Driving a Hummer in Geneva

Today I saw a Hummer with CD plates - should I be pissed off on environmental grounds?

A Hummer uses goes 9 miles per gallon. My Nissan Almeira 42 miles per gallon. All of this rendered meaningless depending on how many flights a year I take.

A Hummer uses up loads of space on the road, pollutes way more than my Nissan and is a nightmare for cyclists and pedestrians. But then I guess the intern who I passed on the bus is probably saying the same about me.

OK, so I can't win the environmental arguments, but it does send out an uncomfortable ethical message if UN employees are buying these monster cars...

Evaluating trade assistance programmes

What Aid for Trade said about evaluation

On Monday I attended the final session of the WTO's Aid for Trade meeting focused on monitoring and evaluation.

Why do we need M & E?

An obvious question but worth asking: electorates are skeptical of development aid’s impact and so want to see independent, scientific studies that demonstrate its impact

· A recent poll in the Financial Times shows that respondents in most OECD countries considered defence and development aid as priority areas for spending cuts

· From the ESCAP delegate, Out of 1 Australian dollar, 67cents ends up in expat salaries

A4T evaluation particularly challenging

The moderator Michael Roberts (WTO) pointed to the success of evaluation in the health sector (i.e. does a dollar spent on health result in lives’ saved) but how can we apply it to A4T? This type of “gold standard” of evaluation seen in health is more difficult in trade due to difficulty in assigning casuality.

Given these challenges evaluation should at least be a learning process, where feedback loops are in place. Fear of making mistakes should be replaced by analysis and learning from them as seen in the private sector (see the new book “Adapt” by Tim Harford on the value of making mistakes).

The wonders of evaluation

Aaditya Mattoo, World Bank expert on evaluation illustrated how powerful evaluation in aid programmes with an example of randomized trials by the Poverty Action Lab and work of Estor Duflo.

Problem: Kids in rural Kenya were not getting sufficient education. How does the government get its biggest bang for its buck investment.

The study show that de-worming kids (In much of the developing world, most kids have intestinal worms, leaving them sick, anemic and more likely to miss school), resulted in 25 percent less absenteeism. The cost of this (35c) compared highly favourably to other policy options like paying for school uniforms or an additional teacher (around US100).

However, such trials are difficult to implement in the A4T context. How can you get robust data sets? How can you assign causality when many other factors are affecting outcomes (e.g. other economic and social policies).

For this reason, he said that A4T was at a primitive stage compared to health in evaluation, but we need to be pragmatic.

The three tyrannies of evaluation

Despite the need for figures showing value for money, Mattoo warned the meeting against what he called the tyrannies of evaluation. These are:

Methodology – i.e. avoiding evaluation as we have not perfected the methodology

Causality – i.e. this programme was wholly responsible for a 10% rise in incomes.

In A4T we can not easily assign casuality but we can draw more qualitative conclusions. For example, an IADB study on a trade capacity building programme could not assign casuality on volume of trade increased but made a useful finding that it increased their diversity of exports. A lesson from another study was that A4T aid should not be directed to the large companies but to the marginal companies.

Measurement – i.e. avoiding evaluating what can not be measured, so we end up focusing on only what we can measure.

At a side event later in the evening the Bank launched a new study Where to Spend the Next Million? Applying Impact Evaluation to Trade Assistance. It looks at how M and E is being applied in A4T.

Why blog?

It has been a year since I blogged....it is time I started blogging again...this is why from Seth Godin

Africa, biotech and climate change

A new report claims that the future of Africas food supply risks being put into the hands of corporate biotech as they develop and patent climate ready crops

Think tank does satire on climate change

Great post from The Onion and CDG on lack of policy action on climate change.

According to a report released this week by the Center for Global Development, climate change, the popular mid-2000s issue that raised awareness of the fact that the earth's continuous rise in temperature will have catastrophic ecological effects, has apparently not been resolved, and may still be a problem.…”

Global warming, if you remember correctly, was the single greatest problem of our lifetime back in 2007 and the early part of 2008,” CGD president Nancy Birdsall said. “But then the debates over Social Security reform and the World Trade Center mosque came up, and the government had to shift its focus away from the dramatic rise in sea levels, the rapid spread of deadly infectious diseases, and the imminent destruction of our entire planet.”

…”I was a bit surprised by our findings, because I, along with the rest of my colleagues, thought that the process of fixing climate change ended soon after [2007 rock concert] Live Earth,” CGD assistant director George Oliver told reporters.

"Last year's federal budget included more than $200 million in funding for the Office of Personnel Management," Birdsall said. "Since nobody really knows what that is, we suggest that money perhaps be spent making sure the oceans don't turn into acid."

Family planning tops for reducing emissions

According to a recent paper by David Wheeler and Dan Hammer, population policy options are much less costly than almost all other reviewed options for low-carbon energy development, including solar, wind, and nuclear power, second-generation biofuels, and carbon capture and storage. They are also cost-competitive with forest conservation and other improvements in forestry and agricultural practices.

This table, based on data in their paper, shows how many tonnes of CO2 would be abated for your $1m:

Intervention	Tonnes of CO2 saved
Family planning & girls’ education combined	250,000
Family planning alone	222,222
Girls education alone	100,000
Reduce slash and burn of forests	66,667
Pasture management	50,000
Geothermal energy	50,000
Energy efficient buildings	50,000
Pastureland afforestation	40,000
Nuclear energy	40,000
Reforestation of degraded forests	40,000
Plug-in hybrid cars	33,333
Solar	33,333
Power plant biomass co-firing	28,571
Carbon Capture and Storage (new)	28,571
Carbon Capture and Storage (retrofit)	26,316

Getting optimism from looking at the past

Podcast from Econ Talk (Russ Roberts) on new book from Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist

1. Musings on the specialization and trade and why humans do it but animals dont

2. First gain from trade:

man goes out hunting warthogs, wife goes out collecting roots . Neither party can guarantee harvest every day and so benefit from trading.

2. Spread the good news: Hundreds of millions coming out of poverty in the last 25 years, lifespan up 30%, per capita income trebled (when population has doubled). Could get alot richer.

We are unappreciative about amazing things that have happened in the last ten years.

The man who despairs when other hope is seen as a sage - yes need to step back and see hope as the podcast says but doesnt really get onto challenge of climate change and sustainability.

Ridley argument against this is :

Humans develop more efficient use of resources - but doesnt mention high incomes making higher overall impact).

Much more productive use of land which is enough to feed the world (including with lots of meat) whilst not putting Amazon at peril - weak argument missing any strong numbers. Can we really go from 6 to 9 billion relying on productivity gains?

Yes we get better but no numbers to say if we can do it fast enough.