The ever-excellent James Surowiecki, writes in The New Yorker The point isn’t that private property is a bad thing, or that the state should be able to run roughshod over the rights of individual owners. Property rights (including patents) are essential to economic growth, providing incentives to innovate and invest. Read more…
Google has launched Google News in English for Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Ghana, Uganda and Botswana allowing users to search and view news in localized editions, and helping dozens of African news sites make their stories available to users worldwide. Google News Ethiopia is here: http://news.google.com.et/
Michael Clemens at the Center for Global Development is one of the smartest (and nicest) people who think seriously about development. What I particularly like is his willingness to challenge conventional wisdom – and to back his judgements with well-researched evidence. When he had doubts about the common view that Read more…
The Los Angeles Times reckons it knows the causes of Ethiopia’s famines: Simply put, the nation, in which 85% of people toil as small farmers, has reached a point where it can’t easily grow enough food to meet its needs. Although agricultural production has increased overall, it has declined per Read more…
Yash Tandon, writing in Business Daily Africa says that that the Paris Declaration on aid is a form of collective colonialism by donors: under the pretext of making aid more effective the Paris Declaration project is a form of collective colonialism by Northern “donors” of those countries in the South Read more…
Bill Clinton has finally been persuaded that investment in health systems is more important than funding “vertical” initiatives for particular diseases: “That’s increasingly in the last few years what our foundation has been focused on – what is the most cost-effective way to mobilise a national health system,” Mr Clinton Read more…
This is without doubt the best out of office reply I’ve ever received. I’ll be in Africa until the end of August, with irregular access to e-mail. No doubt I will still neurotically check my messages, but I may only be able to respond to pressing issues. I’ll try to Read more…
Alex Evans at Global Dashboard I’m currently immersed in writing the main pamphlet for my project on food prices with Chatham House (hence not much posting for the last few days) – but I have to take ten minutes out to sing the praises of the gorgeous piece of writing Read more…
Al Gore (reported in the NY times) “We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that has to change.”
The Economist has reported a paper by Oya Celasun (IMF) and Jan Walliser (World Bank) which looks at the impact of unpredictable aid: They show how unpredictable such aid flows are. The paper finds that the average absolute difference between aid promised and aid given was equal to 3.4% of Read more…