The fatal misconception of population control

development ▪ policy ▪

For the holiday, I decided to finish Michael Connelly's Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population. It's an excellent history of how a hypothesis -- that unchecked, population growth will result in all sorts of problems -- became an ideology that got translated into policies and spun out of control to ruin many lives of women, mostly in developing countries. From the book's concluding chapter:

The great tragedy of population control, the fatal misconception, was to think that one could know other people's interests better than they knew it themselves. But if the idea of planning other people's families is now discredited, this very human tendency is still with us. The essence of population control... was to make rules for other people without having to answer to them. It appealed to the rich and powerful because, with the spread of emancipatory movements and the integration of markets, it began to appear easier and more profitable to control populations than to control territory. That is why opponents were correct in viewing it as another chapter in the unfinished history of imperialism.

The book is full of examples of how good intentions is a poor substitute for good evidence when devising (and scaling up) public policies. Yet, this seems to be the default mode of policy-making -- not only in Indonesia, but also within many international organizations and NGOs. Personally, I find this rather scary.

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Easterly on the wrong lessons from the US crisis

economics ▪ policy ▪

William Easterly on what not to learn from the crisis, ie., "that development flows from all-knowing states rather than creative individuals". His last two paragraphs:

How much poverty has endured because individual entrepreneurs were shunned in favor of the likes of the $5 billion state-owned Ajaokuta Steel Mill in Nigeria, which never produced a bar of steel? Or because African governments spend their time preparing World Bank-required national Poverty Reduction Strategy Reports instead of freeing space for innovators?

We will never know. But we do know that the free market has a long-run track record of creating prosperity -- even with the occasional crash. The Depression's deceptive intellectual legacy is that development flows from all-knowing states rather than creative individuals. Here's hoping that the backlash to today's crash will not spawn another round of bad economics for the poor.

HT: Marginal Revolution

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Growth policies: No substitute for thinking

economics ▪ growth ▪ policy ▪

I have just finished reading Chapter 2 of Rodrik's latest book (which is a revised version of this "Growth Diagnostics" paper):

Most well-trained economists would agree that the standard policy reforms included in the Washington Consensus have the potential to be growth-promoting. What the experience of the last 15 years has shown, however, is that the impact of these reforms is heavily dependent on circumstances...We argue in this paper that this calls for an approach to reform that is much more contingent on the economic environment, but one that also avoids an “anything goes” attitude of nihilism. We show it is possible to develop a unified framework for analyzing and formulating growth strategies that is both operational and based on solid economic reasoning.

The authors then offer a growth diagnostics framework that is summarized by Rodrik here. The paper concludes with the following:

Across-the-board reform packages have often failed to get countries growing again. The method for growth diagnostics we provide in this paper should help target reform on the most binding constraints that impede growth... As our discussion of El Salvador, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic illustrates, each of these circumstances throws out different diagnostic signals. An approach to development that determines the action agenda on the basis of these signals is likely to be considerably more effective than a laundry-list approach with a long list of institutional and governance reforms that may or may not be well targeted on the most binding constraints to growth.

I agree with Rodrik's general message on the context-dependency of growth policies. His offered framework is also useful for policymakers. Yet it is no substitute for thinking by developing countries' economists and policymakers: They need to analyze which of the agenda are particularly relevant to their respective economies. Rodrik puts it best: "The framework does not economize on inputs (the thoughtfulness required to reach decisions), only on outputs (the list of things that we recommend governments should do to get growth going)".

PS: For a somewhat similar exercise for Indonesia (though it doesn't seem to be using this exact framework), see the reports posted here (particularly its Special Focus on Regions reports, on the left sidebar).

PPS: Here is a set of papers commissioned by the Commission on Growth and Development.

PPPS: Charles Kenny offers a review of new evidence on growth in the last six years (his answer: Not very much!). HT: Marginal Revolution.

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Rodrik v. Stiglitz

development ▪ economists ▪

Dani Rodrik discriminates himself from Nobel Laureate (and, nowadays, an anti-globalization poster boy) Joseph Stiglitz. Give and take, I am broadly in agreement with Rodrik on all four points of contention, i.e., on the global economic system, the role of international organizations, the substance of development policies, and on macroeconomic policy.

An aside, Rodrik's new book, One Economics, Many Recipes is out. I've just ordered my copy, so can't say very much about it (but, hopefully, will do so before the end of winter break). In the meantime, here is a transcription of the Crooked Timber seminar on the book.

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Data for development researchers

data ▪ development ▪ economics ▪

For researchers looking for global development data, developmentdata.org provides links to various datasets:

developmentdata.org contains links to developing country data on inequality, trade, aid, education, agriculture, migration, health, FDI, population, governance and debt, and to websites that host and/or catalogue household survey data. The links take you directly to the data you need or to the database or publication that contain the data. For each area, there is a brief data description or list of the variables available. Searchable, general databases that include data for many different variables can be found under databases together with topic-specific databases.

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