Quote of the day

You wouldn’t want to be inside the sausage factory that is the GDP calculation in Chad.

That's Chris Blattman on how fast African poverty is falling (or not) and the reliability of data on developing countries.

Gini coefficient is falling

Following up on my post and the comments discussion on how successful the last decade has been, I was very impressed to see how far the worldwide Gini coefficient has fallen:


If you assume it does not come at the cost of slower overall economic growth (a very relevant caution when formulating economic policy), I'd argue that higher equality of income is unambiguously good.

There are more charts and analysis here. Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.

Not such a bad decade after all

The Roving Bandit excoriates Paul Krugman for his America-centric pessimism about the last decade:

Via The Monkey Cage, apparently Paul Krugman has been whining about the "naughties" and how nothing good happened in America. This is why I don't read Paul Krugman. He focuses too much on America.

Erm Paul, the continuation of the WORLD'S GREATEST ANTI-POVERTY PROGRAMME EVER? NO? NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU?!!

This resonates with the interesting recent writing and forthcoming book by Charles Kenny on "The Success of Development", which argues that aside from growing income (a surprisingly intractable problem), development has succeeded admirably in the last fifty years:

This book explores the bad news and the good news about development. It lays out the evidence on growing income disparities between the global rich and the global poor that are at the heart of a narrative of crisis. And it chronicles the failed search for a silver bullet to overcome economic malaise.

But it also discusses the considerable successes of development. Not least, the evidence for any country being stuck in a Malthusian nightmare is threadbare. The book points to global progress in health, education, civil and political rights, access to infrastructure and even access to beer. This progress is historically unprecedented and has been faster in the developing world than in the developed.

Amartya Sen would of course be proud of this broader conception of what development really means.

See also Tyler Cowen on the "Fruitful Decade for Many in the World" (especially "China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, and much of Africa"), and via his MR blogging partner Alex Tabarrok, this post on and list of African successes:

In recent years, a broad swath of African countries has begun to show a remarkable dynamism. From Mozambique’s impressive growth rate (averaging 8% p.a. for more than a decade) to Kenya’s emergence as a major global supplier of cut flowers, from M-pesa’s mobile phone-based cash transfers to KickStart’s low-cost irrigation technology for small-holder farmers, and from Rwanda’s gorilla tourism to Lagos City’s Bus Rapid Transit system, Africa is seeing a dramatic transformation. This favorable trend is spurred by, among other things, stronger leadership, better governance, an improving business climate, innovation, market-based solutions, a more involved citizenry, and an increasing reliance on home-grown solutions. More and more, Africans are driving African development.

The meaning of rain

I got back to Addis last night, and it rained today, for the first time since I got to Ethiopia. Apparently it rained all weekend. Owen Barder explains the (unfortunate) significance for local farmers:

Over the weekend we were trekking in the north of Ethiopia. The fields were full of wheat and barley, looking (to my inexpert eye) about 3 weeks from harvest (see the picture, right, taken on 29th November). The farmers all said they were looking forward to a good harvest this year.

Then last night, we woke up to torrential rain. I gather it was raining in Addis Ababa too. It doesn’t normally rain at this time of year in Ethiopia. If this continues for another day or two, the crop will be ruined.

The rain today is an unwelcome reminder of how precarious is the livelihoods of millions of people who are dependent on rain coming at the right time (and not at the wrong time). It can turn a good harvest into a bad one, or into no harvest at all. Affected families may be forced to sell their meagre assets, pushing not only them but their children into another generation of chronic poverty.

Our thoughts today are with the millions of farmers of Ethiopia and their families.

Puts complaining about a rainy weekend in an entirely new perspective...

1.02 billion people hungry

The FAO (UN Food and Agriculture Organization) publishes new estimates that the number of undernourished people in the world has climbed to 1.02 billion (from ~925m last year and ~850m in 2005). The main drivers of the rise are the global economic slowdown and high food prices, which have subsided somewhat from highs in 2008 but still not returned to 2002-2004 levels.

This is sad because undernourishment has lifelong negative effects and because hunger is, as Amartya Sen argued in his signature body of work, overwhelmingly an issue of economic access rather than physical access. The world produces enough food, the poor just don't have enough money to buy it.