by Alex Evans | Jan 9, 2008 | Economics and development
Lawrence Haddad, the thoughtful Director of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, has published a list of eight events and trends to watch out for in 2008: here it is. All eight are interesting, but none more so than Haddad’s discussion of a largely unnoticed event last year: the World Bank’s quiet revision of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) estimates for developing countries.
The new calculations involved big downward revisions for China, India and Brazil GDP after PPP is factored in. In Africa, thirteen countries were revised upwards – and thirty three downwards. According to Haddad, the new estimates will “significantly increase the estimates of those living under a dollar a day in Africa, Asia and Latin America”. While the new figures don’t contradict the basic reality of strong economic growth in emerging economies, Haddad notes that they do…
1. accentuate inter-country estimates of inequality (the rich country GDP estimates were largely unchanged), thus changing the dynamic of discussions around climate and trade.
2. force us to question our assumptions about the elasticity of poverty reduction with respect to economic growth. Has it changed in the last 5 years? This is a key question to be answered given the new development cooperation focus on various forms of economic growth.
3. force us to think about the newly increased number of poor within China and India – are they really living in the midst of a sea with a rising tide that will lift them out of poverty or are they caught in an inequality trap that is every bit as unforgiving as the traps in which Paul Collier’s bottom billion are caught?
If one thing’s missing for me on Haddad’s list, it’s scarcity trends. Rising oil prices and rising food prices are already causing real problems for developing countries that rely on imports of fuel or food – c.f. the IEA’s pronouncement between Christmas and new year that oil prices alone have already offset increased aid and debt relief to African non-oil producers over the last three years.
A pronounced downturn in the US and other western economies may ease the pressure in the shorter term – but the long term trends still look tough for developing countries. As I argued in my presentation last year to the PM’s Strategy Unit on international implications of rising food prices, donors need to pay a lot more attention to scarcity – and resilience to scarcity shocks.
by Alex Evans | Nov 15, 2007 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, UK
Gordon Brown’s first foreign policy speech, delivered on Monday evening at Mansion House, was nicely drafted, well argued and competently delivered. Its central argument: that “international institutions built [in 1945] for just 50 sheltered economies in what became a bipolar world … are not fit for purpose in an interdependent world of 200 states where global flows of commerce, people and ideas defy borders”.
Although virtually all media coverage of the speech – Times, BBC, PA, Independent, Telegraph, New York Times, Melanie Phillips in predictable form in the Spectator, Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian – led exclusively either on Iran or on the relative weight accorded to the UK’s relationship with US and EU, this was really a speech about multilateral reform. In particular, it was about reforming international institutions to equip them to deal with six new trends: “failed states and rogue states”; terrorism; global flows of capital, goods and services; the emergence of China and India; climate change; and “a new global competition for natural resources”, especially energy.
(It’s interesting, by the way, that he emphasised natural resource scarcity, rather than just energy security on its own. To give credit where it’s due, Brown spotted that agenda well before most of his peers: the Treasury’s December 2004 paper on long term economic challenges for the UK, for instance, made the same point. It’s also very interesting that Brown has instructed the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit to undertake a review of the UK’s food security, as reported in the Observer last weekend. I’m doing a presentation for the Strategy Unit team in a couple of weeks’ time, which I’ll post here once I’ve written it.)
But as the New Statesman put it pithily in their leader this week, the real question for Gordon Brown’s multilateral reform agenda is “how will he succeed when others have failed?”.
Take, for instance, what he had to say on conflict in fragile states, where there was a strong call for moving from a reactive to a preventive stance on conflict, and for “the first internationally agreed procedures to prevent breakdowns of states and societies”. Fine in principle – but hard to see how Brown will make much headway on this given that moves in 2005 and 2006 to arm the new UN Peacebuilding Commission with a prevention mandate quickly foundered in the face of ferocious developing country opposition.
Similarly, there was a proposal for “Security Council peacekeeping resolutions and UN Envoys [to] make stablisation, reconstruction and development an equal priority”. Again, this was a little unclear: no mention of the Peacebuilding Commission here either, or of the fact that one area where the UN has actually got much better is in integrated mission planning.
But the really key section was the last one, on renewing multilateralism at the global level, where Brown argued the need to “judge success not by the number of initiatives in conference halls but by practical action for change”, and that “we need fewer rather than more international bureaucracies”. So, he went on, we need:
- A less introspective EU – “outward looking, open, internationalist, able to effectively respond both through internal reform and external action to the economic, security and environmental imperatives of globalisation”;
- Security Council reform – where Brown noted that “permanent members do not include Japan, India, Brazil, Germany, or any African country”;
- A broader G8 “to encompass the influential emerging economies now outside but that account for more than a third of the world’s economic output”;
- A “new coalition of democracies and civic societies joining together as allies for progress, with leaders in politics, economics and civil society all pushing forward reform”;
- A transformed IMF “with a renewed mandate that goes far beyond crisis management to crisis prevention”, with particular focus on early warning;
- On environmental protection, a “strengthened role” for the UN and the World Bank becoming “a bank for the environment” as well as for poverty reduction.
It’s hard to argue against any of these ambitions. But it’s also hard to avoid the impression that a lot of them were lifted directly from the 2004 High Level Panel report, as if the 2005 World Summit had not yet taken place (coincidentally, David Miliband chose this week to deliver a speech which revolved around a multilateral institution – this time the EU – being at a “fork in the road”. Sound familiar?)
Nonetheless, what Brown has achieved here is to set out a pretty good framework – a ‘scaffolding’, if you will – on which he can hang fresher and more detailed foreign policy ideas in due course. To my mind, there was just one key trick that he missed. For all that Brown correctly identifies the emergence to global prominence of China and India as a game-changing development, what he doesn’t do in this speech is take the next step and ask: given that effective multilateralism will increasingly depend on Chinese and Indian buy-in, what do they want from it?
Update: Daniel Korski at ECFR is annoyed that Brown didn’t mention enlargement.
by Alex Evans | May 9, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity
A gaggle of UN agencies have just published a report on biofuels, says the Guardian this morning (see also previous Global Dashboard posts on biofuels). Although the report presents a mixed picture of upsides and downsides, it’s clear about the food security risks:
Expanded production [of biofuel crops] adds uncertainty. It could also increase the volatility of food prices with negative food security implications… The benefits to farmers are not assured, and may come with increased costs. [Growing biofuel crops] can be especially harmful to farmers who do not own their own land, and to the rural and urban poor who are net buyers of food, as they could suffer from even greater pressure on already limited financial resources. At their worst, biofuel programmes can also result in a concentration of ownership that could drive the world’s poorest farmers off their land and into deeper poverty.
Absolutely. Slightly confusing, then, to see UNEP head Achim Steiner saying the opposite, according to the FT last month:
The UN’s top environment official has backed a European Union plan to require the blending of plant-based biofuels into road fuels despite fears by environmentalists that this could lead to increased deforestation in south-east Asia and Brazil. Achim Steiner, head of the UN Environment Programme, said on Thursday that biofuels were needed to reduce global dependence on fossil fuels.
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by Alex Evans | Apr 24, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
Last week’s UK-sponsored debate on climate change in the Security Council this week was always going to be contentious, as the Guardian and the Times of India reported (see also a letter to the FT yesterday from UK special representative on climate change John Ashton). As China put it: “The developing countries believe that Security Council has neither the professional competence in handling climate change — nor is it the right decision-making place for extensive participation leading up to widely acceptable proposals.”
The G77 group of developing countries, together with China, have long been acutely sensitive to any perceived encroachment of the Security Council into non-security areas. ‘Soft’ issues like climate change, they argue, belong in the UN’s Economic and Social Council, or indeed in the full General Assembly; but emphatically not in the Security Council, which is seen as an exclusive great powers’ club.
From the perspective of the Foreign Office in London, by contrast, the Security Council debate was an example of ‘disruptive political action’ that could highlight the extent to which climate change is becoming a security issue. As Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett put it, “an unstable climate will exacerbate some of the core drivers of conflict — such as migratory pressures and competition for resources”.
Both China and the UK have a point. For last week’s squabble illustrates a crucial point: that just because climate change doesn’t belong in the Security Council, isn’t to say that it sits any more comfortably anywhere else.
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by Alex Evans | Mar 17, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development, Global system
As the general enthusiasm for biofuels continues to accelerate unabated (most recently with the climate change deal secured at the EU Council of Ministers by Angela Merkel), a sage warning comes from US Department of Agriculture chief economist Keith Collins: all this biofuel-led demand for grain is going to have a big impact on food prices.
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