Short cuts (XVII)

Back with some short cuts...

1. Research about private aid is very scarce. this interesting article titled Uncharted Territories by a friend in the Netherlands is an exception. It analyses how NGODs geographically allocate the money they spend. According to a new database specifically built for these research, they show that although "non-governmental development organizations are expected to focus on countries with poor governance, new evidence shows that they do not. While they do tend to focus more than bilateral donors on poor countries, they make some curious geographical choices. It seems that they too have their ‘donor darlings’. It seems that "the more an organization depends financially on its official donor, the greater is the correlation between their choices of countries". Very useful for those working in non-governmental organisations or bilateral agencies!

2. I have been playing with this interesting website developed by the Inter-AmericanDevelopment Bank that gathers very useful information on governance, social and economic conditions, etc... in a very user-friendly way. It is called Datagob.

3. Krugman on Milton Friedman... an interesting approach to one of the most influential and polemic figures in the economics and the political economy of the past century. Latin America was one the most important playing fields for his acolytes!

Between Sachs and Easterly... you find Collier!

I just read this very, very interesting essay written by Michael Clemens from the Center for Global Development. He reviews Paul Collier's new book The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It.

Mr. Collier knows a lot about development and how to proceed to fight poverty and abjection. On other side, Clemens has made a great effort to critically summarise and analyse Collier's main points. According to the former, Collier seems to stuck in the middle between Sachs and Easterly's fightings (that is, between planners and searchers). Collier basically focuses its efforts towards that billion of people living in those developing countries economically stagnant and caught in any of the different poverty traps he considers: armed conflict, natural resource dependence, poor governance and geographic isolation. I haven't read the book yet, but after reading this essay, everybody interested in development should have a deep look at it. I really liked Clemens' conclusion:

Helping the bottom billion will be a very slow job for generations, not the
product of media- or summit-friendly plans to end poverty in ten or 20 years. It
will require long term, opportunistic, and humble engagement, much of it through
public action—built on a willingness to let ineffective interventions die and on
a sophisticated appreciation of the stupendous complexity of functioning
economies. The grievous truth is that although arrange of public actions can and
should help many people, most of the bottom billion will not—and cannot—be freed
from poverty in our lifetimes.

UPDATE: here, you can find Simon Maxwell's (Director of the Overseas Development Institute) opinions on the book.

It seems to be a must-to-have book!