by Claire Melamed | May 12, 2011 | Economics and development
This post appeared on the Guardian’s Poverty Matters blog yesterday. See the original for some insightful comments.
A recent survey asking people in Sub-Saharan Africa to rank different development objectives found that providing jobs for young people was considered more important than reducing maternal mortality, providing universal primary education, or reducing the spread of malaria. The International Labour Organization estimates that 440 million new jobs will need to be created in the next 10 years, to keep pace with population growth.
While developing country governments have of course been long aware of this issue, there are signs that donors are waking up to it too.
DFID’s Bilateral Aid review promised that the UK’s aid money would create just over 1 million jobs in 10 countries or regions, including 300,000 in South Africa, 200,000 in Afghanistan, and 144,000 in Ghana. But thinking on how this might be done is somewhat hazy .
There is optimism that improving the ‘investment climate’ might help, and that interventions such as improving infrastructure or providing training will also play a role. But will this be enough? ODI has pored over the evidence and distilled country studies into five lessons for policy-makers trying to boost jobs in developing countries.
1. Don’t assume that growth will automatically create jobs
Policies like ‘improving the investment climate’ are assumed to help economic growth, which, it is again assumed, will generate jobs. If only it was that simple. In India, a magnet for foreign investment in recent years, each 1 percent increase in growth increases employment by a mere 0.15 percent. This phenomenon of ‘jobless growth’ stalks countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. So growth policy has to be more nuanced – how and where will growth actually increase jobs?
2. Don’t assume that jobs will automatically reduce poverty
There’s evidence that even when people are in work, they’re not necessarily earning enough to reduce poverty – around 4 in 10 workers worldwide live below $2 a day. Again turning to India, it’s the jobs which pay the least and are most insecure that have been increasing the fastest. So policy-makers have to focus not just on numbers of jobs, but on whether they offer the security and pay that allow people to escape poverty.
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by Alex Evans | May 11, 2011 | Climate and resource scarcity, Influence and networks
With no prospect of a serious global climate deal any time soon, what’s likely to be the main driver of change on climate politics? I think there are basically five main storylines on this, each with their own tribes of adherents.
1) The ‘one last push’ tribe. This tribe argues that nothing short of a global deal based on binding targets and timetables will cut the mustard. But it also doesn’t think that ‘big bang’ approaches can work either. So by default it argues for what you might call a ‘muscular incrementalism’ based on the steady, hard work of assembling political coalitions to make progress and open up political space, one step at a time. Membership of this tribe remains the default among EU governments; the UK’s John Ashton is an articulate proponent of this view.
2) The ‘technology competition’ tribe. This lot reckon that the main driver of change will be countries competing with each other to secure shares of massive future clean technology markets. Look at the fact that the US is taking China to the WTO for renewable energy subsidies, they say: US competitiveness concerns will drive development of its low carbon sector in a way environmental policy never could. The Breakthrough Institute and IPPR’s Political Climate blog are good examples of this view.
3) The ‘tooling up for a zero sum world’ tribe. This tribe – widespread among militaries and national security communities – thinks climate change is a problem, but don’t focus much on how to tackle it. Instead, they’re focused on how to cope with a world of climate impacts and intensifying competition for scarce resources like oil, land, food and water. That focus could help to boost low carbon technologies, when they contribute to energy independence or other national security goals. But equally, it could also drive heavy investment in less sustainable options – like tar sands, shale gas, 1st generation biofuel or liquids from coal.
4) The ‘new designs for living’ tribe. This crowd often don’t have much faith in the capacity of policy elites to get to grips with climate change; instead, they reckon the changes that matter will come from the bottom up – think permaculture and small scale renewables. This tribe draws together people focused on climate change with those more focused on peak oil, but their basic approach is pretty similar. The transition towns folk are a great example.
5) The ‘using shocks intelligently’ tribe. Finally, I think we’re seeing the beginnings of a tribe that seek to deal with the lack of political space for action on climate by being ready for shocks – extreme weather events etc. – and using the political windows of opportunity that open up (usually suddenly and only briefly) in their wake. I’ve been tending towards this theory of change for a while now, as it’s the only way I can see that we’ll get the political space for the comprehensive global approach that I think is needed; Paul Gilding’s book The Great Disruption
is also very much in this space.
These tribes aren’t mutually exclusive, and I think the more we can draw from all of them, the better. But I also think it’s useful if, in debates about where climate policy should go next, we’re also open about our assumptions on what will make change happen.
by Claire Melamed | May 10, 2011 | Economics and development
So... I wanted a picture for this blog but couldn't find anything to fully express the geekiness of what follows. Here's a nice picture of some cliffs instead.
There’s an iron rule of development research which says that when two or more researchers are gathered together at some point they’ll start complaining about how awful the data is. This is quite true. But of course it doesn’t stop any of us who do research from expounding our insights about poverty and inequality with great certainty. And the strange thing is that we know least about the things that we talk about most.
Usually when we talk about poverty and inequality we’re talking about incomes. And what do we know about incomes? Well, the gold standard is probably the World Bank’s Living Standards Measurement survey. It’s wonderful geek-fodder: huge amounts of information on incomes, assets, educational outcomes etc etc, all disaggregated for regions and gender and everything. But…..only five countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have LSMS surveys which include income data available on the Bank’s website. Of which only two are after 2000. This is perhaps not surprising – these surveys are expensive and costs millions of dollars to do properly.
It’s not quite as bad as it first looks. Another 30 countries have other surveys done after 2000 which measure what households earn or what they spend, all collected in one place by the quite brilliant International Household Survey Network. It’s data from all these surveys which are crunched together by the World Bank and used to compile the World Development Indicators and the PovCal Net database. These aren’t all exactly the same – some ask about income, some about how much households spend, but it’s possible to add them together. Together, they cover 82% of the population of Sub-Saharan Africa. Which is not bad but not great. It’s rather like making confident assertions about poverty and inequality in the European Union without any data on the UK, Greece, Switzerland or Sweden.
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by Andy Sumner | May 9, 2011 | Africa, Conflict and security, Economics and development, Global system, Middle East and North Africa
Yes says a new report from the African Development Bank which says one in three (34%) or 313m of Africa’s nearly 1bn people are now middle class (living on $2-$20/day) – a jump from 27% and about 200m in size in 2000 – after several decades without much change.
A similar report by the Asian Development Bank last year found something similar in the data, noting more than half (56%) of people in developing Asia live at the $2-$20/day level (all of this is PPP US$ by the way).
This is all good news. However, is someone living on just over $2/day ‘middle class’? $2 is the average poverty line for developing countries meaning you’re poor or middle class but what about in between? Or is there a different group altogether – those who voted for Lula in Brazil or took to the streets in the Middle East?
The Africa report notes: 62% live under $2/day and 34% of people live on $2-$20/day (of which two-thirds of these live in the $2-$4/day range or are in ‘the floating class’ in the report) and 5% live on more than $20/day.
Interestingly, Tunisia and Egypt were high up in the countries in Africa by % citizens in the middle class of $4-$20/day and also top for fewest poor people under $1.25/day tho both have surprisingly high non-monetary poverty).
Does this mean the middle classes are likely to speed up development by pushing harder for political and economic change as Foreign Policy argued?
Nancy Birdsall at CGD and myself have been working on a new idea – that there is a new group emerging in many developing countries that ought to be called the “catalytic class’ – a group that is not as secure or well-off as the Western middle class but not poor either.
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by David Steven | May 9, 2011 | Economics and development, South Asia
The new UN population projections were published to great fanfare last week, with much of the coverage focusing on a significant increase in overall estimates from the 2008 figures.
Pakistan, however, bucked the overall trend. It is now projected to have 60 million fewer people at mid-century, with its population peaking at 283 million in 2075. In the 2008 data, it was projected to hit that level by 2035 – a striking difference of 40 years.
What gives? I have absolutely no idea. Pakistan has not had a census since 1998. As a result, much of the country’s data is based on extremely ropey projections over a nearly 15 year period.
But somehow the United Nations has managed to make significant changes to its data for Pakistan (oddly population figures revised downwards all the way back to 1950). What gives?
This post appeared on the Guardian’s Poverty Matters blog yesterday. See the original for some insightful comments. 