussion at the Hudson Institute's website, or download a copy of the edited transcript here.

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Caroline Preston has a good review of the panel on the Chronicle of Philanthropy's "The Giveaway" blog as well.

The Stanford Social Innovation Review hosted a webinar on the same topic on December 14. Tim Ogden summarizes this discussion about the Gates Foundation's impact on global social change:

The Gates Foundation needs to become more transparent, faster. It needs to provide more insight into how it makes decisions, what factors it considers, how it forms strategies, what it learns, and why it changes directions. This increased transparency is not just for—or even primarily for—those on the outside. It is the best way for the foundation to get the feedback it needs, determine its limitations and blind spots, and hear the wisdom of those outside its domain.

Read his entire post on the SSIR blog.

EVALUATION: Major Problems with the “Christmas Gifts” Aid Program

Lack of Rigorous Methodology: Regrettably, this evaluation had to proceed without the required Randomized Controlled Trial on Christmas Gifts, which failed to be completed as planned. Project managers did a poor job explaining the advantages of RCT participation to the Control Group. Lack of Targeting: The Christmas Gifts aid program was not sufficiently well-targeted to the poor.  Recipients of Christmas Gifts indiscriminately included well-off regions, groups, genders, and individuals.

Lack of Efficient Modalities: The Christmas Gifts appeared to consist largely of in-kind aid.  This contradicts abundant evidence of best practices emphasizing cash transfers as superior to in-kind aid. There was some evidence of #SWEDOW (“Stuff We Don’t Want”) in-kind transfers, the worst possible kind of aid, usually involving fruitcakes.

Lack of Efficient Timing: Contrary to the recommendation that aid consist of an even, predictable flow, the Christmas Gifts program is mostly concentrated on one day, with a few unpredictable lags ranging from a few days (“late deliveries”) to months (“handmade gifts”).

Lack of Net Flows:  Evaluators found Christmas Gift recipients engaged in behavior that frustrated the aid program, with Recipients acting as Donors to their own Donors, reducing their own net aid intake. They explained their counterproductive behavior with non-standard concepts such as “Tis more bless’d to give than to receive.”

Merry Christmas

from the  NYU Development Research Institute

PUBLICATION: Dignity and Development

What do dignity and liberty have to do with institutional outcomes on development? DRI Post-doctoral Fellow Claudia Williamson publishes in the Journal of  Socio-Economics:

This paper explores how expanding the notion of informal institutions in the broader institutional framework provides a more complete explanation for development. Specifically, I incorporate McCloskey’s notion of ‘dignity and liberty’ as part of the institutional nexus. By doing so, a richer explanation and understanding of the importance of institutions in explaining different economic outcomes is offered. Focusing on bourgeois dignity offers a precise mechanism to explain how institutions matter to support economic growth. In addition, analyzing the changing attitudes towards the bourgeoisie provides a specific example of mechanisms that can lead to institutional change.

She concludes:

As such, we arrive at two main conclusions: 1) dignity must be grounded in liberty, and 2) economic exchange as a result of underlying liberties leads to dignifying the bourgeoisie. This suggests that by moving towards freer trade, poor countries today will reap the traditional benefits of free trade, but it might also set in motion a cycle for more liberties and institutional change.

WORKING PAPER: Foreign Aid's Amplification Effect on Political Institutions

Does foreign aid encourage democracy in recipient countries, or does it strengthen their dictators instead? These have long been the contradictory predictions of two competing hypotheses in the aid debate, but a new DRI working paper by Nabamita Dutta, Peter T. Leeson and DRI Postdoctoral Fellow Claudia Williamson suggests that in reality neither prediction captures the entire picture:

This paper offers a third hypothesis about how aid affects recipients’ political institutions that we call the “amplification effect.” We argue that foreign aid has neither the power to make dictatorships more democratic nor to make democracies more dictatorial. It only amplifies recipients’ existing political institutions. We investigate this hypothesis using panel data for 124 countries between 1960 and 2009. Our findings support the amplification effect. Aid strengthens democracy in already democratic countries and dictatorship in already dictatorial regimes. It doesn’t alter the trajectory of recipients’ political institutions.

The amplification effect of aid means, the authors suggest, that both competing hypotheses ascribe too much power to foreign assistance. Aid doesn't alter the institutional trajectory of any country; it makes democracies more democratic, and autocracies more dictatorial. So aid given for the "purposes of democratizing the dictatorial developing world may not only fail,"  they write, "but may actually cause harm."

What could this mean for the real purpose of aid -- economic growth and development?

To the extent that because of their stronger constraints on executive power, democracies tend to pursue better economic policies than dictatorships, when democracies receive foreign aid they become more democratic, leading to the adoption of better policies, which in turn leads to higher economic growth. Conversely, when dictatorships receive aid they become more dictatorial, preventing the adoption of better policies, which in turn prevents increases in economic growth.

Read the paper.

WORKING PAPER: Ethnicity and Conflict: An Empirical Study

Everyone has heard that ethnic divisions can lead to conflict, but is this empirically true? Moreover, how exactly might ethnicity matter during conflict? A new DRI Working Paper by Joan Esteban, Laura Mayoral and DRI Affiliated Faculty Debraj Ray study the issue in past conflicts across three measures: ethnic polarization, ethnic fractionalization and the level of cohesion within the group. From the abstract:

This paper examines the impact of ethnic divisions on con ict. The empirical specication is informed by a theoretical model of conflict (Esteban and Ray, 2011) in which equilibrium conflict is related to just three distributional indices of diversity: ethnic polarization, ethnic fractionalization, and a Greenberg-Gini index constructed across ethnic groups. Our empirical findings verify that these distributional measures are significant correlates of conflict. The underlying theory permits us to use these results to make inferences about the relative importance of public goods in conflict, as well as the extent of within-group cohesion in conflictual activity. These effects are further strengthened as we introduce country-specic measures of group cohesion and the relative importance of public goods, and combine them with the distributional measures exactly as specied by the theory.

They find that all three specifications matter for conflict:

The main result of this paper is that polarization | using linguistic distances | has a large and highly signicant impact on conflict across a number of different specifications. By and large, though with somewhat lesser consistency, this is also true of fractionalization. These two findings suggest that public and private components of conflict are generally both present, and that group cohesion is present during conflict. The numerical effects of the two measures are also quite similar and strong. For instance, moving polarization from the 20th percentile to the 80th percentile, holding all other variables at their means, approximately doubles the chances of conflict, and the same is true of fractionalization.

Read the paper.

Read about the theoretical model of conflict.

PUBLICATIONS: The Climate and Civil War Relationship

A series of recent papers by Marshall Burke, John Dykema, David Lobell, Edward Miguel and DRI Adjunct Faculty Shanker Satyanath documented evidence that warming temperatures caused by climate change increase the risk of civil war in Africa. The authors first established this connection in a published 2009 study, finding that warmer-than-average temperatures were linked to large increases in civil war in Africa between 1981 - 2002, with grave implications for the future:

We find strong historical linkages between civil war and temperature in Africa, with warmer years leading to significant increases in the likelihood of war. When combined with climate model projections of future temperature trends, this historical response to temperature suggests a roughly 54% increase in armed conflict incidence by 2030, or an additional 393,000 battle deaths if future wars are as deadly as recent wars. Our results suggest an urgent need to reform African governments’ and foreign aid donors’ policies to deal with rising temperatures.

Their results were challenged by Buhag (2010), who argued the findings were not robust as they relied on an "unorthodox" understanding of civil war, on "methodological fixes" and on the specific time period in question. In both an open letter to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and in a new DRI working paper, Burke et al. dispute this assertion:

Buhaug’s dubious econometric choices in many of his specifications – including his decision not to control for country fixed effects or deal adequately with time trends in many specifications, or his willingness include endogenous regressors that bias all of his coefficients – further call into question his results. This of course does not imply that climate is solely “to blame” for African civil wars, as Buhaug’s provocative title would suggest that we are arguing. Rather it implies that during a particularly violent recent period in African history, variation in climate was a significant contributor to the incidence of large, destructive civil wars. We believe that this relationship is both robust and of significant interest to policy-makers tasked with reducing the incidence or impact of future conflicts.

The relationship between civil war and climate change still holds, in other words, even with alternatives measures. The authors do note, however, that this relationship has been considerably weaker in the past decade, a period of unprecedentedly high African growth and relative peace.

Read the original study on conflict and climate change here.

Read the letter to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences here.

Read the latest working paper here.

WORKING PAPER: Understanding Transitory Rainfall Shocks, Economic Growth and Civil Conflict

Leaving aside these data and econometric issues, Ciccone’s surprising results do not survive obvious robustness checks.

Edward Miguel and DRI Affiliated Faculty Shankar Satyanath rebut Antonio Ciccone's (2010) assertion  that higher rainfall levels are, in fact, linked to more conflict -- a rejection of the Miguel, Satyanath and Serengeti (2004) conclusion that higher rainfall is associated with less conflict and more economic growth. But Ciccone's methods might have had some very fundamental errors:

Miguel, Satyanath and Sergenti (2004) use rainfall variation as an instrument to show that economic growth is negatively related to civil conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. In the reduced form regression they find that higher rainfall is associated with less conflict. Ciccone (2010) claims that this conclusion is ‘erroneous’ and argues that higher rainfall levels are actually linked to more conflict. In this paper we show that the results in Ciccone’s paper are based on incorrect STATA code, outdated conflict data, a weak first stage regression and a questionable application of the GMM estimator. Leaving aside these data and econometric issues, Ciccone’s surprising results do not survive obvious robustness checks. We therefore conclude that Ciccone’s main claims are largely incorrect and reconfirm the original result by Miguel, Satyanath and Sergenti (2004), finding that adverse economic growth shocks, driven by falling rainfall, increases the likelihood of civil conflict in sub-Saharan Africa.

Read the paper.

ARTICLE: Think tanks help alter public opinion

DRI postdoctoral fellow Claudia Williamson writes for The Oklahoman on December 9, 2011:

Voters aren't particularly thankful for government right now. According to Gallup, congressional job approval is tied for an all-time record low of just 13 percent.

Voter frustration stems from the fact that things at the federal level never seem to change; national debt grows while corporations get taxpayer handouts. But what about policy groups trying to improve government at the state or local level, such as the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs?

Research I recently completed with colleagues at George Mason and Duquesne universities suggests these think tanks have made some strides in changing the public's mind, but that their legislative impact is limited.

State-based think tanks are nonprofit research organizations that operate with two goals: educating the citizenry and affecting public policy. We looked at think tanks whose policy preferences included reducing the role of government and increasing the role of private markets.

Unfortunately, these groups don't appear to have a direct impact on policy. We analyzed data sets for each state between 1997 and 2010 and found little evidence that market-oriented think tanks lead to more pro-market policies such as lower tax rates or less government spending.

Evidence shows that, unlike think tanks, political lobby groups influence state public policy. For example, union lobbyist spending leads to more government employees and higher government wages. This finding may reflect the fact that lobby groups are legally permitted to advocate directly for policy changes. Think tanks are not. In other words, they don't need to engage the public to secure desired policy outcomes. Lobbying dollars trump public opinion.

Discouraging as this might be for advocates of better and smaller government, here is some good news: Spending and investment on the part of free-market think tanks between 1997 and 2002 led to an increase in pro-market attitudes between 2003 and 2008. These think tanks were particularly effective in shifting public opinion on issues regarding welfare policies and government intervention into the market.

For example, the OCPA increased its expenditures from $50 to almost $300 per thousand state residents over the past 13 years. During this time, the policy environment improved slightly from a free-market perspective. However, state employee wages also increased, as did government expenditures for education and welfare.

Yet the council's spending wasn't a complete waste; public opinion in the state regarding markets in general and welfare spending in particular shifted toward less government intervention.

The way any policy group potentially influences economic policy is by shifting ideology. But translating shifting attitudes into policy change takes time — perhaps decades — in sharp contrast to lobbying efforts that can have an immediate political impact.

These results suggest policy groups operate via the channel of ideas while lobbyist groups go directly to the source: politicians. Still, free-market advocates have reason to hope. Politicians ultimately respond to public opinion. And though free-market think tanks might not be winning legislative battles, they are winning a longer war of public opinion.

Read more on the Oklahoman

Read the working paper "Think Tanks"

INTERVIEW: Raquel Fernández in Conversation with The Straddler

The Straddler interviews Raquel Fernandez, Professor of Economics and a DRI affiliated faculty member, on culture's impact on economic outcomes:

Economists essentially have a sophisticated lack of understanding of economics, especially macroeconomics. I know it sounds ridiculous. But the reason why I tell people they should study economics is not so they’ll know something at the end—because I don’t think we know much—but because we’re good at thinking. Economics teaches you to think things through. What you see a lot of times in economics is disdain for other's lack of thinking. You have to think about the ramifications of policies in the short run, the medium run, and the long run. Economists think they’re good at doing that, but they’re good at doing that in the sense that they can write down a model that will help them think about it—not in terms of empirically knowing what the answers are. And we have gotten so enamored of thinking things through that the fact that we don’t know anything needs to bother us more. So, yes, it’s true that the average guy on the street doesn’t understand economics, and it’s also true that we don’t understand economics. We just have a more sophisticated lack of understanding than the guy on the street.

Read more on The Straddler.

UPDATE: The Price of Cocoa, Delivered to Your Phone

With mobile phones achieving an estimated 80% penetration rate in Ghana, can cellular technology help make agricultural markets more efficient? Could providing market information to farmers alleviate information asymmetries between farmers and traders?

One idea being explored in Ghana is a text message-based market information system, which would provide automatic and personalized price alerts for agricultural commodities and buy and sell offers directly through SMS. At the Center for Technology and Economic Development (CTED), an Abu Dhabi-based NYU organization affiliated with DRI, Professor Yaw Nyarko and a team of graduate students are evaluating the effect of such a system set up by Esoko, a private company based in Accra, on the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in rural Ghana. The goal of the study, designed as a randomized controlled trial, is to see whether providing farmers with market information leads to fundamental changes in the bargaining process between farmers and traders.

Last summer, the team conducted a baseline survey of 1,000 farmers in nearly 100 communities in the Northern Volta region of Ghana, asking them what crops they were planting and bringing to the market, how the bargaining process with the traders works, and how often they use cell phones. The farmers were then randomly divided into two groups – a treatment and a control group of roughly the same size.

In early October, the farmers in the treatment group were given training and access to the Esoko technology, including regular messages regarding crop prices. Next summer, farmers from both the treatment and the control groups will again be given the same survey. The team will rely on the baseline and annual follow-up surveys to document the changes in the bargaining process and in farmers’ marketing behavior brought about by the Esoko text messages.  After the follow-up survey in July 2012, the farmers in the control group will also be offered free training and access to the Esoko technology.

The study will shed light on how mobile phones can increase the efficiency of agricultural markets and improve the livelihoods of farmers in the developing world.

UPDATE: NYU Students, Come Work for DRI

DRI is accepting applications from current NYU students for the following four part-time positions: EDIT: We are now only accepting applications for the Program Assistant position.

Program Assistant, NYU Africa House and DRI

See each job description for details and application instructions. We look forward to hearing from you!

ARTICLE: A firewall should be built between USAID the defence department

Professor Easterly writes for the Guardian Poverty Matters blog on November 21, 2011:

US foreign aid programmes should be for poverty relief and should not be taken over by national security interests, abetted by delusions of nation-building.

As the US government budget wars continue, everyone agrees that among the most vulnerable programmes is foreign aid. What is now forgotten is that foreign aid enjoyed strong bipartisan support until quite recently. On 16 March 2002, President George W Bush announced large funding increases for aid, which have indeed been realised across two administrations since. Even former opponents such as Jesse Helms became aid boosters. What happened to destroy that support?

The answer is that the US aid programme was taken over by national security interests, abetted by delusions of nation-building. The US Agency for International Development (USAid) wound up in the most self-destructive position – the unsuccessful cover-up. USAid arguably had little choice, but development intellectuals and celebrity aid advocates did have a choice – and most chose to stay inexcusably silent during the national security takeover of aid. The resultant failures overshadowed notable successes in more traditional aid programmes like health. These disasters and the neglect of more feasible poverty relief failed to sustain the compassionate constituency evident earlier in the decade. Aid can still be saved politically if it now forswears the undoable nation-building dictated by the defence department, and returns to its original mission of poverty relief – a mission both cheaper and more likely to succeed.

Read the full article on the Guardian website.

PUBLICATION: The Rise of Global Governance Indicators

A new paper by DRI affiliated faculty member Kevin Davis and NYU Law colleagues Benedict Kinsbury and Sally Engle Merry takes on the proliferation of global governance indicators like the UN Human Development index and World Bank Ease of Doing Business rankings:

The burgeoning production and use of indicators has not been accompanied by systematic study of and reflection on the implications, possibilities and pitfalls of this practice. As a result, little attention has been paid to questions such as: What social processes surround the creation and use of indicators? How do the conditions of production influence the kinds of knowledge that indicators provide? How does the use of indicators in global governance change the nature of decision-making? How does it affect the distribution of power among and between those who govern and those who are governed?

Theoretically, the authors hypothesize, indicators benefit global decision-makers. First, because the indicators simplify, they reduce the cost of decision-making. Second, decisions based on indicators are expected to be transparent, consistent, and grounded in scientific expertise, which makes the decision appear more authoritative.

But such authority may not always be warranted: the editing process required to turn raw data into easily digestible indicators removes uncertainty and makes the information seem more robust than it is.  At the same time, indicators may deepen existing inequalities, since the creators of indicators are usually powerful global actors from rich countries, and contesting indicators requires deep technical expertise.

The authors conclude:

The rapid growth in the production, use, and influence of indicators in global governance has had effects on forms of decision-making and on the shaping of public knowledge. This technology of global governance can affect the relative power and the identities of those who govern and those who are governed, and can alter patterns and possibilities of accountability. To what extent the reliance on indicators increases transparency and public scrutiny and to what extent it narrows the production of public knowledge to a small elite circle who create indicators are among key questions, with considerable theoretical and policy significance, that require substantial further empirical investigation.

The paper, "Indicators as a Technology of Global Governance" is forthcoming from the Law & Society Review. Ungated version here.

WORKING PAPER: Reestablishing the Income-Democracy Nexus

...[T]he bulk of the evidence favors of a statistical relationship between income and democratization.

Fighting words from DRI Affiliated Faculty Jess Benhabib and co-authors Alejandro Corvalan and Mark Spiegel, who use new data to overturn previous studies (Acemoglu, et al (2001), Easterly and Levine (2003), Rodrik et al (2004)) that showed good democratic institutions cause economic growth, not the other way around.

In this paper, we reexamine the robustness of the income-democracy relationship. We extend the research on this topic in two dimensions: first, we make use of newer income data, which allows for the construction of larger samples with more within-country observations. Second, we concentrate on panel estimation methods that explicitly allow for the fact that the primary measures of democracy are censored with substantial mass at the boundaries, or binary censored variables. Our results show that when one uses both the new income data available and a properly non linear estimator, a statistically significant positive income-democracy relationship is robust to the inclusion of country fixed effects.

Read the paper.

BOOK REVIEW: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Professor Easterly reviews Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow for the Financial Times:

There have been many good books on human rationality and irrationality, but only one masterpiece. That masterpiece is Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Kahneman, a winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, distils a lifetime of research into an encyclopedic coverage of both the surprising miracles and the equally surprising mistakes of our conscious and unconscious thinking. He achieves an even greater miracle by weaving his insights into an engaging narrative that is compulsively readable from beginning to end. My main problem in doing this review was preventing family members and friends from stealing my copy of the book to read it for themselves.

Kahneman presents our thinking process as consisting of two systems. System 1 (Thinking Fast) is unconscious, intuitive and effort-free. System 2 (Thinking Slow) is conscious, uses deductive reasoning and is an awful lot of work. System 2 likes to think it is in charge but it’s really the irrepressible System 1 that runs the show. There is simply too much going on in our lives for System 2 to analyse everything. System 2 has to pick its moments with care; it is “lazy” out of necessity.

Read more on the Financial Times website.