Dambisa Moyo

Editors’ Note: This will be the last Aid Watch post until Monday after the holiday weekend. Happy Thanksgiving! Which attribute of an aid project makes it more likely to succeed: 1) It will have rigorous evaluation based on some output indicators to make sure it’s working, OR 2) It is staffed by people who really, really want it to succeed? Sister Shewaye Alemu, Area Director for Addis Ababa, introduces the staff of Marie Stopes This question came out of a… - Dambisa Moyo

Bono thanks Commission chairman Nelson Mandela for the Report An expert commission of African leaders today announced their plan for comprehensive reform of music band U2. Saying that U2’s rock had lost touch with its African roots, the commission called for urgent measures to halt U2’s slide towards impending crisis. “Our youth today are imperiled by low quality music,” said Commission chairman Nelson Mandela. “We will be lending African musicians to U2 to try to refurbish their… - Dambisa Moyo

After sending an email to Constance Hamilton, Deputy Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Africa, we received the following email in response: Thank you, Mr. Easterly, for your email. We of course, want to have as many sub-Saharan African countries as possible be eligible for AGOA benefits. We are working with all the countries, including Madagascar – to encourage their governments to abide by the AGOA eligibility criteria, particularly rule of law. There has been some recent progress amongst the Malagasy actors… - Dambisa Moyo

Aid Watch has a stubborn attachment to excellent but possibly hopeless causes… Madagascar, a country we first blogged about in June and then again in August, may be down to its last few days as regards AGOA, the US preference program that underpins about 50 percent of the country’s $500 million textile industry.  Because of the change of government that took place in Madagascar in March, the US has been steadily threatening to suspend its AGOA eligibility… - Dambisa Moyo

Is Ethiopia having a famine? As often is the case, there are two forces pulling in opposite directions that make it hard to answer the question. On the one hand, the authoritarian government wants to cover up any famine to mute criticism of its performance.  Ethiopia is due for elections next year, and the government is determined not to go the way of previous regimes toppled in part because of anger at famines in the 1970s… - Dambisa Moyo

The Millennium Challenge Corporation was created in 2004 to be a different kind of aid agency, a model that would correct the mistakes of other development agencies and put lessons gleaned from decades of experience into practice. Belief in country ownership—the widely-accepted idea that country-led development is critical to the success of sustainable development—was one of MCC’s founding principles. At an event this fall the acting CEO said, “Country ownership is not just a catchphrase at… - Dambisa Moyo

…as well as Poor. I don’t dispute, and I do care very much about changing, the well known material and health deprivation in Africa. But Life doesn’t have only one dimension. These thoughts were prompted by a recent seven-day journey on foot through the highlands of North Wollo, Ethiopia.[1] Going through a district with no roads, no electricity, no wheeled vehicles, no source of energy other than animal and human power, threshing and winnowing grain with… - Dambisa Moyo

With a USAID administrator at long last named and awaiting confirmation, some of pieces of the overall US development strategy should finally begin falling into place. Will we then get some answers on what the heck is going on with US aid in Pakistan? Those of you who follow the region know that in October, Congress moved to triple current levels of non-military aid to Pakistan, approving a package for $7.5 billion over the next five years.… - Dambisa Moyo

This post is by Adam Martin, a post-doctoral fellow at DRI. A couple months ago, Bill addressed the imperial origins of state-led development, arguing that economic development was a substitute for racism as a rationalization of empire. I think it’s worthwhile to delve a bit further into the intellectual and social context in which these ideas were put forward. Why bother? Because ideas matter for policy. There are good, hard-nosed reasons for believing that rationales are not mere epiphenomena… - Dambisa Moyo

…but after months of delay, the Obama administration has finally named a nominee for the position of USAID administrator. The Center for Global Development’s Sheila Herrling was among the first to mention Shah as a last minute candidate: [R]ecent activity on our poll shows an unusual flurry of write-ins for Raj Shah, currently serving as Undersecretary for Research, Education and Economics at USDA.   Could this be the final twist of fate? Politico picked up the gossip on Monday and added some… - Dambisa Moyo

The straight horizontal line across Nigeria at latitude 7˚10' divided it into two colonies, Northern and Southern, in 1899 In colonial Nigeria in the last years of the 19th century, a strange quirk of history led the British rulers to draw an arbitrary boundary line along the 7˚10′ N line of latitude, separating the population into two separate administrative districts. Below the line, the colonial government raised money by levying taxes on imported alcohol and other goods… - Dambisa Moyo

Monkeys Do Markets In a recent experiment, a team of scientists trained a vervet monkey to open a container of apples, a task no other monkey in her group could do. She was well-compensated for this service by the other monkeys, who began to spend a lot of time grooming her (apparently, grooming is the monkey unit of exchange). Then, the scientists trained another monkey in the group to get the apples, and the “price” for… - Dambisa Moyo

Today’s guest blogger, Tim Ogden, is the editor-in-chief of Philanthropy Action. Bill Easterly has been a frequent critic of the rights-based approach to development, most recently in his article in the FT focusing on the “right to health.” For as long as I’ve known about the rights-based approach I’ve agreed with him. Recently, though, I’ve seen the light. For those unfamiliar with the rights-based approach to development, it starts with defining inalienable human rights—and then seeks to ensure… - Dambisa Moyo

This post is by Claudia Williamson, a post-doctoral fellow at DRI. P.T. Bauer was a brilliant development economist who began writing in the early 1970s, when most of his profession favored central planning and government solutions.  Bauer preferred bottom-up solutions and focused on the importance of institutions to align incentives and provide information to promote social cooperation and economic growth. Relying on basic economic principles and logic, Bauer made bold arguments that are surprisingly relevant today. Bauer said:… - Dambisa Moyo

In next week’s New York Review of Books, Korean development economist Ha-Joon Chang responds to a review of his new book, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. Chang defends his argument that the majority of rich nations today benefited from infant industry protection, and stands by his analysis that developing countries under an interventionist regime grew faster than those with neoliberal policies, looking at the period from 1980 to 2000. Pointing  to… - Dambisa Moyo

Hello, aid watchers. I am Africa-bound and will go off the Internet for the next 2 weeks (out of choice, not technological constraints). Laura will be running the blog in my absence. When I come back I will tell you about any experiences of interest. Maybe when I come back I will also wearily comment on the latest aid-and-growth regression paper, the 1 millionth attempt to resolve the relationship in a cross-country growth regression literature that is… - Dambisa Moyo