by Mark Weston | Mar 1, 2010 | Africa, Economics and development
When I arrived in Sierra Leone six weeks ago and encountered its friendly people, spectacular beaches, lively nightlife and mysterious traditions, I wondered why the country has so few tourists (in our six weeks we have met a total of three, with three or four other possible but unconfirmed sightings).
It didn’t take long to find out. A nation that should be eager to attract tourists seems to be making systematic efforts to keep them out. If you were trying to make it as difficult as possible for foreigners to visit your country, I could recommend the following measures, which all work brilliantly for Sierra Leone:
– Charge an exorbitant sum for visas (£50 for a month, compared to, say, £10 for three months in Turkey, a much more tourist-friendly destination)
– Make obtaining the visa more complicated than for any of your neighbours by forcing applicants to produce a letter of invitation from a Sierra Leone national
– Encourage customs officials in the airport to be as surly as possible, and fail to punish them for extracting bribes from new arrivals for performing the simplest of procedures
– Build your airport thirty miles away from the capital city, on the opposite side of a giant river mouth, forcing visitors to cross either by helicopter, which regularly crashes, or ferry, which often breaks down or sinks. Make sure, too, that the ferry departure times do not coincide with incoming flights, so that your visitors will have to wait for hours in the burning sun (you will of course already have ensured there is no shade at the dock)
– Allow dozens of hustlers to converge on new arrivals as they exit the airport, giving preference to pickpockets and con merchants
– Refuse to harness the torrential rain in the rainy season to provide water and electricity to visitors at any time of year. This will ensure they cannot take respite from the heat with the help of fans, cold drinks, air-conditioning or showers. It will also mean restaurants and food stores will be unable to refrigerate food, thereby increasing the risk that your visitor will fall sick
– In the event that he does fall sick, make sure you spend none of the billiions of pounds of aid you receive on building effective hospitals or recruiting competent doctors to treat him
– Make your public transport system as slow and uncomfortable as possible, by failing to maintain vehicles so that they break down often, waiting until they are full before departing hours behind schedule, and packing two people into seats designed for one
– Enhance the effect of the above by allowing roads paid for by foreign donors to deteriorate and then failing to fill in the hundreds of resultant potholes
– Should a tourist somehow manage to shrug off these obstacles and apply for a visa extension (you have no psychiatric hospitals to house him, of course), redouble your efforts to force him out. To do this, hire the least friendly, most corrupt people to work in your immigration department. Extort money from your visitor for a visa extension that is officially free, then smile smugly at his distress
– As a final punishment for having the cheek to visit your country despite all your efforts to stop him, charge the departing, browbeaten tourist a £50 airport tax
NB: For foreign investors, multiply your efforts tenfold.
by David Steven | Mar 1, 2010 | Africa
Xavier Sala-i-Martin and Maxim Pinkovskiy today published a working paper today that drops the following bombshell (here’s a free version):
Our main conclusion is that Africa is reducing poverty, and doing it much faster than we thought. The growth from the period 1995-2006, far from benefiting only the elites, has been sufficiently widely spread that both total African inequality and African within-country inequality actually declined over this period. In particular, the speed at which Africa has reduced poverty since 1995 puts it on track to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty relative to 1990 by 2015 on time or, at worst, a couple of years late. If Congo-Zaire converges to Africa once it is stabilized, the MDG will be achieved by 2012, three years before the target date. These results are qualitatively robust to changes in our methodology, including using different data sources and assumptions for what happens to inequality when inequality data is not available.
Not much reaction yet – but I’m intrigued to see what other economists are going to make of their work…
Update: Xavier Sala-i-Martin has a wonderfully crazy Columbia University website – he likes FC Barcelona, Salvador Dali and Beavis and Butthead.
Update II: These Economist articles from 2004 (one, two) offer useful background. The crux of the matter seems to be that Sala-i-Martin and Pinkovskiy use GDP to measure poverty (working out distribution of income from household surveys) – the World Bank’s figures are derived directly from the surveys themselves.
by David Steven | Mar 1, 2010 | Europe and Central Asia, Influence and networks, UK
It’s taken as a given here in the UK that Brits wield little influence in Europe. But apparently – not. According to the Guardian, an FCO-led coup is under way:
Germany is planning to stop what it sees as a British campaign to dominate European foreign policy-making under Lady Catherine Ashton, the Guardian can disclose.
Amid growing criticism across the EU of the performance of Baroness Ashton of Upholland, the EU’s new high representative for foreign and security policy, Berlin and Paris are alarmed at the prominence of British officials in the new EU diplomatic service being formed under Ashton.
A confidential German foreign ministry document analysing the creation of the EU’s new diplomatic service, seen by the Guardian, has concluded that Britain has grabbed an “excessive” and “over-proportionate” role…
The French contend that the inexperienced Ashton is being schooled in policy-making by the Foreign Office. Diplomats and officials in Brussels also see Britain’s hand in one of Ashton’s first appointments, made last week. She named Vygaudas Ušackas, a former Lithuanian foreign minister and ambassador in London, as the EU’s special envoy to Afghanistan. He was widely seen as the UK’s favoured contender after Britain withdrew its own candidate because it secured the post of Nato envoy in Kabul.
The Germans are also increasingly unhappy at what they see as the erosion of their influence and being cut out of decision-taking.
by Alex Evans | Mar 1, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity
While we’re on the subject of comings and goings on India’s climate team, worth noting that the Indian press is full of talk of an epic fallout between India’s Environment Minister, Jairam Ramesh, and Shyam Saran, the Indian PM’s Special Envoy on Climate Change – who’s just quit. So what’s the fight about? Over to the Times of India:
Indian negotiators are up in arms against minister of state for environment and forest Jairam Ramesh commissioning a study and proposing a meeting of experts that could redefine India’s fundamental principle of `per capita emissions’ norm while negotiating how the burden of reducing greenhouse gases is shared.
The per capita norm, embodied in the Kyoto protocol, has been backed by successive governments and reiterated by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself. Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, the seniormost Indian negotiator and member of the PM’s council on climate change told TOI: “I am deeply concerned that the per capita equity approach, which provides the foundation for India’s position on climate change negotiations, is being questioned at the level of minister of state (Jairam Ramesh).”
The study that Ramesh is commissioning is to be undertaken by Arvind Subramanian – formerly at the IMF, now at CGD and the Peterson Institute. The reason for the consternation, according to the TOI, is that Subramanian’s published work rebuts the idea of per capita equity – and a quick web search confirms that a piece he co-authored with CGD’s director Nancy Birdsall in December last year (summary here) does indeed implicitly rebut “equality of greenhouse gas emissions per capita as a desirable long run objective”. Instead, it argues for “industrial countries [to] drop their demand that developing countries commit now to binding emissions targets”, and focus instead on improving access to energy for the poor – although his paper does also call for sharp improvements in emerging economies’ carbon efficiency.
All this has now become a political issue in India. The opposition BJP has picked up on the issue:
On Saturday, BJP alleged that Saran had to go because of his resistance to UPA government’s bid to dilute the country’s stand in climate change negotiations, attracting allegation of irresponsibility from the Congress. The BJP attributed Saran’s departure to his reservations against environment minister Jairam Ramesh’s attempt to “weaken” India’s negotiating stance on emission cuts.
Meanwhile Ramesh is trying to cast himself as the victim in all this, as in this piece in The Hindu on Thursday:
Union Minister of State for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh has cast himself as a lonely crusader for the environmental cause within the government, with no support from any quarter except the Prime Minister and the UPA chairperson. In an interaction with journalists on Wednesday, hours before a meeting called by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to iron out differences within the Cabinet over Bt brinjal, Mr. Ramesh said he had “zero” friends in the government.
“I have no friends, only the Prime Minister supports me in the Cabinet… At times I feel I am fighting a lonely battle. The odds are tremendous against anyone trying to do anything right and rational when it comes to the environment and forests,” he said, using the words ‘thankless’ and ‘friendless’ to describe his job.
So is Ramesh really ‘selling out’? (more…)
by David Steven | Mar 1, 2010 | Economics and development, Europe and Central Asia
According to the FT, the German government is proud that it is keeping pay down in both the public and private sectors, and hopes this will provide an example to less prudent Eurozone economies.
But surely Greece, Italy, Spain and Ireland (and the UK as well) would prefer Germany to push wages up – putting more money in the pockets of German consumers and helping reduce Europe’s trade balances?
