trade

22 April 2018: Management, Spring Meetings, ODA

Posted on April 22, 2018 Leave a Comment

I got excited about this article and that podcast which align with my wish for human-centered management cultures to replace policy-centered ones. The Harvard Business Review’s “Co-creating the employee experience” shows how IBM uses design thinking, crowdsourcing, and prototypes to develop HR policies because “people are much less likely to resist the change when they’ve had a hand in shaping it”. Tom Peters’ “Excellence dividend” [H/T Kathleen Edison] shows why investing in people and their development is the only necessary strategy companies should truly pursue. That quote sums it all: “If it is not incredibly cool and fun and energizing for the boss to walk at 1am in the distribution centre with the front line people who are doing the work, do the world a favour boss: resign tomorrow!”

It was the week of the IMF and World Bank Group Spring Meetings. What caught my attention came mostly from the IMF. Managing Director Christine Lagarde unpacked the trade tensions that were the main backdrop of the Meetings in her Hong Kong speech. In her Beijing speech, she flagged the debt and broader fiscal challenges that the Belt and Road Initiative faces in its expansion phase, and launched the China-IMF Capacity Development Center to train Chinese diplomats. The World Economic Outlook chapter on “Manufacturing jobs” debunked the long held view that development requires moving from agriculture to manufacturing to services. It documents the shrinking contribution of manufacturing to job creation at the global level and shows that some developing countries have skipped the manufacturing stage by rapidly developing service sectors with high productivity (eg telecom, transportation, financial intermediation).

My graph this week is from the OECD 2017 Official Development Assistance (ODA) figures. ODA stabilized at 146.6 billion in 2017 with two trends in reverse gear: (i) a decrease of in-donor spending (i.e. money spent on refugees in rich countries), and (ii) an increase in funds going to poorest countries. ODA remained mostly disbursed in the form of grants but the share of loans grew (+13% from 2016). The broader trend, pointed to by World Bank President Jim Kim, is that since the 1990ies, the ODA share of financial flows going to developing countries has dropped significantly to reach 9% today, reflecting the shrinking financial power of development organizations.

My quote this week is from Zuckerberg in his Ezra Klein interview: “It’s just not clear to me that us sitting in an office here in California are best placed to always determine what the policies should be for people all around the world.”

4 March 2016

Posted on March 4, 2016 Leave a Comment

Ricardo Haussman’s “The problem with evidence-based policies” is an interesting read. The title is misleading because the piece focuses only on randomized control trials (RCTs). The argument goes like this: “evidence-based” is the new motto of development work; RCT is perceived as the evidence-generation gold standard; but RCTs are not adequate to get feedback on social interventions which “have millions of design possibilities and outcomes”; so iterative approaches with quick feedback loops should be preferred. AidThoughts reminds us that this debate between “randomistas” on the one hand, and adepts of “doing things differently” on the other is not new. And I side with AidThoughts in rejecting the black-and-white Haussman perspective. Chris Blattman’s response is also worth reading. He argues that the problem in our field is less about an RCT-invasion than about lack of rigorous evidence and good feedback on our work all together. He also shows how RCTs can pave the way for more iterative approaches with real time feedback loops, using a good illustration from the International Rescue Committee.

Shawn Donnan’s “Global trade: structural shifts” tells us that for a growing number of economists the global trade post-crisis downturn is structural, not cyclical. A key underlying trend is that globalization is driven less and less by trade in goods/services/finance, and more and more by data flows. Businesses don’t ship machines from A to B anymore, they send digital orders from A to 3D-print machines in B. This is an exciting read with great infographics. But I am left thinking: how does that apply to food? I, for one, am not ready to eat 3D-printed food.

My graph of the week is from George Gao’s “UN peacekeeping at new highs after post-Cold War surge and decline”. Last year, the number of uniformed peacekeeping personnel reached the all-time high of 108,000. Over the past 20 years, the peacekeeping contributor landscape also evolved: today 82% of peacekeeping forces come from Africa and Asia (29% in 1995) while only 6% come from Europe (52% in 1995).

My quote this week is from Lindiwe Mazibuko’s “There is no one waiting to save us. We must save ourselves”: “[The rise of financial remittances coming from the young African diaspora] got me thinking about skills remittance, talent remittance, social and political remittance. If these people have the passion to give back to their communities monetarily, imagine how different our politics would be if their skills, influence, leadership, talent were put to work in the service of the public good.” [7’15”]

26 June 2015

Posted on June 26, 2015 Leave a Comment

Dabla-Norris et al.’s “Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality: A Global Perspective” is the third IMF Staff paper series on inequality. It focuses on how income distribution affects growth. Its main finding is that “if the income share of the top 20% increases by 1 percentage point, GDP growth is 0.08 percentage point lower in the following years, suggesting that the benefits do not trickle down. Instead, a similar increase in the income share of the bottom 20% is associated with 0.38 percentage point higher growth”. The paper sums up what we know about inequality of outcomes and opportunities, and their drivers. It is full of quotes coming in handy for advocacy such as “healthier societies, as proxied by lower female mortality rate, tend to have lower income inequality” and “better access to education […], improved health outcomes, and redistributive social policies help raise the income share of the poor and the middle class irrespective of the level of economic development of a country”.

Hoekman’s “Trade and Growth: The end of an era?” shows that while the trade/GDP ratio has changed over the past 6 decades, it may now have structurally stopped rising. It discusses 3 structural factors possibly causing this slowdown: the end of the integration of China and Eastern Europe; global value chains (i.e., big businesses outsourcing part of their production process to firms in other countries) expansion reaching its limits; and protectionism. And it says that technology (sigh) and the liberalization of trade in services could give a boost to global trade in the nearer future.

My graph of the week is from Warren’s “What will the next generation of development professionals look like?” presenting the results of a survey with 1000+ development professionals about what will be needed to service our industry in the next 10 years. Integrators (those who understand different specialties, how they impact each other and foster cross-specialty partnerships) will be in high demand; more professionals will come from high tech firms and social impact investors; and human-centered design will be a required skill. Are we ready?

My quote of the week is from Gapminder’s Rosling at UNICEF: “You should never give aid money to a country that can buy a Swedish car company; there, guiding domestic money is what is needed”.