growth

1 July: Melting Artic. BLM. Helping the poor.

Posted on July 15, 2020 Leave a Comment

Last week witnessed the hottest temperature ever recorded in north-of-the-Artic-circle Verkhoyansk, Russia. Polar heatwaves are very bad news. They accelerate global warming. Melting sea ice gives way to dark water that absorbs more heat. Melting permafrost releases huge amount of ice-trapped greenhouse gases while damaging all man-made infrastructure. These changes are often irreversible.

It has been hard to choose from what I read and listened to on Black Lives Matter. Feel free to share with me what you have found the most helpful and educational. I need it. I would suggest taking the time to listen to Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 podcast series: it is personal, it has good soundtrack, it provides a whole alternative narrative on how slavery shaped the American economy and how black people’s struggles and fights paved the way for other minorities’ struggles and fights.

The Center for Global Development published their 2020 Commitment to Development Index which uses over 50 indicators to assess rich countries’ dedication to helping the poor. While the UAE features last in the list of 40 countries for the overall index, it is in the top-5 countries supporting health multilaterals – assessed through their relative aggregated contributions to WHO, GAVI and the Global Fund.

My quote this week is from Psychiatrist Julie Holland [28’53’’]: “In medicine, un-checked growth is called cancer. And to me it’s pretty much the same in business: If it’s all about growth and profit you are missing public benefits.”

2 June 2017

Posted on June 2, 2017 Leave a Comment

Nora Rosenberg et al’s “The effect of HIV counselling and testing on HIV acquisition in sub-Saharan Africa: a systematic review” finds that despite big investments in HIV counselling and testing, we don’t know much about its impact on prevention. That is because this impact has not been systematically evaluated: only 8 decently-designed studies were found for sub-Saharan Africa. And they show that individual HIV counselling and testing is neither consistently good nor bad for prevention. These important findings come out of a systematic review of the literature on the topic. Systematic reviews are often seen as the “poor relation” of research methods. They don’t bring academic glory. Yet, as argued here before, they produce the most useful evidence for policy makers. And with the advances of natural language processing and text mining techniques, we could automate large parts of the search process to increase our capacity to conduct systematic reviews that inform our work. I, for one, am excited about the future of systematic reviews.

I spoke to several colleagues about Mia Schaefer’s “The new kid” this week. The school-commissioned personal essay describes a 14-year-old’s mixed emotions about having a new baby brother. I thought she did a good job at articulating this. But of course, as the mother, I am biased.

My graph is from SITRA’s “This is how we create a circular economy in Finland” because it is super clear and because SITRA is hosting the World Circular Economy Forum next week. We pointed to the rise of the circular (or sharing) economy, in Horizons, two years ago. When looking at the list of speakers it struck me that all UN professionals engaging in that conversation were environmentalists. Why? There are huge opportunities for “social” practitioners in this space from restructuring service delivery systems, to reducing inequalities, to formalizing invisible economic relations, to fundraising. So I was happy to also see this week that NESTA had selected 8 organizations from the social sector to support via their ShareLab Fund.

My quote this week is from Cate Blanchett’s interview with David Miliband in Town and Country: “Being a mother was, for me, undeniably a central point of connection to the refugee crisis. Learning that more than 10 million of the world’s refugees are children, and then meeting refugee parents in Jordan and Lebanon who had fled to protect the lives and futures of their children—well, that was personally heartbreaking and galvanizing. As a parent I connected with their desire to protect their children and provide them with every possible opportunity in life: a safe home, an education—but most important, a childhood free from the horrors of war.”

And to make you smile at the end of a week full of bad world news, you get this.

13 April 2017

Posted on April 13, 2017 Leave a Comment

It is always good to have a quick look at the curtain raisers for the IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings. They give a sense of where the IFIs are going. This year, they come out right after a joint WTO-IMF-World Bank expression of support for open trade and international cooperation. IMF Christine Lagarde’s “Building a more resilient and inclusive economy” brings some good news about the health of the global economy including in low income countries helped by a much awaited rise of commodity prices. She zooms in on equitable growth arguing that technology has increased income gaps and will slow employment growth in emerging and low income countries. She points to governments’ responsibility to provide lifelong learning (from ECD to online senior course) and to maintain intergenerational equity in ageing societies. World Bank Jim Kim focuses on “Rethinking development finance” which is about using billions of public money to leverage trillions of private finance. What is worth keeping an eye on, here, is the new IDA $2.5 billion private window that came out of the last replenishment round concluded last December. Note the focus on fragile contexts which could shake up operations on the ground. And note the push to change the organization’s culture and incentivize staff to work at facilitating investments rather than designing loans: the Bank is “putting in place a tracking system that captures indirect forms of mobilization, and figuring out how to reward staff who focus on advisory programs, building markets, and creating the environment for investment”. Heads up!

Tom Jackson writes about technology in Africa. His March round-up helps us keep up with the fast financial services transformation in Kenya. Safaricom-supported M-Pesa, the super successful mobile money transactions system born in Kenya a decade ago, has since spread to India, Afghanistan and Romania. But Kenyan banks who originally tried (and failed) to regulate M-Pesa out of their industry just launched a competitor product, PesaLink, cutting transaction costs, allowing real-time inter-bank transfers, and attracting 2 million customers in two months. Safaricom responded by launching an M-Pesa App, and halving its fee. And it is now possible for Kenyans to buy government treasury bonds through their phones.

My graph this week is from Ana Moraru’s “Ghost village project” that uses monthly data of household power consumption to map population density and identify patterns of rural-urban migration in Moldova. Moraru works with the UNDP-sponsored Moldova Social Innovation Hub and tells us that this project is meant to inform a major 2018 administrative reform and associated local investments in public services in a context where internal migration is only documented by low frequency census data.

My quote this week is from Kevin Watkins’ interview with Sarah Brown in her Better Angels series “[The SDG agenda] ought to appeal to anyone who is driven by values and by a sense of solidarity, compassion and empathy. We need hard skills that are harnessed to good values. We need economists, people who understand finance, people who understand the law. Because these are great instruments for achieving change.” [30’]

20 January 2017

Posted on January 20, 2017 Leave a Comment

The National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends report comes out every four years. This year’s “Paradox of Progress” does not bring much novelty when it comes to the list of global trends considered [summary p. 6]. The three scenarii (islands, orbits, communities) piqued my curiosity a little more, in particular the third one discussing the future of governing. In this scenario, successful countries are those who manage to share governing power with local authorities and non-state actors when responding to citizens’ needs. The idea is that national governments retain “hard power” (eg security) while “soft power” is decentralized both geographically and to other actors with technology providing some kind of partnership gel. And there is an emphasis on the growing power of human agency. International organizations get revived because they know how to bring multi-stakeholder partnerships [yes, this non-UN document uses such term] to life. I’d also recommend the first annex [p.85] offering a 3-page five-year outlooks for each region. The Artic/Antarctica and space sections are exciting, not least because they are presented as regions where international cooperation may have the brightest near future. They also got me thinking that most UN agencies do not have a regional office for these parts of the world (nor for the deep and high seas for that matter). And yet, they will increasingly matter for next generations and the natural resources, food, and habitat they will need. Should we consider piloting a desk for polar, space and sea?

It was Davos week. Global reports flooded the Swiss resort. Oxfam did it again: for the fourth year in a row they grabbed headline news with their inequality report showing that the 8 richest men have as much wealth as the poorest half of the world population. The Commission on Business and Sustainable Development report argued that $12 trillion of market opportunities could be unlocked by 2030 if companies embraced a sustainable growth model. And the Edelman’s 2017 Trust Barometer, surveying 30,000 people in 28 countries, unpacked the global trust crisis. Trust in institutions is declining across the board from governments and businesses to NGOs and the media. More than half of interviewees, including those with high-income and college degree, believe that the system is failing them. The credibility of government leaders and CEOs is at all-time low. The most credible person today is a peer (“person like yourself”). Information coming from a spontaneous speaker, relating to personal experience, and communicated via a company’s social media is more likely to be perceived as true than information with a more traditional format, style and channel. The report thus calls for a communication model that work “with the people” rather than “for the people”.

Two weeks ago, I flagged exciting trends for renewable energy generation. But green power can only boom with matching prospects on the storage and distribution fronts. This graph from the International Finance Corporation’s “Energy storage trends and opportunities in Emerging markets” offers just that. It forecasts that “energy storage deployments in emerging markets worldwide are expected to grow by over 40 percent annually in the coming decade”.

My quote this week is from Andrew Sullivan’s “I used to be a human being”: “If you had to reinvent yourself as a writer in the internet age, I reassured myself, then I was ahead of the curve. The problem was that I hadn’t been able to reinvent myself as a human being.”

5 February 2016

Posted on February 5, 2016 Leave a Comment

Tetlock and Gardner’s “Superforecasting: The art and science of prediction” deserves the praises it received as one of the best books of 2015. It is also easy to read, uses topical illustrations, and gives concrete recommendations. The main message is that it does not take a genius to ace predictions; what matters is having the right thinking approach and working really hard. The book builds on research started by Tetlock in the 1980ies analyzing the forecasting skills of people from different backgrounds and evaluating their predictions against those made by intelligence superstars. His latest project – the Good Judgment Project – gathered 20,000 laypeople who answered about 500 questions and made over 1 million predictions about world affairs during 2011-15. Over the first 2 years of the project, predictions by these recruits beat control groups’ by 70% and “outperformed professional intelligence analysts with access to classified data.” So, what’s the trick? Here is summary of what helps: break down the big question into as many sub-problems as you can and estimate those; start with the outside view – how common is something in the broader landscape – and then dig into the specifics of the question at hand; integrate other people’s conflicting perspectives; endlessly update your predictions based on new facts (being a newsjunkie helps); have a growth mindset (e.g., maintain constant self-criticism and learn from your mistakes). And practice, practice, practice. All this works in time horizons below 5 years. Beyond that, the motto is: “plan for surprise”. If you are a podcast-type person, two recommendations for getting the gist of the book: here (45’) and here (48’).

Cross and al.’s “Collaborative overload” tells us that while collaboration has taken over the workplace (80% of our time), a third of value-added collaborations comes from only 3-5% of employees. What is problematic is that those super-collaborators are not on the radar of senior management, their work is typically not accounted for nor rewarded, and their level of engagement and career satisfaction is low. Everybody wants them and their skills but they are the first to get burned out and leave the job. Oh, and the majority of them are women. The call to managers is clear: spot and reward your collaborators; and redistribute responsibilities for collaboration fairly. Otherwise you may quickly lose skills essential to dealing with cross-cutting issues.

My map of the week is HowMuch.net’s “This world map shows the economic growth over the coming decade”. It visualizes countries’ annual growth rates up to 2024 as forecasted by Harvard’s Center for International Development. Top growing countries over the period are located in Asia (with India leading globally) and Africa (with Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Malawi and Madagascar on top of the list). Guatemala is in the lead for LAC, Egypt for MENA, and Turkey for CEE-CIS.

My quote this week is from Deutsche Bank co-head John Cryan [HT Gillian Tett] which reminded me of an interesting Atlantic article on the same topic: “Cash probably won’t exist in 10 years’ time. There is no need for it. It’s terribly inefficient and expensive”. [14’07”].

2 October 2015

Posted on October 2, 2015 Leave a Comment

I enjoyed Gillian Tett’s “The silo effect: The peril of expertise and the promise of breaking down barriers“. The Financial Times US Managing Director uses a cultural anthropology approach (nice!) to show how strong compartmentalization of expertise made some companies lose their edge while “silo-busting” kept others innovative and adaptive. She uses stories from the worlds of finance, technology, and government to illustrate. And she shows how people, technology and management can help break down specialist silos.
People can help by changing their mindsets, questioning existing taxonomies used to organize the world, or jumping from one field to another. For instance, the Cleveland Clinic gained in efficiency by reorganizing its structure around multidisciplinary centers focusing on body parts or broad ailments (the way patients describe illness) rather than around medical disciplines (the way education segments professions between physicians, surgeons, nurses and therapists). What if we were structured around multidisciplinary teams focusing on, say, age-specific issues?
Technology can help by offering analytical tools that mesh silo data, or facilitating cross-company horizontal communication. For instance, computer analytics from OpenTable was used by the Chicago Police to crunch violence data from different departments with temperature patterns. This generated real-time crime predictions that significantly reduced Chicago’s murder rate. What if we had investigative data science teams to better predict complex issues affecting children?
Management can help by rewarding those who promote inter-disciplinarity, or running internal social experiments that cluster people across specialities (e.g., common induction programmes and staff rotation across disciplines). For instance, Facebook’s Hackamonth encourages staff who have worked on the same thing for 12-18 months to work with a different department for a few months. What if we had a line of stretch assignments that would aim not at filling gaps but rather at disturbing and enhancing teams?

It is always good to have a quick look at the IMF and World Bank’s “curtain raisers” ahead of their Annual Meetings. Christine Lagarde focuses on the economy telling us that it is not looking very good, especially for emerging economies facing a fifth consecutive year of slowing growth. Jim Kim focuses on inequalities in a speech that could have been drafted in NY: importance of investing in children, from ECD to stunting elimination; promoting UHC and progressive social protection; and designing equitable tax collection systems. Fighting inequalities, he says, “starts with the pregnant woman who lives in a conflict zone.” But how does that message trickle down? How much of this rhetoric translates into the World Bank operations in your country?

My map of the week is from the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide’s Early Warning Project showing countries most likely to suffer onsets of state-led mass killing. The ranking combines statistical risks with expert opinions, and averages results from 3 “models”: Forecasts of political instability; forecasts of future coup attempts and new civil wars; and a machine-learning process that chews up experts’ opinions. Countries with the highest risks for mass killing today are Myanmar, Nigeria, Sudan, Egypt, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen.

My quote of the week is from Quartz Akshat Rathi’s “If there is liquid water in Mars, no one – no even NASA – can get anywhere near it”: “The world’s space powers are bound by rules agreed to under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty that forbid anyone from sending a mission, robot or human, close to a water source in the fear of contaminating it with life from Earth.”