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# Owen Abroad

## Sitemaps

- [XML Sitemap](https://owen.org/sitemap.xml): Contains all public & indexable URLs for this website.

## Posts

- [Blog](https://owen.org/blog/)
- [Race report: Tallinn Ironman Middle Distance Triathlon (113km) - August 2025](https://owen.org/blog/12200/) - Tallinn (Estonia) hosted an Ironman weekend - with the long distance (226km or 140.6 miles, aka the Full Ironman) event on Saturday, and the middle distance event (113km or 70.3 miles, aka a Half Ironman) on Sunday. In brief: Highly recommended. Fast flat course, brilliantly well-organised for amateur athletes in a great location. (I was
- [Why we need government digital identities and how to do it safely](https://owen.org/blog/12159/) - The Government is considering whether and how to introduce digital government identities. This is partly because the Tony Blair Institute has made the case (here) and also because - as the Institute correctly says - Britain is falling behind other countries in using technology to make Government services more efficient, effective and reliable. This is
- [Smoking the biometric crack](https://owen.org/blog/572/) - The Register reports Gordon Brown's interest in extending the ID cards scheme. In the ID world according to Gordon, on the other hand, ID management will proceed down pretty much the path laid out by the architects of the ID scheme. It won't consider more decentralised and secure approaches that tailor levels of security to
- [Are we 'freeloading' on US innovation?](https://owen.org/blog/12125/) - President Trump's letter to 17 pharmaceutical companies has potentially seismic implications. His grievance is understandable, but his approach is disastrous. Here is why, and what we should do instead.
- [Age verification as digital public infrastructure](https://owen.org/blog/12110/) - I am in favour of the requirements in the Online Safety Act which require platforms that publish some kinds of content to verify the age of their users. It is also understandable why many people do not want to upload their photo, or a scan of their passport or credit card, to an age verification
- [Rishi Sunak and the legacy of Nigel Lawson](https://owen.org/blog/9048/) - Rishi Sunak has a photo of Nigel Lawson on his wall. But is he the heir to Lawson?
- [Fixing Windows drivers for my iPod](https://owen.org/blog/7764/) - How to get Windows 8.1 to recognise my Apple iPod
- [Party on](https://owen.org/blog/6892/) - Please come and meet the CGD Europe team this Tuesday evening (6 August) from 6pm at the The Rooftop Café near the Shard. There is no charge for admission, but you'll have to buy your own drinks and food. We've reserved the whole venue, so please sign up here so we know to expect you.
- [Geeky stuff for the weekend](https://owen.org/blog/3692/) - Social media I can think of a couple of organisations which have embraced social media exactly like this: New aidinfo website In work-related geek news, my team has a brilliant new website: http://www.aidinfo.org. (I can call it brilliant without immodesty because I had almost no part in it.) The internet in Ethiopia If you live
- [Not about the death of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi](https://owen.org/blog/5748/) - Following the death of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, this blog post reminds readers of an earlier blog post explaining why I don't write much about Ethiopian politics, despite (then) living there.
- [Time for a "Love Actually" moment](https://owen.org/blog/8890/) - President Trump's decision to cut funding to the World Health Organisation calls for a "Love Actually" moment. There is a precedent. One of George W. Bush's first acts as president in 2006 was to reinstate the "global gag rule" which withdrew US aid from organisations that counsel women about abortions or to advocate for liberalized
- [Is the UK putting its own interests ahead of the poor in its new aid strategy?](https://owen.org/blog/8456/) - Britain’s new aid strategy has important implications, not only for DFID but for international organisations who will either need to adapt or face losing some of their core funding. Here’s why.
- [Theresa May's letter to EU citizens does not guarantee key rights](https://owen.org/blog/8753/) - Theresa May says that citizens' rights are her first priority. She means that her first priority is to curtail them.
- [Brexit and Truthiness](https://owen.org/blog/8598/) - In which I fact check and annotate today's Vote Leave leaflet
- [What rights will EU citizens in the UK lose?](https://owen.org/blog/8749/) - This is a good round-up of the rights that EU citizens living in the UK seem likely to lose, notwithstanding the government's protestations that their rights will be largely unchanged. I list them here, but they are better explained in the article. The right to go abroad The right to fall in love with a
- [Religious zealots should mind their own business](https://owen.org/blog/8741/) - How dare religious zealots impose their wicked views on the rest of us?
- [Supporting our overseas workers (student loans edition)](https://owen.org/blog/8468/) - It is time to change the British government rule which make the children of aid workers ineligible for student finance.
- [Geo-coding aid: powerful and not that hard](https://owen.org/blog/3571/) - This is very cool. A team of researchers from Development Gateway and AidData have worked with the World Bank to add detailed subnational geographical information to all of the Bank’s active projects in the Africa and Latin America region. This isn't just pins in a map showing the country where the money is spent: they
- [Global integrity is hiring](https://owen.org/blog/3534/) - If you read this blog, you might be interested in this job with the good people at Global Integrity. The post is based in Washington DC: Project Manager – This position will play a key role in managing and supporting almost all of Global Integrity’s fieldwork in the coming years. Alongside other colleagues, this position
- [Effective Altruism](https://owen.org/blog/8054/) - Here is Beth Barnes of Exeter College on the difference that effective altruism could make:
- [The rules of the road](https://owen.org/blog/7354/) - General rant about the ignorance of car drivers.
- [It knows what we do ...](https://owen.org/blog/5630/) - Excellent Dilbert cartoon on big data.
- [How's that austerity thing working out?](https://owen.org/blog/5620/) - Remarkable chart from the National Institute for Economic and Social Research showing what has happened to GDP in each recession, compared to the cyclical peak.
- [We are the first generation in history ...](https://owen.org/blog/7384/) - In which Erik Solheim adds himself to the list of people to proclaim that, for the first time in history, we can eradicate poverty.
- [African Arguments](https://owen.org/blog/2133/) - New website from the Royal African Society, African Arguments, with some really good contributors: we promise to make African Arguments Online the site of the most vigorous debates on Africa available on the web.
- [A good question](https://owen.org/blog/2058/) - Willem Buiter on the Christmas message from the Pope What is it about the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religious tradition that leads so many of its most prominent spokespersons to make hateful, bigoted, life-diminishing and personal security-endangering statements when it comes to human sexuality?
- [Thinking of starting an NGO?](https://owen.org/blog/99/) - Read this first (Allana Shaikh): Don’t do it. You’re not going to think of a solution no one else has, your approach is not as innovative as you think it is, and raising money is going to be impossible. You will have no economy of scale, your overhead will be disproportionately high, and adding one
- [Best of British](https://owen.org/blog/504/) - Tim Worstall's roundup is here. Tabloid Edition_ Britblog Roundup # 63Download
- [Rising prices are not what is making us poor](https://owen.org/blog/9006/) - Framing this as a "cost of living crisis" creates the misleading impression that inflation is the problem. Our standard of living is lower for a combination of reasons: the war in Ukraine, the covid pandemic, Brexit, and structural problems in the British economy. These hits mean that real incomes will fall. There are distributional choices
- [The Europe Development Digest](https://owen.org/blog/6711/) - A plug for the wonderful Europe Development Digest produced by my CGD colleagues.
- [Why Leave has no plan](https://owen.org/blog/8772/) - Why leave has no plan: it isn't cock-up, it's conspiracy.
- [More in common](https://owen.org/blog/8635/) - Thoughts the day after the Brexit referendum.
- [Promenade des Anglais [photo]](https://owen.org/blog/8547/) - Considering posting a photo each day. Let's see how long this lasts.
- [Joined up government](https://owen.org/blog/8040/) - The Secretary of State for International Development is missing from a number of key Cabinet Committees and task forces on which a development perspective would be useful.
- [Europe Development Digest: CGD Hebdo](https://owen.org/blog/5610/) - Sign up to the CGD Europe newsletter
- [Is migration really too toxic?](https://owen.org/blog/5592/) - Modest changes in immigration policies could have huge benefits for the people affected, but are perhaps small enough to be introduced below the radar, without great political risk. This blog posts lists four possible initiatives for the UK.
- [Doonesbury on abortion](https://owen.org/blog/5379/) - This Doonesbury cartoon is causing some American newspapers either not to run the series, or to move them to the op-ed pages.
- [Dilbert on Skype](https://owen.org/blog/5129/) - Dilbert cartoon on people who fly to meetings instead of using video conferencing.
- [Where do citations come from?](https://owen.org/blog/5113/) - From the brilliant xkcd
- [Rumbled](https://owen.org/blog/3509/) - Hadley Freeman in the Guardian has rumbled my black jeans delusion: Black button-down shirts are basically the upper-body equivalent of black jeans, which were discussed on this page a few weeks ago. Just as some misguided men think the black gives the jeans a smack of formality while the denim gives the black a hint
- [Lalibela kids on football](https://owen.org/blog/3496/) - Will Ross has a nice piece on BBC Radio 4 Today this morning in which he goes to Lalibela, a small, quite remote, mountain-top town in Northern Ethiopia, and interviews the kids there about the World Cup. They know all about the players and are so excited about the World Cup. The developing world may
- [Not getting a second date](https://owen.org/blog/3476/) - Welcome to my world. Fortunately my partner has reality-based beliefs.
- [A loss to the House of Commons](https://owen.org/blog/3314/) - Reflections on the loss to Parliament of retiring and defeated MPs and especially the loss of Dr Evan Harris, who has stood up for science, secularism and freedom of speech.
- [Taking the guesswork out of aid](https://owen.org/blog/3308/) - Esther Duflo explains in a TED talk how we can bring aid evaluation from the "middle ages" to the 21st century. It is extraordinary how much resistance there is within development agencies to rigorous evaluation of development interventions.
- [Personal data and a digital manifesto](https://owen.org/blog/3230/) - Back in 2006, I blogged saying that I am in favour of better use of data by government, provided that there is a shift of control of personal data back to the individual. Here is what I said then: A national identity register of unique personal identifiers could make a significant contribution to improving government
- [Earned autonomy and the individual (spoof)](https://owen.org/blog/3171/) - The UK General Election campaign could start as soon as next week, and it is already clear that one of the battlegrounds will be the relationship between the citizen and society. Both parties are keen to demonstrate that they don't agree with Margaret Thatcher's adage that "There is no such thing as society". Yesterday, the
- ["We are all in this together"](https://owen.org/blog/2619/) - George Osborne said eight times in his speech to the Conservative Party Conference that "we are all in this together". Let's consider what this might mean.
- [Alex Singleton - wrong as usual](https://owen.org/blog/2182/) - Alex Singleton is the man who called himself the Globalisation Institute for a while, which he used as a platform to argue against things that would help poor people, like fair trade and aid. When that folded (presumably on account of talking rubbish) he now seems to write leaders for the Daily Telegraph. The always
- [Don't read this, read....](https://owen.org/blog/2173/) - Ngaire Woods on what Africa needs from the G20 Bill Easterly's new AidWatch blog The Global Crisis Debate in the run up to the G20 (moderated by Dani Rodrik) Simon Maxwell's reflections on Davos
- [Good sentences](https://owen.org/blog/2136/) - From John Naughton: The most satisfactory sight yesterday was that of Dick Cheney, looking for all the world like Dr Strangelove, being wheeled off the scene in a wheelchair. The only problem is that he was then helped into a limousine rather than a police van. Coming soon_ Obama’s first mistake_ _ Memex 1.1Download
- [A tale of two inquiries](https://owen.org/blog/691/) - The Government has consistently refused to set up a statutory inquiry into the way that many thousands of haemophiliacs were put at risk by the supply of contaminated blood products. (The new inquiry by Lord Archer of Sandwell is an independent inquiry, not a government inquiry, and has no powers to subpoena witnesses or evidence.)
- [World Bank on effectiveness of aid](https://owen.org/blog/690/) - The head of evaluation at the World Bank writing in the Guardian blog about the effectiveness of aid: For donors, this means going beyond the push for free-standing projects and the tracking of individual project successes, to supporting better coordination and linkages. For developing countries, it means being in the driver's seat in recognizing and
- [Being Paul Wolfowitz’s girlfriend](https://owen.org/blog/686/) - According to Murray Waas: Employees of the World Bank have been "expressing concern, dismay, and outrage" regarding favoritism shown by the bank and the Bush administration towards the one-time girlfriend of World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz, according to an internal memo circulated within the bank by the World Bank Group Association, which represents the rights
- [Best of British](https://owen.org/blog/495/) - Tim Worstall's weekly roundup of the best of British Blogs is up. Tabloid Edition_ Britblog Roundup # 63Download
- [Marathon runners have stamina](https://owen.org/blog/491/) - A self-confessed sex-fiend, the Girl with a one-track mind reports her experience of a marathon runner (not safe for work): ... I had a fling with a marathon runner for a while - damn that boy had stamina. Stamina like you wouldn’t believe. ... But it just goes to show that there is a correlation
- [Bold vs risky](https://owen.org/blog/69/) - Reich on Palin: while Ms. Palin is perfectly entitled to believe that evolution is a myth, that women should be barred from choosing to have abortions, and that global warming has yet to be proven, these views all run counter to the views of mainstream America.
- ["One of Mr Blair’s successes"](https://owen.org/blog/698/) - I've just heard Jack Straw tell the Today programme that one of Mr Blair's great successes was to persuade the United States at Gleneagles to increase aid to Africa. The transcript of the briefing by US officials on Air Force One going home from Gleneagles says different. Press Gaggle by Scott McClellan and Faryar Shirzad
- [Fascist America in 10 easy steps](https://owen.org/blog/696/) - You must read this article by Naomi Wolf in the Guardian From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all Fascist America, in 10 easy steps _
- [“Wild speculation” is not the same as “false”](https://owen.org/blog/490/) - According to CNN, President Bush said that reports that his administration has considered nuclear strikes against Iraq are "wild speculation". "And by the way, I read the articles in the newspapers this weekend. It was just wild speculation, by the way. What you're reading is wild speculation. Which is, kind of a -- you know,
- [Grauniad misattributes comments as bloggers](https://owen.org/blog/486/) - Today's Guardian (27 March) includes a roundup of what the bloggers are saying about Norman Kember. (I can't find it online). Except that I did not say what is attributed to me. The excellent Neil Hall said it, in the comments to my post.
- [Government small enough to fit into your bedroom](https://owen.org/blog/481/) - According to MSNBC.com the state of Mississippi has passed a law which outlaws sex toys: “A person commits the offense of distributing unlawful sexual devices when he knowingly sells, advertises, publishes or exhibits to any person any three-dimensional device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs or offers to
- [Limiting foreign ownership of companies - not protectionism?](https://owen.org/blog/480/) - Daniel Davies in the new Guardian blog thing writes that limiting foreign ownership of companies is not the same as forms of protectionism that restrict trade in goods and services: while the gains from goods markets liberalisation are big and definitely there, the gains from capital account liberalisation are small and frustratingly difficult to detect,
- [Harriet Harman](https://owen.org/blog/475/) - Ms Harman may have been surprised to hear David Grossman on Newsnight this evening refer to Jack Dromey as being married to "former Minister Harriet Harman". Perhaps Mr Grossman knows something that the Department of Constitutional Affairs does not?
- [Is it 20:20 hindsight?](https://owen.org/blog/473/) - Andrew Sullivan yesterday: I'm aware of one person who clearly stated before the war that he believed that Saddam had no WMDs. That was Scott Ritter. This is not the same as saying that we didn't know for sure, or should have waited some more; or that containment could have worked for a few months
- [George W Bush is right about these](https://owen.org/blog/469/) - George W Bush is right about: opposing the nonsense that it is dangerous to let an Arab company operate your ports seeking a line-item veto to enable the President to veto individual budget lines. The "take it or leave it" budget packages are a recipe for pork. Credit where it is due.
- [New mechanisms to finance aid: are they a good idea?](https://owen.org/blog/468/) - I've got a post up at Views from the Center on whether the proposed new mechanisms to finance aid are a good idea. Two new mechanisms for financing aid are close to being agreed. First, yesterday's UK Guardian reported that France and Britain have agreed to raise billions of dollars for health and education by floating
- [Is Bono noble but misdirected?](https://owen.org/blog/465/) - I've got a post up at Views from the Center - the Center for Global Development blog on development issues, taking issue with Jagdish Bhagwati in today's Financial Times who says that Bono is noble but misdirected. February 28, 2006 Jagdish Bhagwati in today's Financial Times says that Bono is noble but misdirected: But I
- [The accountability of politicians](https://owen.org/blog/463/) - Jowell facing conduct questions Shadow leader of the Commons Theresa May has demanded a ruling on whether Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell has breached the ministerial conduct code. Ms May has written to Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell asking him to make a ruling on the matter. I have said it before, and I will say
- [Government to make swearing illegal?](https://owen.org/blog/459/) - Now that the Government has decided to get rid of inconvenient elections, and decided to bypass the tedious business of getting parliamentary approval for new laws, it is good to see them using their new powers to crack down on swearing. (PS Only one of these is a spoof ...) How I woke up to
- [You read it here first, folks …](https://owen.org/blog/455/) - (From today's news) I intended this as a spoof, on November 3rd last year, not as a recommendation! BBC NEWS _ Politics _ Council polls could be scrappedDownload
- [David Cameron is New Doctor Who (spoof)](https://owen.org/blog/401/) - See full story
- [What the Cabinet Secretary did not say](https://owen.org/blog/467/) - Here is the letter Gus O'Donnell did not write: (And here is the one he did write.) BBC NEWS _ Politics _ In Full_ Tessa Jowell inquiry letterDownload
- [Elections abolished (?)](https://owen.org/blog/385/) - Full story here
- [Eight ways to change the world](https://owen.org/blog/282/) - The Guardian has an online photograph exhibition about the eight Millennium Development Goals. Jeff Sachs's introduction says: This remarkable exhibition of photographs on behalf of the Millennium Development Goals brilliantly highlights our common humanity. We look at photos of people living in extreme poverty but see first and foremost their humanity and spirit and dedication,
- [EU, China and Trade](https://owen.org/blog/265/) - Take a look at the article in The Business by Alex Singleton of the Globalization Institute, denouncing EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson for the agreement to limit textile imports from China. A sample: The EU's stance is perverse and immoral and will hit the weakest and poorest hardest, both in Europe and in China; it
- [Why Ian Blair should not resign, and why perhaps he should](https://owen.org/blog/259/) - There have been calls for Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, to resign over his remarks at a press conference following the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Tube station on 22 July. Blair said The information I have available if that this shooting is directly linked to the ongoing and expanding
- [House of Lords Reform 2: A suggestion](https://owen.org/blog/262/) - In a companion post, I summarise the recent round of blogging about House of Lords Reform, and highlight some common themes on which there seems to be quite a bit of consensus. In this post, I offer my own, slightly unusual suggestion for House of Lords reform, which I think would be one way to
- [House of Lords Reform 1: The Bloggers Round Up](https://owen.org/blog/260/) - This is the first of two contributions to the debate reforming the UK House of Lords. This post summarises the issues raised by various blogs who wrote about this in a coordinated effort on 10th August. A companion piece makes a novel proposal for reform. It summarises the blogs, and draws out some common themes.
- [UK Bloggers First Scalp?](https://owen.org/blog/501/) - According to this BBC report, the Government is to back down over the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which would have given ministers the power to alter legislation without the approval of Parliament. If so this is perhaps the first scalp for UK bloggers, who I believe first identified the dangers of this Bill, analysis
- [Dangerous Foreigners Act 2006](https://owen.org/blog/500/) - Please tell me that the following are not controversial: courts, not civil servants or politicians, should determine what punishment a criminal deserves, based on the individual circumstances of the crime; foreigners should be punished no more harshly, and no less, than a UK citizen. I think it is downright racist to have a policy of
- [Blogging from Firefox with Performancing](https://owen.org/blog/436/) - Performancing for Firefox has released version 1.1 of its very impressive add-in for Firefox. It is a full featured blog editor that sits within Firefox, and makes it very easy to bash out a quick post while you are browsing. It is especially useful if you are mainly a "link-quote-comment" blogger. Easy to install (and
- [Another reason to love America](https://owen.org/blog/383/) - The TV commentators here in the US are distinctly underwhelmed by the visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales; they are not just bored, they are mocking the British. Maybe, as Christine Odone claims (via Tim) it is because a second marriage to your long-time mistress is less romantic than marrying a glamorous princess.
- [The enquiry into Katrina](https://owen.org/blog/281/) - I am not sure yet if President Bush is seriously planning to conduct his own enquiry into Katrina, or if this was just a poor choice of words. If he does end up holding an enquiry into the events, I predict this will be his undoing. It is always the cover-up that creates the political
- [Why this blog?](https://owen.org/blog/1130/) - I guess my first blog should explain why I'm doing this. That way I (and you) can look back to see whether my expectations have been met. Is this just an electronic form of vanity publishing? I was impressed by a piece in the Observer by John Naughton which explained by blogging has been so
- [The myth of intellectual property rights](https://owen.org/blog/1131/) - Thirteen million people died last year of curable diseases. Of these, three million children died from diseases that are preventable with currently available vaccines (see GAVI). This is 35,000 people every day – seven times as many deaths each day as died in the attack on the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001. The
- [Abortion: why the 24 week rule is absurd](https://owen.org/blog/1132/) - The Reverend Joanne Jepson has been given permission to seek a judicial review of the decision by West Mercia Police not to prosecute a woman who had an abortion of a foetus that would have been born with a cleft palate. The current abortion law in England is the 1967 Abortion Act, as amended in
- [I had a vasectomy today](https://owen.org/blog/1133/) - Today I had a vasectomy. I realise that this is relatively unusual for a man of only 36 with no children. But I have absolutely no doubt, and nor does my partner, that we do not want to have children, so I regard the risk of wanting to reverse it as, effectively, zero. Why? My
- [More on the vasectomy](https://owen.org/blog/1134/) - 3 days later, I still feel as if someone has gripped my balls and given them a hard twist. I am not in pain exactly - more of a dull ache, really. As a result, I feel a little nauseus. I think it is getting better, but more slowly than I would like. The actual
- [Vasectomy update](https://owen.org/blog/1136/) - It is now 6 weeks and a day since I had the snip. I now have only very occasional discomfort when running - usually just at the start, when I still sometimes feel as if I need to urinate. When I am not running, and most of the time when I am, I cannot feel
- [Update on the snip](https://owen.org/blog/1135/) - After ten days, the stitches are beginning to dissolve, and the incisisions seem to be healing well. However, there is still some inflammation in the groin area, on either side of the base of my penis, and at in the scrotum at about the point where my vas deferens was cut. The inflammation in the
- [Targets in public services do more harm than good](https://owen.org/blog/1137/) - Targets for the management of businesses, including public services, do more harm than good. Target setting is based on a command and control mindset which assumes that the job of managers is to find a way to "get the workers to do the work". The Civil Service has taught managers that our job is to
- [Seven habits for effective marathon training](https://owen.org/blog/1138/) - In 1998, I made a New Year's resolution to run a marathon in less than 3 hours. It has taken me six years to achieve this goal. I've tried many different approaches to training; looked for shortcuts; made mistakes; and learned lessons. I have learned a lot from books, magazines and articles; but I have
- [Richard Clarke](https://owen.org/blog/1140/) - Richard Clarke, former counter-terrorism coordinator in the White House and author of Against all Enemies, spoke at Berkeley last night to a packed auditorium. He came across as civilized, well-informed, thoughtful; and genuinely contrite that he and his colleagues had failed to convince the Bush administration of the importance of pre-empting an attack by Al
- [Open Season for Preemptive Attacks](https://owen.org/blog/1141/) - George Bush and Tony Blair may want to reflect that they have created the precedent, through their action in Iraq, which has allowed the Russians to announce today that Russia will take pre-emptive strikes anywhere in the world. According to BBC news website "We will carry out all measures to liquidate terrorist bases in any
- [To whom does the Policy Directorate report?](https://owen.org/blog/16/) - It seems that Alan Milburn, now rejoicing in the feudal title of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (very New Labour), will have responsibility in No.10 for the policy directorate and the strategy unit. These staff obtain such influence as they have in Whitehall from having direct access to the Prime Minister, and being thought
- [Darfur & the failure to act](https://owen.org/blog/1142/) - At the Labour Party conference in October 2001, shortly after the atrocities of 9/11, Tony Blair made this promise: And I tell you if Rwanda happened again today as it did in 1993, when a million people were slaughtered in cold blood, we would have a moral duty to act there also. We were there
- [The Corporation](https://owen.org/blog/1143/) - Went to see The Corporation the other night. This documentary film looks at the history of corporations, and criticises the behaviour of many companies. Highly recommended. Check the film's website: www.thecorporation.com.
- [New blog software](https://owen.org/blog/1145/) - I've upgraded my blog software. I use WordPress. If you are using Firefox, and if you want to use the "live bookmark" feature, click on the orange icon in the bottom left hand corner.
- [Gary Becker and Richard Posner Blog](https://owen.org/blog/1147/) - Take a look at a new blog by Gary Becker and Richard Posner.
- [Story of our trip to Ethiopia](https://owen.org/blog/1148/) - Grethe and I have, at last, got around to writing an account of our cycling holiday in Ethiopia in 2002. You can read about it here. Ethiopia is a wonderful destination for a holiday. It has a fascinating history, spectacular and varied countryside, open and engaging people, and a very pleasant climate. Ethiopia needs income
- [Is America stingy with aid?](https://owen.org/blog/27/) - There is an interesting discussion going on about whether the US is "stingy" in the amount of aid it gives. US official aid is 0.15% of national income. But some commentators are claiming that this understates American generosity, because of substantial flows of private giving. See, for example: Replublicans and Conservatives Blog Bruce Bartlett's article
- [Aid and private giving](https://owen.org/blog/1149/) - A request has flooded in for the figures for my previous posting ("Is America stingy with aid?"). So I have worked out league tables for the industrialised countries which rank countries according to: public and private giving measured in total dollars (the US is ranked 1st of 22) public and private giving as a percent
- [Another McDonalds Tragedy](https://owen.org/blog/29/) - I have the greatest sympathy for the family of Charlie Bell, the Chief Executive of McDonalds who died on Sunday of cancer of the colon at the age of 43. That is a tragically young age for a man who should have had a great future. It is all the more saddening because it follows
- [Visiting Pennsylvania](https://owen.org/blog/30/) - We spent the weekend in Pennsylvania. You can see the photos here. Philadelphia was the venue for the meetings which lead to the drafting of the US Declaration of Independence, and the US Constitution - documents (esp the Declaration of Independence) which are, even today, inspiring and radical. It is difficult to conceive of such
- [May I still play football if I wear gloves?](https://owen.org/blog/1150/) - My Dad reproduced this very funny spoof letter in his blog - see it here. Every time I read it, it seems funnier and funnier. Dear President Bush:Congratulations on your election victory and for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from you and understand why you
- [The top ten stories you should have heard about](https://owen.org/blog/1152/) - Millions of people are living through catastrophes in places that are never mentioned on the evening news. The NGO Medicins Sans Frontiers has compiled the top ten stories of 2004 that you should have heard of. The 10 stories highlighted by MSF accounted for just one minute of the 14,561 minutes on the three major
- [Liberty and terrorism](https://owen.org/blog/1153/) - Whatever you think of the outcome of the election, the inauguration of the President is a special moment. The ability of a country to hand power peacefully from one administration to the next is one of the most important defining features of democracy. The US should be proud of its history of doing so successfully
- [Running in Golden Gate Park](https://owen.org/blog/1154/) - It was a cool, sunny day: perfect for joining the KStars running club for one of their regular Saturday morning runs in the Golden Gate Park. (The KStars was co-founded by our friend, David Hoatson.) Apparently, lots of other people thought it would be a good day to go running with KStars, which had a
- [Dick Crossman and the holocaust](https://owen.org/blog/1155/) - John Naugton has a very interesting story about Dick Crossman, the great Labour politician and writer; who apparently insisted that one of the death camps be filmed as it was liberated, because some day people will deny that this ever happened. Sixty years on _ Memex 1.1Download
- [Why I like living in California](https://owen.org/blog/1156/) - In case you wonder why we like living in California (as if), the following two pictures may help to explain. (Yesterday in Times Square, New York) See more photos from today's bike ride. With warm thoughts to those living on the other coast ...
- [Hotel Rwanda - great film](https://owen.org/blog/1158/) - We went to see Hotel Rwanda - a film about a hotel manager who saved more than a thousand people during the Rwanda genocide, by sheltering them in the Hotel Mille Collines. It is a very good film: both moving and, as far as I know, reasonably accurate in its account of what happened in
- [Big sugar is poisoning us](https://owen.org/blog/1159/) - The US Government published new dietary guidelines on January 13, 2005. These guidelines are updated every five years. The Government did not take on the sugar industry by recommending that people should eat less sugar. Instead, the pitifully vague conclusion is that we should choose foods with "little added sugars or caloric sweeteners". It even
- [Successful elections do not vindicate the war](https://owen.org/blog/42/) - The initial news from Iraq is very encouraging: media reports are talking about a turnout of more than 70 percent. This would be an excellent step towards a representative government in Iraq. I very much hope the elections in Iraq do turn out to be as successful as these reports suggest, and that the new
- [Rewriting history](https://owen.org/blog/1160/) - RC has a blog which claims, about the Iraqi elections, I was naïve, perhaps, in believing that all anti-war liberals could put aside their hatred for Bush and his policies for just one day and recognize the critical importance of the Iraqi experiment with democracy. ... For war supporters, the election mirrored the Afghani elections
- [Nelson Mandela’s Speech](https://owen.org/blog/1161/) - Nelson Mandela made a very good speech in Trafalgar Square today, in an effort to galvanise young people. For me, the key passage in this speech is this: Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. Please be a
- [Europe and America](https://owen.org/blog/1162/) - Tony Judt has an excellent article in the 10th February edition of the New York Review of Books, discussing the economic, social and cultural evolution of the US and Europe. As a Brit living in America, and loving it, this is of course interesting to me. The article includes some interesting statistics showing that the
- [Reporting from Iraq](https://owen.org/blog/1163/) - Stephen Grey has shown great courage in spending a great deal of time in Iraq during and since the war. His journalism about Iraq, which you can read here on his website, is powerful and vivid. (Full disclosure: Stephen is an old friend.)
- [San Francisco Half Marathon](https://owen.org/blog/1164/) - Grethe and I ran the Kaiser Permanente Half Marathon in San Francisco yesterday. Over six thousand runners took part on a bright morning, which began cool but which was warm in the sunshine. We both ran personal bests (Grethe: 1:32:22; Owen: 1:17:49) - no doubt in part because the course is net downhill, though that
- [Some Linux solutions](https://owen.org/blog/1165/) - Cannot talk to klauncher I've been updating my KDE 3.3 libraries for SUSE 9.2 and had some problems. Trying to run konqueror in file management mode as root gave the message: "Cannot talk to klauncher" The solution is to delete /root/.DCOPserver_*__0 Switch off autorun Every time I put a CD in to my drive, KSCD
- [Broadband as an addiction](https://owen.org/blog/59/) - There is an interesting story on the BBC magazine about a man who has cancelled his broadband because it was too addictive. Sit down to work. Ten minutes in, the new mail icon tempts me from the bottom of the screen. I'll just check. Nothing like a few juicy new e-mails. Click a few links.
- [African leadership is improving](https://owen.org/blog/1166/) - President Gnassingbe Eyadema of Togo died last weekend. He was Africa's longest serving leader, taking power in a military coup in 1967 (the year I was born). Eyadema was one of Africa's strongmen. For twenty years, political parties were banned; and when elections were allowed from 1991, there was electoral malpractice and continued abuses of
- [Steven Walt on US Foreign Policy](https://owen.org/blog/1168/) - Steven M Walt - academic dean and Professor of International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University - has a long, balanced article in the current edition Boston Review about US Foreign Policy. He concludes: What is needed instead is greater confidence in America's fundamental principles and institutions and greater
- [The open source revolution](https://owen.org/blog/1169/) - You may not have noticed the footer on every page of this website which allows the use of the content of the site under the creative commons licence. The Creative Commons organisation has announced today that the number of sites linked to one of their licences now exceeds 5 million. And the firefox web browser
- [The Top 100 Gadgets of All Time](https://owen.org/blog/1170/) - Take a trip down memory lane. Mobile PC has compiled a list of the top 100 gadgets of all time. See if you can guess what number one is going to be. (It is obvious to anyone who lives in San Francisco.)
- [Detention without trial](https://owen.org/blog/1171/) - The existing powers of imprisonment without trial lapse on March 14. Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, apparently intends to introduce new counter-terrorism legislation to replace them. (The existing laws were heavily criticised by the law lords.) The proposals will give the Home Secretary the power to order that a terror suspect, British or foreign, be
- [Getting old?](https://owen.org/blog/1172/) - Today is my birthday: I am 38. Which is the same age as Carlos Lopes was on April 20th, 1985, when he set the world marathon record of 2h7m12 s. It all just goes on getting better. So far.
- [The wrong sort of socialism](https://owen.org/blog/1173/) - The UK Government has launched a new website to provide information about IT security. This suggests a somewhat strange idea of what Government is for. The private sector does this sort of thing pretty well - there are lots of websites providing useful and free information about viruses, and there are tools, both free and
- [Sedgemore on the Prevention of Terrorism](https://owen.org/blog/1174/) - Brian Sedgemore, who is retiring from Parliament at the next election, will be sorely missed. His speech during the recent debate on the Government's proposals for the prevention of terrorism, is a model of passion and clarity. Here is an extract: However, our debate here tonight is a grim reminder of how the Prime Minister
- [Yesterday, more than 20,000 people perished of extreme poverty](https://owen.org/blog/1175/) - Jeff Sachs, the economist who heads the United Nations' Millennium Development Project says in "The End of Poverty": Every morning, our newspapers could report, 'More than 20,000 people perished yesterday of extreme poverty.' The New York Times rose to that challenge with its editorial yesterday (27 February - registration required). This country is going to
- [Adam Smith Institute and FairTrade](https://owen.org/blog/1176/) - The Adam Smith Institute is known for its robust support for free markets. Their blog is always interesting and often well-informed; and they enjoy taking unconventional positions on topical policy issues. But every so often, the position they take is not well thought through, and not consistent with their general philosophy. It feels as if
- [The case for US Aid](https://owen.org/blog/1177/) - The prolific Brad DeLong, an economist here at Berkeley (where I am a visiting scholar), makes a good case for the US to do everything it can to help China and India to develop. It is very important for the late-twenty first century national security of the United States that, fifty years from now, schoolchildren
- [Outvoting the US at the World Bank](https://owen.org/blog/1178/) - It is traditional for the Managing Director of the IMF to be a European; and for the President of the World Bank to be an American (the current World Bank President, an Australian called Jim Wolfensohn, took US citizenship to get the job). Of course, the job should be advertised, and chosen through an open
- [Making markets for vaccines](https://owen.org/blog/1179/) - In my day job, I am working on how we can accelerate research and development of new vaccines for malaria, AIDS and other diseases concentrated in developing countries. Alan Beattie has an article in today's FT on the topic (quoting me.) You can read the article below. This is the FT link (but it requires
- [Aid works: introduction](https://owen.org/blog/1180/) - Over dinner the other night, some friends - all intelligent, well-informed, thoughtful and caring people - were expressing scepticism that foreign assistance actually works. They were concerned that aid is often syphoned off by corrupt elites, and ends up in private bank accounts in Switzerland. I suspect their views are fairly typical of how people
- [Aid works: the eradication of Smallpox](https://owen.org/blog/92/) - Update: see a longer post on smallpox here. An estimated 300 million people died from smallpox in the 20th century. As a result of a global international effort, financed by foreign aid, the disease has been eradicated. In the middle of the 20th Century, there were approximately 10 to 15 million cases of smallpox in
- [Plucky little Denmark](https://owen.org/blog/1182/) - Plucky little Denmark plans to sabotage the EU's sinister and unwelcome plans to introduce software patents. Another reason to be thankful to the Danes.
- [Aid works: aid leads to economic growth](https://owen.org/blog/1183/) - There have been several studies looking at whether aid results in economic growth, which all reach broadly similar conclusions. The most recent, and best study, is by my colleagues at the Center for Global Development. Like the other studies, it finds that aid has had a substantial positive impact on growth. On average, aid worth
- [Denmark not so plucky](https://owen.org/blog/1184/) - My forecast was wrong: Denmark did not block the the EU Council of Ministers from approving a proposed law which would allow patents on software. According to Groklaw, Bill Gates threatened the Danish Prime Minister with the loss of 800 software jobs if Denmark did not support the patents. Clearly Denmark was not so plucky
- [The role of the net in politics](https://owen.org/blog/1185/) - In 2004, 75 million Americans – 37% of the adult population and 61% of online Americans – used the internet to get political news and information, discuss candidates and debate issues in emails, or participate directly in the political process by volunteering or giving contributions to candidates. See the full report here. According to the
- [Online war about aid effectiveness](https://owen.org/blog/1186/) - Over at Our Word is Our Weapon, Jim from North London writes a well-informed and interesting blog about current issues in international development, as well as various other issues of social policy. This week, Jim has rightly taken Tim Worstall to task for claiming that aid does not work. As usual, Jim is spot on
- [Where the aid goes](https://owen.org/blog/1187/) - According to Jeff Sachs in this week's Time Magazine: Aid per sub-Saharan African in 2002 was just $30. Of that modest amount, almost $5 was actually for consultants from the donor countries, more than $3 was for emergency aid, about $4 went for servicing Africa's debts, and $5 was for debt relief operations. The rest,
- [Incentives for organ donors](https://owen.org/blog/1188/) - The Dutch Health Minister has proposed a system under which people who sign organ donor cards would receive points which would raise them on the waiting list should they one day need an organ. That's a good idea. I'd also be in favour of an "opt-out" system, in which everyone is assumed to consent to
- [Aid works: education in Tanzania](https://owen.org/blog/1189/) - In 2001, using the resources released by debt relief, Tanzania increased the education budget by 130 percent and eliminated school fees, with the aim of reaching universal basic education by 2006. Almost overnight, an estimated 1.6 million kids returned to school. By 2004, the number of children in primary school had increased by 50 percent.
- [The argument from intelligent design](https://owen.org/blog/1190/) - Dr Charles Townes was on National Public Radio yesterday, because he has been awarded the Templeton Prize for progress or research in spiritual matters. Dr Townes won the Nobel Prize for physics for inventing the laser, and is Professor here at Berkeley. What shocked me was that Dr Townes said that he thought that complexity
- [God and Government](https://owen.org/blog/1191/) - Brad DeLong rightly attacks Supreme Court Justice Nino Scalia for saying that "government comes from God". As DeLong says Nino Scalia's views on this are profoundly -- there is no other word for it -- UnAmerican. Here in the United States, we are all children of Thomas Jefferson. God does not give us rulers. Instead,
- [Bob Geldof calls it how it is](https://owen.org/blog/1192/) - According to Ireland Online, Bob Geldof has asked Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to be robust when they ask President Bush to increase aid to help to reduce poverty. At the launch of the Africa Commission report, Geldof said: Tony and Gordon have to prepare to ring up George and say, 'Do this, George, do
- [Aid works: measles deaths reduced](https://owen.org/blog/1193/) - The bad news is that over half a million children still die of measles each year, even though we can save these lives for less than a dollar each, using the measles vaccine. The good news is that, since 1999, the number of children dying of measles in Africa has been reduced by 46 percent.
- [Save Toby](https://owen.org/blog/1194/) - This guy rescues an injured rabbit; and then creates a website saying that, unless he receives $50k in donations or merchandise purchases by June 30th 2005, he is going to eat the rabbit. The site has lots of cute photos (including one of the rabbit in a cooking pot) and there are plans to include
- [Paul Wolfowitz nominated to World Bank](https://owen.org/blog/1195/) - It was announced today that the US plans to nominate Paul Wolfowitz. So I was wrong in my earlier prediction that Randall Tobias would be nominated to be President of the World Bank. I'll be interested to see what the reaction of the Europeans is to this proposal (which is all it is, at this
- [Comparing Iraq and Darfur](https://owen.org/blog/1196/) - Some statistics comparing Iraq, where we have intervened, and Darfur, where we have not intervened. I'm happy to take corrections, or suggestions for additions.
- [The first test of the Africa Commission](https://owen.org/blog/1197/) - The report of the Africa Commission, whose members include Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, said just 5 days ago (p75) : Appointments of the heads of international institutions should be decided upon by open competition which looks for the best candidates rather than by traditions which limit these appointments by nationality. One international appointment of
- [Easterly on Sachs](https://owen.org/blog/1198/) - Over at Our Word is Our Weapon, Jim has done a good job in explaining why Bill Easterly's critique of Jeff Sachs's new book, The End of Poverty, is not up to Easterley's usual standards. I thought Bill Easterly's book, The Elusive Quest for Growth, was excellent. Indeed, one lesson I thought I learned from
- [Aid works: safe drinking water](https://owen.org/blog/1200/) - The good news is that 83% of the world's population now has access to safe drinking water. But the bad news is that, despite good progress, there are more than 1 billion people without safe water and 2 billion people without sanitation. From 1990 to 2002, the proportion of the world's population with access to
- [Abortion, conscience and elections](https://owen.org/blog/1201/) - There is public debate about abortion again in the UK. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, says in today's Sunday Times that he hopes that questioning candidates could prompt a wider debate. First, on the merits of the issue itself, as I argued here in 2003, there is no case for adjusting the time limit
- [More objectivity, less balance, please](https://owen.org/blog/1202/) - Paul Krugman made an interesting observation in a talk at Berkeley, which is becoming something of a meme. Apologies to those for whom this is obvious, but it was new to me. He pointed that we should distinguish between balance and objectivity in our media. Let me give an example. Evolution is a scientific theory
- [What do city analysts do?](https://owen.org/blog/1203/) - We've all been amused by former Enron Chief Executive Ken Lay trying to present himself as a regular guy who did not understand technology and did not understand finance. The court didn't believe him and has sent him to prison. But the collapse of Enron and of Worldcom should make us wonder what we are
- [Aid works: rates of return of 20-30%](https://owen.org/blog/1204/) - Donor agencies have tried to measure the rates of return on investment in individual, aid-financed projects, and have typically estimated ex post rates of return ranging from 10 to 30 percent. Studies of the macroeconomic impact of aid up to now have run growth regressions in which aid is one among many explanatory variables for
- [World Water Day](https://owen.org/blog/1205/) - Spare a thought for 1.1 billion people - 1 in 6 of the world's population - who do not have access to safe drinking water.
- [Are you thinking what I’m thinking?](https://owen.org/blog/1206/) - Living in America, I am fortunately spared all but the worst excesses of the British election, which seems to be in full swing despite not having been formally declared. Even at this distance, the Tory posters - "are you thinking what I'm thinking" - hadn't passed me by altogether. So I enjoyed the Pseudo Magazine's
- [Pay Day for Big Sugar](https://owen.org/blog/1207/) - The allocation of EU Common Agricultural Policy subsidies has been released, under the Freedom of Information Act. Who get's the money? It turns out that the money is not being used to support struggling farmers and preserve a rural way of life. A large chunk supports big agri-business. And top of the list is Big
- [My new blog on vaccines](https://owen.org/blog/1208/) - I've been setting up the first blog for my employer, the Center for Global Development. This blog is about the use of vaccines in developing countries - mainly about the development of new vaccines, but also about access to existing vaccines. If you think that might interest you, take a look here.
- [Abortion and stem cell research](https://owen.org/blog/1209/) - Read Matthew Yglesias on the contradiction between opposing abortion but believing in stem cell research. the view seems to be that the moral standing of embryonic life is somehow large enough to override a woman's interest in her autonomy, but small enough to be overridden by our interest in maybe developing a treatment for Parkinson's
- [Aid works: abolition of Guinea Worm](https://owen.org/blog/1210/) - Guinea worm is set to be the next disease eradicated from the world and the first to be overcome without a vaccine or treatment. Through the effort of The Carter Center and its partners, this disease has been reduced by 99 percent: from an estimated 3.5 million cases in 1986 to fewer than 32,193 reported
- [Every 3 seconds](https://owen.org/blog/1211/) - Make Poverty History has a short video here about the fact that a child dies unnecessarily every 3 seconds of extreme poverty. https://youtu.be/gFfIIW_xQq4?feature=shared
- [Making money from obesity](https://owen.org/blog/1212/) - Today's NY Times has an interesting article about drugs companies racing to make drugs to fight obesity. From pharmaceutical giants to tiny start-ups, the industry is spending billions of dollars developing obesity drugs. An estimated 200 possibilities are now in the research pipeline or under test among patients at dozens of clinics like L-Marc, according
- [Washington Post on Paul Wolfowitz](https://owen.org/blog/1213/) - Bizarre editorial in the Washington Post saying that People who care about this institution and its mission -- as many of Mr. Wolfowitz's detractors do -- should think carefully before they damage it by attacking its new boss. In other words, we should not criticize the appointment of the World Bank President because, er, it
- [Differential pricing](https://owen.org/blog/1214/) - There is a strange misconception around that differential pricing of pharmaceuticals (in which rich countries pay more than poor countries) is a form of subsidy by the rich of the poor. In fact, the opposite is true. If the people in poor countries pay something above the marginal cost - even if only slightly -
- [What rich countries should do](https://owen.org/blog/1215/) - Tim Worstall worries that he will get stick from me and Jim about his latest post, in which he draw attention to a piece by Jeff Sachs. Sachs says: If the United States and a united Europe will honour their long-standing - and long-neglected - pledge of 0.7% of GNP, then Africans and other impoverished
- [Trade Justice and Slavery](https://owen.org/blog/129/) - Christian Aid does itself no favours by talking of "the slavery of free trade". To compare free trade with slavery is a grotesque mischaracterisation. A more rational position would be: trade liberalisation will, on average, increase incomes and well-being across the world; the challenge for globalisation is to determine how those gains are shared; because
- [New Pope](https://owen.org/blog/130/) - The bad news is that the cardinals, hand-picked by JPII, have chosen as the new Pope a man who will continue to cause the suffering and deaths of millions of people across the developing world by opposing contraception and the use of condoms, which reduce the spread of AIDS. The good news is that, by
- [The Pope and the Nazis](https://owen.org/blog/132/) - Very interesting article in The Times about Ratzinger and his time in the Hitler Youth. “Resistance was truly impossible,” Georg Ratzinger said. ... Some locals in Traunstein, like Elizabeth Lohner, 84, whose brother-in-law was sent to Dachau as a conscientious objector, dismiss such suggestions. “It was possible to resist, and those people set an example
- [America’s health system: good value for money?](https://owen.org/blog/135/) - Paul Krugman has two interesting articles in the New York Times, here and here about the US Health Care system. Most Americans probably don't know that we have substantially lower life-expectancy and higher infant-mortality figures than other advanced countries. It would be wrong to jump to the conclusion that this poor performance is entirely the
- [Ghana - a fragile success](https://owen.org/blog/138/) - New York Times Editorial today (free registration required) about Ghana's success, against enormous odds, in making progress towards democracy and economic growth. Ghanaians like to brag that they have passed the point of no return in making their humid patch of West Africa a functioning democracy with all the perks that brings: a free and
- [It is always the cover-up that does you](https://owen.org/blog/139/) - An iron law of politics is that it is never the mistake that causes the political damage, but the cover-up. Think of Watergate, or the Lewinsky affair. Think of Peter Mandelson's troubles over his loan from Robinson, or Blunkett's resignation. The leak of the Attorney General's advice on the legality of the war in Iraq
- [How AIDS is being defeated in Uganda](https://owen.org/blog/140/) - AidsMatters reports that two recent reviews of Uganda's celebrated "ABC" (abstinence, be faithful, condoms) approach to AIDS management have questioned whether abstinence and being faithful have contributed to the decline in AIDS in Uganda. First, researchers at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health reported in February that abstinence and fidelity don't seem to have played
- [Changing behaviour by policy](https://owen.org/blog/141/) - The British Government's new website on sustainable development is a commendably thoughtful contribution. WorldChanging.com has an interesting commentary: Behavioral inertia is a tricky thing, but once overcome, large changes can happen at once. They draw an analogy to smoking--in the 1950's, 70% of Brits smoked, but after a few decades of this four-pronged approach the
- [Sudan, and what America stands for](https://owen.org/blog/142/) - I commend to you an excellent article at Democracy Arsenal about Sudan, and the failure of the powerful nations to stop the genocide in Darfur. (The article is about United States policy, but the point applies equally to the United Kingdom.) In the eyes of the world, Darfur is a test – maybe the most
- [Things the UN Does Well](https://owen.org/blog/143/) - Another very interesting post at Democracy Arsenal, this time reminding us of ten things the UN does well. This will take a look at the top 10 things the U.S. does well or, in a few cases, not quite "well" but at least better than any other organization out there. The approach of D-Day on
- [Don’t mention the war …](https://owen.org/blog/144/) - Lovely quote from Malcolm Rifkind, today appointed as the shadow to David Blunkett, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, who happens to be blind: I will be looking at David Blunkett across the Despatch Box and holding him to account on behalf of the country.
- [Bizarre memorial](https://owen.org/blog/145/) - As I was crossing Park Lane today from Hyde Park at Brook Gate, I stumbled across a new "Animals At War" memorial. The memorial, designed by sculptor David Backhouse, is carved from Portland stone, with bronze relief of different animals. The inscription reads: Animals In War. This monument is dedicated to all the animals that
- [The politics of aid and NGOs](https://owen.org/blog/147/) - I was very struck by this article by the BBC's Lara Pawson, about the behaviour of ex pats living in Africa. When aid agencies like the UN’s World Food Programme move in, African administrations tend to be let off the hook. But who can object? They’re only there to help. The aid worker goes to
- [Kaletsky is over-optimistic](https://owen.org/blog/148/) - Anatole Kaletsky has this article in the May 2005 edition of Prospect which argues that economics has been of declining political importance - as evidenced by the absence of economic policy as an important topic in the 2005 General Election. Since the mid-1990s, however, the idea of economics as the dominant factor in British, American
- [Making us safe](https://owen.org/blog/146/) - An email has flooded in, commenting on my blog, from someone calling himself "Chipper". He says: One thing I have noticed about people in general, especially the ones from around liberal cities such as San Francisco, LA, etc is that they have no grasp on reality. I read a couple of your drivelous slants on
- [Fallacies about aid and development](https://owen.org/blog/149/) - Generally, blogs are a pretty good way to hear from people with direct experience and expertise on important issues, without their views being intermediated by the traditional media. Blogs often provide analysis which is well-informed and evidence-based, and both deeper and broader than can be found in the mainstream media. But sadly, these qualities are
- [Mr Blair’s adventure in America](https://owen.org/blog/150/) - All credit to Mr Blair for visiting Washington to try to persuade the US administration to make a substantial contribution to the G8 inititiative on reducing poverty. If this Reuters report is to be believed, the US is planning to announce that it will allocate some of its existing aid budget to famine relief in
- [Role reversal: subsidizing the private sector](https://owen.org/blog/151/) - Here's an odd thing. Many people with free market instincts about development assistance say that they think that private sector investment, rather than spending by developing country governments, is essential to creating growth and jobs; and they argue that aid should be used to support the private sector (see this, for example). What's so odd
- [Book meme](https://owen.org/blog/152/) - Thanks to EU Rota, I got tagged for the book meme to tell you about my reading habits. Number of Books I Own I reckon about 2,500. They are mainly boxed up and in store somewhere in Gloucester, while I live in the US for a couple of years. I miss having them around. Last
- [The myth of national competitiveness](https://owen.org/blog/153/) - This is an excellent post by Brad DeLong, explaining why free trade can only be good, and explaining why we should not worry that all our jobs and income will shift overseas. As the interesting discussion that follows the post makes clear, it is important to distinguish comparative from absolute advantage to understand why we
- [Gruesome](https://owen.org/blog/154/) - I've had two wisdom teeth taken out today. The good news is that it was very straightforward. A couple of injections near each tooth, and then less than 15 minutes each. But despite the anaesthesia, there is something unspeakably uncomfortable about having a tooth extracted. You can feel the instruments being put into your mouth,
- [Clone Town Britain](https://owen.org/blog/155/) - Interesting report from the New Economic Foundation (pdf) about the rise of "Clone Town Britain". In the place of real local shops has come a near-identical package of chain stores replicating on the nation’s high streets. As a result, the individual character of many of our town centres is evaporating. Retail spaces once filled with
- [Road charges, fuel duty and satellites](https://owen.org/blog/156/) - Economists will be in favour of road users paying what it costs to use their car - including the costs of pollution, other damage to the environment, and congestion. So I am broadly sympathetic to Alastair Darling's proposals to charge road users. But I don't understand why it isn't simpler and less bureaucratic just to
- [Some good news at last](https://owen.org/blog/157/) - Now here is some good news. Apparently, being a geek (preferably a scrawny geek) is now considered attractive. "I think geeks are more successful. They're happier in the work they do," Koppel [Elle magazine's love and sex advice columnist] said. "And they're pretty faithful people, because they're certainly grateful for anything they have." When it
- [Ethiopia](https://owen.org/blog/158/) - Terrible news from Ethiopia, where demonstrations on Wednesday about alleged election rigging ended in violence and the death of several protesters. Andrew Heavens, a photo journalist, has been recording events in his outstanding blog, Meskel Square. I confess that I have been an admirer of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who has made an extraordinary journey
- [Thank you Tony](https://owen.org/blog/160/) - Am I the last person to have discovered this hilarious site, set up to enable ordinary Americans to thanks Tony Blair for his steadfast support of George Bush in their adventure in Iraq? Visitors are invited to post their comments which "are printed on paper, and wire-bound into books of 250 messages. Message books are
- [Aid works: AIDS treatments](https://owen.org/blog/161/) - David Brooks has this uplifting article in the New York Times (free registration required) about the impact of access to AIDS drugs, financed by aid: You come to Southern Africa to visit AIDS hospitals, and you expect, or at least I expected, to find unrelieved sadness. But something positive has happened recently because of the
- [Credit where it is due: debt relief](https://owen.org/blog/162/) - The news today is that a deal has been reached on 100% multilateral debt relief. (There has been consensus for some time on this objective; the difficulty has been reaching an agreement on whether and how the multilateral institutions would be replenished for the cost of the relief). If so, then we should give credit
- [Mandelson, trade and accountability](https://owen.org/blog/163/) - The EU has reached an agreement with China under which China will restrain its exports of textiles and clothes into the EU until the end of 2008. The negotiators - EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson and Chinese Commerce Minister Bo Xilai - are are very pleased with themselves for averting a trade dispute. They should
- [Debt relief: avoiding the problem in the future](https://owen.org/blog/165/) - The welcome announcement this weekend of one hundred percent debt relief for Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) has prompted some discussion of whether we need arrangements to prevent the accumulation of debt in future. Debt relief skews development assistance away from priorities by shifting resources to countries that have been managed badly (and hence run
- [The payoff from globalisation](https://owen.org/blog/166/) - Next door to us at the Center for Global Development is our sister institution, the Institute for International Economics. Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Paul L. E. Grieco have published some very interesting analysis which finds that: Using four different methods, we estimate that the combination of shrinking distances ... and lower political barriers to international
- [Legal guide for bloggers](https://owen.org/blog/167/) - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has released a guide for bloggers about their legal rights in the United States, including libel law, election law, privacy, labour law and copyright law. This BBC guide to defamation and libel is useful for UK bloggers. Legal Guide for Bloggers _ Electronic Frontier FoundationDownload
- [Cabinet Secretary](https://owen.org/blog/168/) - So, Sir Gus O'Donnell is to be the new Cabinet Secretary. So much for the fiction that the civil service wants to recognise and promote civil servants who "deliver" public services. Gus is a great guy, and is no doubt a good policy adviser. But he has never delivered a public service - except advice
- [More good governance from Africa](https://owen.org/blog/169/) - Thabo Mbeki has sacked his Deputy President, the popular Jacob Zuma, over allegations of corruption. This is exactly the sort of firm leadership, and intolerance of corruption, that the new generation of African leaders are advocating. I hope he will get the international recognition that he deserves. In the meantime, the UK has suspended a
- [Lessons from the Michael Jackson trial](https://owen.org/blog/170/) - The Michael Jackson trial has reminded me that: a. Juries can make remarkably sensible decisions. As is clear from the post-trial interviews, several jurors thought it quite likely that Jackson had behaved inappropriately with his house-guests, but that the prosecution had not proven the case. This shows that the jury understood its responsibility and took
- [New ODI blog](https://owen.org/blog/171/) - The Overseas Development Institute has set up a blog on 2005. They are independent, well-informed and always interesting.
- [The beginning of the end for Microsoft?](https://owen.org/blog/172/) - Michael Dell says he would license Unix-based OS X from Apple for Dell computers, if Apple were interested. (Apple has announced that it is moving over to Intel chips.) If I were Microsoft, I would be quite alarmed by this prospect. Dell 'happy' to ship Mac OS X-based PCs • The RegisterDownload
- [Senator Durbin on Torture](https://owen.org/blog/173/) - Sen. Durbin, a democrat from Illinois, made a moving, patriotic statement in the Senate (full statement as pdf) criticising the treatment of prisoners innnnn Guantanamo Bay. The issue is not about closing Guantanamo Bay. It is not a question of the address of these prisoners. It is a question of how we treat these prisoners.
- [Consistently standing up for democracy (2)](https://owen.org/blog/175/) - A commendable speech by Condi Rice (full text here). Perhaps she read my post yesterday? She said: For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East -- and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting
- [Consistently standing up for democracy?](https://owen.org/blog/174/) - President Bush made this statement on the elections in Iran: Iran is ruled by men who suppress liberty at home and spread terror across the world. Power is in the hands of an unelected few who have retained power through an electoral process that ignores the basic requirements of democracy. The June 17th presidential elections
- [Income tax and redistribution](https://owen.org/blog/176/) - Tim Worstall has an interesting post in which he argues that redistribution is made harder by having big government. I agree with him that: the poor pay too much in tax the state takes an unnecessarily large share of national income income tax should be used as a tool for redistribution But: he ignores the
- [Money down a rat hole?](https://owen.org/blog/177/) - Here is a characteristically thorough and well-informed fisking dished out by Jim, at Our Word is Our Weapon, demolishing a recent paper from the so-called International Policy Network which claimed that "foreign aid does more harm than good". And while you are there, read Jim's excellent rebuttal to the argument that because aid has been
- [Markets everywhere](https://owen.org/blog/178/) - The barking-at-the-moon lunatics who are against government provision of any goods and services that private citizens will buy themselves if they are put under enough duress, will be very pleased to see this latest privatisation in America. Marines' families have been asked to provide service-people with equipment: Besides the essential flak jacket with steel "trauma"
- [The so-called Globalization Institute reports daft survey](https://owen.org/blog/179/) - Alex Singleton moved from the Adam Smith Institute to set up The Globalization Institute (which as far as I can tell is just him, with a couple of guest appearances from the irrepressible Tim Worstall). Sweetly, Mr Singleton refers to himself as "we" - The Royal We - presumably to bolster the illusion that he
- [Quoted in the Scotsman](https://owen.org/blog/182/) - I'm quoted in today's Scotsman newspaper about the forthcoming G8 meeting. Above all, however, he vowed to concentrate on the plight of Africa and climate change. The priorities have not changed. This week he and Gordon Brown face the task of making good on their progress so far. "The [UK's] objectives for the summit are
- [The Transformation of Tanzania](https://owen.org/blog/180/) - Jonathan Power writes in Prospect about his return to Tanzania. There is no doubt that aid works. The proof of that can be seen in both Tanzania and Uganda from the times when they were given little or no aid. Nothing moved. Look at both countries now and you can see aid projects delivering. Even
- [When your hard disk fails](https://owen.org/blog/181/) - A very timely reminder from John Naughton in the Observer. You rely on your hard disk to store your photos, your music collection, your address book and quite a lot of essential personal data. What are you going to do when (not if) your hard disk fails? ... about three years ago, millions of such
- [Protecting infant industries](https://owen.org/blog/183/) - It is sometimes argued that developing countries should protect their firms from international competiton (or should be allowed to do so) so that the firms can get big enough and efficient enough to compete in global markets. This is called "infant industry protection". Sometimes people say that the East Asian countries used this policy successfully.
- [Double Dipsea](https://owen.org/blog/184/) - Grethe and I ran the Double Dipsea on Saturday - nearly 14 miles of gruelling, hilly trail running. Check the course profile. Here is the Marin Independent Journal's review of the race.
- [Free trade and price discrimination](https://owen.org/blog/185/) - Should a free trader be in favour of allowing firms to charge different prices to different customers? The Globalisation Institute thinks not, in the context of pharmaceuticals. Drug companies in the United States are trying to find ways to prevent pharamaceuticals from being imported from markets outside the US where they are sold more cheaply.
- [What did you do during the genocide?](https://owen.org/blog/186/) - What have you done today about the genocide in Darfur? Try this. What have you done today about the avoidable and unnecessary death of 20,000 people each day of extreme poverty? Try this. Or this.
- [On left wing free traders](https://owen.org/blog/187/) - I suppose I'm flattered to be picked out by Tim Worstall as an example of someone who is both left of centre and in favour of free trade (even if it is in a post entitled "crazed loons"). However, in a desperate attempt to put some clear red water between me and the real crazed
- [Sign the letter to George Bush](https://owen.org/blog/188/) - Please sign the One Campaign Declaration. The declaration is: WE BELIEVE that in the best American tradition of helping others help themselves, now is the time to join with other countries in a historic pact for compassion and justice to help the poorest people of the world overcome AIDS and extreme poverty. WE RECOGNIZE that
- [On markets and equality: in praise of the 2nd theorem](https://owen.org/blog/189/) - It is widely known that economists predict that, under certain assumptions, competitive markets are efficient - that is, nobody can be made better off without making somebody else worse off. This result - which is knows as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics - is the basis of the view held by economists since
- [What African bloggers say about Live 8](https://owen.org/blog/190/) - Global Voices Online has a roundup of what African bloggers are saying about the Live 8 concerts. Most of the African commentators are not complementary about the idea, or the way it has been executed. For example, Gerald Caplan, writing in Pambazuka, says: These views reflect a common theme: they leave the rich world blameless
- [Running in Berkeley Hills](https://owen.org/blog/191/) - We did our usual morning run yesterday: up Claremont Canyon and down Strawberry Canyon. It is hilly, but rewarded by great views of the Bay on sunny days. One particular stretch of the trail is known as the "connector", because it links the upper and lower Strawberry Canyon fire trails. According to local folklore, the
- [But Africa has already had $450bn?](https://owen.org/blog/192/) - Some people who are against increasing aid say that, because foreign aid worth more than $450bn has been given to Africa and Africa remains poor, this is evidence that aid does not work. This argument is, of course, absolute rubbish, and you would think that intelligent people would be ashamed to advance it. Apparently not:
- [Technical shortcomings with IMF analysis](https://owen.org/blog/194/) - There has been quite a bit of interest today in two new studies by Raghuram Rajan and Arvind Subramanian from the IMF. I apologise for this rather technical posting, but it is important to understand that, while the authors are eminent economists, the econometrics underlying these particular papers is seriously flawed. Correctly specified, the model
- [Map of aid donors](https://owen.org/blog/195/) - Mapping Worlds has produced a fascinating new map of the world showing countries in proportion to the amount of aid they give, and the amount they would give if they met the target of 0.7% of GDP.
- [Bush and Africa](https://owen.org/blog/196/) - Credit where it is due: President Bush made a speech about Africa yesterday. Two quick comments. First, I cannot see how the White House reckons it has trebled aid to Africa. President Bush said yesterday: Over the last four years, the United States has stood squarely with reformers in Africa on the side of prosperity
- [Newsnight blog on G8](https://owen.org/blog/197/) - Paul Mason is blogging the G8 and Live 8 for Newsnight. So far it is lively and interesting. And not just because he has already linked to this blog twice: on aid effectiveness and on trade.
- [Rockall Times on ID cards](https://owen.org/blog/198/) - This is a pretty funny vision of what life will be like with ID cards.
- [IMF corrects misleading impression given by FT](https://owen.org/blog/199/) - Raghuram G. Rajan, one of the authors of the much quoted and misquoted IMF working papers which look at the impact of aid on growth, has published a correction to the Financial Times article which, he says, misrepresents the IMF's position. Andrew Balls' article "Aid will not lift growth in Africa, IMF warns" (June 29),
- [A republican quits](https://owen.org/blog/200/) - James Chaney has been a member of the Republican Party for 20 years. In a blog entry today, he explains why he is quitting the party. Fifty years from now, the Republican Party of this era will be judged by how we provided for the nation’s future on three core issues: how we led the
- [Your computer is at risk](https://owen.org/blog/201/) - There is now a 50% chance of being infected by an internet worm in just 12 minutes of being online using an unprotected, unpatched Windows PC, according to Sophos.
- [End to US cotton subsidies is WTO at best](https://owen.org/blog/202/) - Mike Johanns, the US agriculture secretary, has announced that the US will phase out cotton subsidies after Brazil challenged the US subsidies in the World Trade Organization. American cotton farmers currently receive more in subsidies than the entire GDP of Burkina Faso – a country in which more than two million people depend on cotton
- [London attacks](https://owen.org/blog/203/) - Our thoughts are with our families, friends and colleagues as they cope with the terrorist attacks on London today. It is very strange to be so far from home when this is happening. Ken Livingstone, The Mayor of London, issued a moving statement: This was a cowardly attack, which has resulted in injury and loss
- [Redirecting from Blogger to Wordpress](https://owen.org/blog/204/) - I recently migrated my Dad's blog from Blogger to Wordpress. To transfer the content, I used Andy Skelton's import tool, which seems to have worked perfectly, especially when combined with Catstutorials' illustrated guide. Many thanks to both of these. I managed to find a way to get Blogger to redirect to the correct post on
- [The difference between a General and an Attorney General](https://owen.org/blog/205/) - I'd like to think that President Bush knows the difference between an Attorney General and a General. Perhaps not. In his speech today, according to a press release put out by the White House, he welcomed his audience as follows: I appreciate our Attorney General, Al Gonzales, who has joined us today. General, thank you
- [The London Bombings: Pride and Prejudice](https://owen.org/blog/206/) - I’m proud to be a Londoner. Though I am away for now, part of me is always in the vibrant and diverse city that I have grown up in and where I have my home. It has been strangely dislocating to be so far away during the traumatic events of the last week – not
- [Lake Langano](https://owen.org/blog/207/) - Meskel Square has an evocative post about Lake Langano in Ethiopia. When we lived in Ethiopia, we used to visit Langano (in part to get away from the high altitude in Addis Ababa). We stayed in the cottages in his picture. He asks for nominations for favourite places in Ethiopia. This is tough, because there
- [The London Olympics](https://owen.org/blog/208/) - I am very glad that, as a result of hosting the Olympics in 2012, we will invest in regeneration of the Lea Valley improve our transport infrastructure promote sports among young people upgrade sporting facilities across London What I don't understand is this: if we all agree that these are good things to do (which
- [Blogging and the mainstream media](https://owen.org/blog/209/) - Normally I tried to avoid blogging about blogging - it is all too self referential. But three recent articles (see below) got me thinking. It seems to me that there are three distinct roles for blogs in relation to conventional media: first, blogs give a chance for experts to communicate directly, without being intermediated by
- [Transferring money from rich to poor](https://owen.org/blog/210/) - A recent entry over at Unrestricted Domain raises an interesting and important point which is often ignored in the discussion of the relationship between aid and growth. Unrestricted Domain says: To be honest, I’d find it extremely odd if several hundred billion dollars failed to yield any benefit whatsoever. This is absolutely right. And it
- [To the victor, the spoils](https://owen.org/blog/211/) - Ed Harriman's article in the London Review of Books is a thorough review of financial mis-management by the coalition forces in Iraq. (For those who do not want to read the full article, The Guardian carried an edited version.) By 28 June last year, when Bremer left Baghdad two days early to avoid possible attack
- [G8 at Gleneagles: new money?](https://owen.org/blog/212/) - The White House is clear that it did not agree to any additional aid for Africa in Gleneagles. Here is an extract from the transcript of the press briefing, given on Air Force One on the way home, by Faryar Shirzad, the Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economics. He's also the United States G8
- [Cycling this morning](https://owen.org/blog/213/) - It being Friday, another great cycle ride in the Berkeley Hills, finishing at the Cheeseboard in North Berkeley, where the fresh scones have to be tried to be believed.
- [Access to Knowledge Treaty](https://owen.org/blog/214/) - The A2K initiative is an effort to change the priorities of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to encourage it to pay more attention to the needs of developing countries, and balance the benefits of easier access to knowledge and knowledge-intensive products such as medicines and software, with the benefits for greater innovation of copyright,
- [US Aid to Africa has not trebled](https://owen.org/blog/215/) - I expressed some doubt here about President Bush's claim that US aid to Africa had trebled. My colleagues at the Center for Global Development, Steve Radelet and Bilal Siddiqi, have now done the numbers. They find that total U.S. aid to Africa has doubled, but not tripled, since 2000, continuing an upward trend that began
- [Sleepless in Sudan](https://owen.org/blog/216/) - Read Humanitarian Hijinks by an aid worker in the Darfur region of Sudan: The children are the worst because they are already weak and often malnourished, their little bodies are just completely overstretched. Most are eerily quiet despite their obvious discomfort, and it pains me to think that maybe they just don't know anything different.
- [Aid, evidence and anecdotes](https://owen.org/blog/217/) - Tyler Cowen says that the debate about the effectiveness of foreign aid has improved in the last ten years. If so, then things must have been really bad a decade ago: it continues to astound me how many people are allowed to get away with peddling their prejudices without any meaningful evidence. James Surowiecki has
- [Famine in Niger](https://owen.org/blog/219/) - More than 2 and a half million people are at risk from starvation in Niger, because of food shortages caused by drought and locusts. According to today's Guardian: The UN first appealed for assistance for Niger in November and got almost no response. Another appeal for $16m (£9.2m) in March got about $1m. The latest
- [The effectiveness of aid agencies](https://owen.org/blog/220/) - There are people who think that there should not be a significant expansion of aid to developing countries; of these, some believe that all aid harms the recipient, while others believe that aid is generally effective, but that there are diminishing marginal returns which mean that expanding aid significantly beyond current levels would not be
- [The economics of the cruise ship](https://owen.org/blog/221/) - Bryan Caplan discusses the economics of a cruise ship as a metaphor for trade and labour mobility in this thought provoking post. At one level, economic theory tells us that the exploited workers on the cruise ship are better off than they would be if we boycotted the cruises. But at another level, they are
- [Cycling Economist](https://owen.org/blog/222/) - Stephanie Flanders is a cyclist, and the economics editor of Newsnight. In this article in the Torygraph, she considers why people cycle. Mile for mile, you are 84 times more likely to get killed travelling by bike than by tube. Cycling is also about 14 times riskier than going by car. But if you are
- [The Downing Street Memos](https://owen.org/blog/223/) - Much has been said and written about these seven leaked documents. These minutes have been discussed extensively in the United States because of the light they shed on the way in which the Bush administration came to the decision to invade Iraq. But they also offer a unique insight into the making of British foreign
- [If you had a billion dollars](https://owen.org/blog/224/) - There were two separate calls today for the creation of two separate $1 billion trust funds: A US Council on Foreign Relations task force published a report In the Wake of War: Improving U.S. Post-Conflict Capabilities which calls for the U.S. to push to create a $1 billion multilateral reconstruction Trust Fund to pay for
- [Recycle your bike](https://owen.org/blog/225/) - So it sounds as if everyone in London has taken to their bikes since the terrorist outrages of July 7. Why not give your old bike to Re-Cycle? They will refurbish it and ship it to Africa. There are collection points in Colchester and Glasgow, and new points are planned in London, Oxford and Bristol
- [Customers don’t know what they will want](https://owen.org/blog/226/) - Quentin Stafford-Fraser debunks the idea that businesses (or the IT shops of a business) should be focused on what customers say they want. How many of those people now carrying iPods could have told you a few years ago that that was what they really wanted? ... in the words of Wayne Gretzky, you want
- [Fructose and obesity](https://owen.org/blog/227/) - I am increasingly confident that processing of foods, especially the addition of sweeteners such as HFCS, will be "the new tobacco" in years to come.
- [San Francisco Marathon](https://owen.org/blog/228/) - Grethe and I ran the San Francisco Marathon yesterday. This was a training run for both of us - we even ran on Saturday (which we would not have done if we had been taking this seriously). It started very, very early (5.20am), in part so that the route could go over the Golden Gate
- [Famine is not usually caused by the absence of food](https://owen.org/blog/229/) - In 1987, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen showed that many famines are not caused by a lack of food production, but by a change in the incomes of poor people. For example, a group of peasants may suffer entitlement losses when food output in their area declines, perhaps because of a local drought, even
- [Looking for a lover?](https://owen.org/blog/230/) - I was strangely fascinated by this posting by a woman who is looking for a "travel companion and a lover". She says: Traveling with a partner is safer, two people together can afford nicer accommodations than if they travel alone, and I *really* don't want to be celibate for a long period of time nor
- [Could you negotiate with al Qaeda?](https://owen.org/blog/235/) - The latest statement from Ayman al-Zawahri, broadcast by al-Jazeera on 4 August, does not support the claims by President Bush that they want to "impose their dark vision on the world". As I noted here after the London bombings, there is no suggestion that the muslim extremists want to change the way western countries are
- [Sudan after Garang](https://owen.org/blog/231/) - From Sleepless in Sudan - a moving and very readable blog recording life in a Sudanese refugee camp: After two years, living in a state of limbo is taking its toll on families and communities. It's not just the little things, like trying to decide whether you will stay displaced long enough to justify to
- [The coup in Mauritania and Islam in sub-Saharan Africa](https://owen.org/blog/232/) - The coup in Mauritania has had very little attention in the world's media, but it raises some important questions. In a nutshell, the Mauritanian army has overthrown the regime of of President Maaouiya Ould Sid Ahmed Taya. It is hard not to have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, African leaders have resolved
- [Not the America of Thomas Jefferson](https://owen.org/blog/233/) - Let's hope this is temporary, but many of characteristics that made America great seem to be in decline. an understanding of science as the key to humanity's futureinstead of which we see the President apparently endorsing Intelligent Design being taught in schools, and banning federal funding for stem cell research leading the world in technologythe
- [Then and now](https://owen.org/blog/234/) - The first photo was taken in 1997, in Pretoria; the second in 2005, in San Francisco.
- [Solutions in search of a problem](https://owen.org/blog/236/) - Bureaucrats have a habit (and I should know, because I am one) of maintaining a list of policies they want to see implemented, and then offering them opportunistically as solutions to whatever the problème du jour happens to be. We have been offered identity cards as a possible solution to benefit fraud, asylum seekers and
- [Craigs List Scam](https://owen.org/blog/237/) - Craig Newmark, founder of Craig's List and all round good bloke, says in his blog: SCAM: site faking craigslistJust to let people know in a hurry, the sitewww.pay-craigslist.orghas no relation to us, and we're escalating dramatically now.Please get the word out.Thanks! You're welcome, Craig. And thanks to you for a great service.
- [London Bridge did not fall down](https://owen.org/blog/238/) - Driving from the Grand Canyon to Las Vegas, we decided to stop in to Lake Havasu City, Arizona, to visit London Bridge. London Bridge was designed by John Rennie and completed by his son (of the same name) between 1824 and 1831. It was made of Dartmoor granite, and the offical opening took place on
- [Avoiding a sugar crash](https://owen.org/blog/239/) - I have written a long, boring article on the impact of sugar. Here is a different way of making the same point. Sugar Crash is a flash game: you have move around Mr. Sugar to keep a kid happily bouncing on a sugar high. But not too much sugar or the kid will crash. Sickly
- [Do politicians deserve their reputation?](https://owen.org/blog/241/) - It is fashionable to deride politicians for being ambitious, greedy, incompetent and vain. This is in part perpetuated by right-wing bloggers, perhaps because it is a natural complement to favouring small government. But it also seems to be a widely held view among the public. When J K Galbraith coined the term “conventional wisdom”, he
- [Development and the supply side](https://owen.org/blog/242/) - I'm trying not to over-react to Tim Worstall's naiive article over at Tech Central. His core premise is right. Supply side reforms are essential for economic growth and prosperity, in developing countries as well as in wealthy countries. Measures to promote improvements in the supply performance of an economy will increase the welfare of its
- [TechCentralStupid](https://owen.org/blog/243/) - TechCentralStation desribes itself as the place "where free markets meet technology". It in fact a mouthpiece for right-wing claptrap of various sorts. I particularly enjoyed this defence of Intelligent Design. Not exactly a robust advertisement for putting science first. For those who don't know, TCS is published by a Washington lobbying company. According to Washington
- [House of Lords Reform](https://owen.org/blog/244/) - My ha'porth on the House of Lords:* 1. Don't stop here. Just because the hereditary peers are largely gone does not mean we have ended up where we want to be. 2. Elect the upper chamber in rotation - eg a third of the house every 2 years. With fixed election dates. 3. Have non-geographic
- [Blogpulse](https://owen.org/blog/245/) - BlogPulse.com is a blog search engine that also analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere. Well worth a look, if you are a blogger or reader of blogs. Hat tip: Ethan Zuckerman.
- [Niger, markets and famine](https://owen.org/blog/246/) - An article in Thursday’s Washington Post by Craig Timberg claimed that “the rise of a market mentality” has contributed to the famine in Niger. As you would expect, this has provoked a strong reaction from free market bloggers, such as Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek, Melana Zyla Vickers at TechCentralStation, Craig Newmark at Newmark's Door,
- [What do we owe the world’s poor?](https://owen.org/blog/247/) - Over at Stumbling and Mumbling, Chris Dillow sets out a compelling moral case for the people of rich countries to help the world's poor. He argues that, whether you take a utilitarian, rights-based, or a social contract view, we have a duty to assist. I agree with this as far as it goes, but it
- [Will deportation make us safe?](https://owen.org/blog/248/) - Ignore, if you will for a moment, any doubts you have about the civil liberties implications of the UK Government's proposals to deport foreign nationals. Set aside the question of whether it is consistent with our obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights. Step back and ask: even if we could find a way,
- [Don’t know much about Niger …](https://owen.org/blog/249/) - ... and I'm increasingly sure that Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek doesn't either. We've been treated to four posts from Professor Boudreaux about Niger in the last four days which illustrate how his thinking has evolved, and on what basis: first, we are told that "Perhaps if the U.N. weren’t in Niger, traders would be
- [Good news: private investment in Africa increasing](https://owen.org/blog/250/) - Stephen Thomsen at Chatham House has published an interesting paper, "Foreign direct investment in Africa: the private-sector response to improved governance" (pdf) which says that: Private capital flows to Africa in the form of foreign direct investment (FDI) are growing. While in the past much of this investment was limited to the raw materials sector,
- [Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery](https://owen.org/blog/251/) - I suppose I was pleased to see Tim Worstall's article at the Globalisation Institute making the same points as me about the famine in Niger: I said (on August 2nd): Food aid may depress local food prices, and thereby cause some harm to food producers and perhaps reduce future production. In these circumstances, it would
- [More aid for Pakistan](https://owen.org/blog/252/) - The World Bank has today announced an increase in its assistance to Pakistan. That would be the country led by a military dictator, General Musharraf, who took office in a coup in 1999 and was recently criticised by the Commonwealth for reneging on his promise to to relinquish the post of Chief of Army Staff
- [Wouldn’t this be nice?](https://owen.org/blog/254/) - According to SFGate.com, the city of San Francisco is putting out to tender a proposal for city-wide WiFi. (It was cancelled)
- [Visit to the Grand Canyon](https://owen.org/blog/253/) - We visited the Grand Canyon on the weekend of 6 & 7 August. We hiked down the South Kaibab trail to Phantom Ranch, where we stayed the night, and then hiked up Bright Angel trail in the morning. Phantom Ranch is very highly recommended. On the banks of a stream feeding into the Colorado River,
- [Denmark 4 - 1 England](https://owen.org/blog/255/) - Some of us will be celebrating Denmark's 4-1 victory over the English football team (apprently England's worst defeat since it was trounced by Wales in May 1980). As evidence of a worrying growth of Danish nationalism in this household, here is a picture of Grethe running the San Francisco marathon in her Denmark t-shirt.
- [The death of public enquiries](https://owen.org/blog/256/) - TalkPolitics takes a well-aimed shot at the new arrangements for establishing and operating public enquiries in the UK. Apparently, a cosy deal between Government and Opposition saw the passage of a bill, without a vote, of the Inquiries Act 2005, which changed the process by which public and other governmental inquiries are convened, conducted and,
- [Food crisis in West Africa: online discussion with Washington Post journalist](https://owen.org/blog/257/) - You may be interested in the transcript of an online discussion with Washington Post journalist Craig Timberg. You will recall that it was his article that set off a debate in the blogosphere about the role of markets in the famine. He comes across as a very sincere and decent journalist, doing his best to
- [Evangelical scientists refute gravity with ‘intelligent falling’](https://owen.org/blog/258/) - I commend to you this very funny article in the satirical magazine, The Onion: KANSAS CITY, KS—As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the
- [Buy Danish](https://owen.org/blog/456/) - Here are some Danish products you might want to add to your shopping basket this week, as a way to stand up and be counted: Lurpak butter Anything sold by Arla Foods Tuborg beer, or Carlsberg beer if you must (either is 8 times better than Budweiser) Danish movies (I don't recommend Lars Von Trier
- [The political economy of trade & subsidiarity](https://owen.org/blog/264/) - Tim Worstall wants us to believe that the EU makes worse decisions on trade policy because the decision-makers are too far from the people: it’s a fairly basic theory of mine about how the world works that the further away from the people any bureaucracy is the worse it does. Some twit trying to impose
- [Will your blog comments come back to haunt you?](https://owen.org/blog/261/) - Here's an interesting email, from someone I know a little (he is a graduate student here at Berkeley) who has commented on my blog in the past with some fairly anodyne political views: I am going on the academic job market this year and some people have told me that it is unwise to have
- [Niger and over-population](https://owen.org/blog/266/) - Professor Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek draws attention to the facts to dispel the myth that developing countries are poor because they are over-populated. An excellent contribution to the reality based debate. Professor Boudreaux might have added that population growth tends to slow down when economic prosperity increases, not the other way round. Those who are
- [Private Sector Development Blog](https://owen.org/blog/267/) - If you are interested in development economics, you should be reading The Private Sector Development Blog (PSD Blog), which gathers together news, resources and ideas about the role of private enterprise in fighting poverty. The site's objective is: To provide intelligent comment on private sector development issues in the news. To highlight new Web sites,
- [Recreating Beatles Love Songs](https://owen.org/blog/268/) - When I was 11 at boarding school, one of the boys in my dormitory (a lad by the name of Adam Wolf) had a cassette of Beatles Love Songs, a compilation double album released by Capitol Records in 1977. We listened to those cassettes all day every day. Nothing reminds me more of my time
- [Is abortion wrong?](https://owen.org/blog/270/) - No good ever comes of trying to change someone's mind about abortion. So I should know better than to react to Andrew's argument against abortion at The Sharpener, which has already generated a lot of discussion over there (noticeably, among a bunch of mainly men rather than women). But my first degree was in Philosophy,
- [One last heave against poverty?](https://owen.org/blog/273/) - It is currently fashionable to say that poor countries are caught in a poverty trap; and that a big push involving aid and investment would lift them onto a virtuous circle of faster growth and rising prosperity. So said Jeff Sachs in his report to the UN Secretary General on meeting the Millennium Development Goals,
- [I met a man from Mississipi](https://owen.org/blog/272/) - I met a man from Mississippi the other day. We sat next to each other over dinner at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. When he heard my British accent, he thanked me for our support for the United States military in Iraq. He said that America had rescued freedom and democracy in Europe in
- [Singers who can’t sing](https://owen.org/blog/269/) - I was playing Transformer by Lou Reed the other day. Grethe walked in, and demanded to know, in that forthright Scandinavian way, why I was listening to this man who cannot sing. After a moment's thought, I replied that there are many great songs by bands or artists who can't, you know, sing. At least,
- [John Bolton’s proposed amendments](https://owen.org/blog/274/) - John Bolton, the recently appointed US ambassador to the United Nations, has been criticized for the amendments that he has proposed to the draft communique for the forthcoming UN Summit. I've spent an interesting couple of hours reading through Mr Bolton's proposed changes, which can be read in full here (large PDF file). They provide
- [Katrina](https://owen.org/blog/275/) - My thoughts are with the many thousands of people who have been affected by Hurricane Katrina; those who have been killed and injured; those who are trapped and need to be rescued; those who are now refugees seeking shelter and food; those whose posessions and homes have been destroyed; and the family and friends around
- [Niger update](https://owen.org/blog/276/) - You will recall that there was a flutter in blogland a couple of weeks back about the causes of the famine in Niger, triggered by an article in the Washington Post which claimed that “the rise of a market mentality” had contributed to the famine in Niger. A number of us, including Cafe Hayek, TechCentralStation,
- [New Orleans: Mad Max meets WaterWorld](https://owen.org/blog/277/) - We are witnessing appalling scenes from New Orleans, reminiscent of the dystopic vision of Mad Max blended with Waterworld. Heart wrenching scenes of people desperate for food, water, health care and transport. A breakdown in law and order. Police officers bravely defending the their stations under sustained attack. Gangs of youths roaming the city, looting
- [What the bomber did not say](https://owen.org/blog/278/) - Brian Barder (my father) rightly points out that everything in the Guardian's report of the tape of British suicide bomber Mohamad Sidique Khan is wrong. He also lambasts Ken Clarke for his speech in which points out that the attack on Iraq made Britain a less safe place. I actually thought Clarke's speech was pretty
- [Out of the rubble](https://owen.org/blog/279/) - President Bush, at 10.30am this morning, arriving in Mobile Alabama: The good news is -- and it's hard for some to see it now -- that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire
- [Statement of the bleedin’ obvious](https://owen.org/blog/280/) - Patti Waldmeir in today's Financial Times (subscription required) about the death of William Rehnquist, who died on Saturday night: a Supreme Court spokeswoman said at the weekend that his health had declined. Yep, you could say that.
- [Dismal economists don’t understand opportunity cost](https://owen.org/blog/283/) - Only 22 percent of American professional economists understand the idea of opportunity cost. This is the conclusion of a study of 200 economists attending the 2005 annual meetings of the American Economic Association. They were asked this: You won a free ticket to see an Eric Clapton concert (which has no resale value). Bob Dylan
- [The blame game](https://owen.org/blog/290/) - Matt Yglesias on why we need to play the blame game: THE BLAME GAME. A brief comment on the subject of this game, which, apparently, it's a bad idea to play. First off -- it's not a game. Assigning blame is a deadly serious matter. It's also integral to any sort of viable social practice.
- [Aid and the UN Summit](https://owen.org/blog/284/) - Tim Worstall reacts to an article by Bill Easterly which I quoted here last week. Bill Easterly argues that we do not have evidence to support the view that countries are caught in a poverty trap, or that countries can be helped to "take off" in a virtuous circle of growth and rising prosperity. Tim
- [Measles campaign success in Africa](https://owen.org/blog/285/) - A study in The Lancet (free registration required) measures the success of a partnership to reduce measles in Africa, the Measles Initiative, started in 2001. Initial partners were the American Red Cross, the WHO, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United Nations Foundation, and UNICEF. Subsequently, the Canadian International Development Agency, the
- [Still dying in Darfur](https://owen.org/blog/286/) - The mainstream media have lost interest in Darfur. Even Nicholas Kristof, who has done an outstanding job writing about this in the New York Times, has been quiet since July. Things are not getting any better. A fuel shortage delayed the deployment of Africa Union troops, desperately needed to restore peace. George Bush and Tony
- [Progressive flat tax?](https://owen.org/blog/287/) - I have a confession to make. Despite my progressive tendencies, I am in favour of a flat tax. Calm down comrades. Before you take away my Guardian subscription and cut my lentil ration, hear me out. (I'm not alone. Jarndyce, also a pinko, agrees. So, to some extent, does Chris.) Is it progressive? A flat
- [Vaccine fund to save lives](https://owen.org/blog/288/) - Kudos to Gordon Brown for getting the new International Finance Facility for Immunization off the ground. Vaccines are one of the most cost-effective (and least corruptible) ways to save lives in developing countries. Read about it here in my "day job" blog over at the Center for Global Development. Update: 12 September - see this
- [Saving capitalism from itself?](https://owen.org/blog/271/) - Those of a right-wing disposition may care to look away now. Robert Reich's 2004 book, Reason, argues that liberals* have twice saved capitalism from its own excesses: The first time was in the early 1900s. By then, captains of American industry had monopolized the economy into giant trusts, American politics had sunk into a swamp
- [Party like its 1999](https://owen.org/blog/291/) - I think the next tech bubble may be on its way. I was sitting in Oakland airport on Sunday, reading the New York Times and drinking my double espresso. I happened to be wearing a Linux T-shirt. Which was enough to get me offered a job. The owner of a Silicon Valley tech company, sitting
- [Extraordinary Rendition](https://owen.org/blog/292/) - I do not understand why extraordinary rendition is not causing more outrage in the UK. Read this to find out what it is like to be tortured, and British complicity. Credit, though, to BlairWatch, who highlights a recent article in the Guardian. And to my father, Brian Barder, who resigned from the Special Immigration Appeals
- [Do I feel less of a man?](https://owen.org/blog/293/) - I see from my website logs that somebody in Edinburgh typed this into Google: can a man feel less of a man after having a vasectomy? For some reason my name comes up second in Google's rankings in response to that question! (No snarky comments please.) The answer is no. You should feel less of
- [One step forward, two steps back](https://owen.org/blog/294/) - World leaders will be asked to approve the Outcome Document agreed at the United Nations General Assembly today. Others will comment on important issues such as the fudge on the Human Rights Council, the survival of the proposed Peacebuilding Commission, the absence of any agreement on disarmament and proliferation, the pretty good text on "responsibility
- [Fuel protests](https://owen.org/blog/295/) - Read Chris Dillow at Stumbling and Mumbling who explains why the fuel protests are misplaced. Stumbling and Mumbling_ Against fuel protestsDownload
- [Pledge-a-picketer](https://owen.org/blog/296/) - I just love this idea. Religious fundamentalists are picketing a planned parenthood health centre in Southern Pennsylvania. Staff and patients are being harassed. So the centre has set up a pledge bank by which people who support the centre and want to stand in solidarity with them can pledge an amount which increases for each
- [A Speech He Could Not Make Today](https://owen.org/blog/298/) - So New Labour plans to introduce a new offence of publishing a statement which "glorifies, exalts or celebrates" acts of terrorism. Alfred Nzo, General Secretary of the African National Congress, spoke in Camden on June 26th 1980, the 25th Anniversay of the Freedom Charter. He spoke of the two attacks by ANC on 1 June
- [Doing Business and Poverty Reduction](https://owen.org/blog/297/) - The World Bank’s Doing Business survey is a comprehensive annual analysis of which countries are the best and worst places to business. This year’s results have just been published, and they make fascinating reading and provide valuable information about the business climate in different countries. This survey tells us quite a bit about the relationship
- [Doing ourselves a favour and trade negotiations](https://owen.org/blog/299/) - One of the more widespread pieces of rampant stupidity is the language of trade "negotiations" in which countries make "concessions" if there is a "deal" and other countries do the same. Let's get this straight. Trade barriers make a country poorer and should be abolished irrespective of whether other countries have the wisdom to do
- [What’s next for the UN](https://owen.org/blog/300/) - The excellent Suzanne Nossel at Democracy Arsenal proposes ten next steps for the United Nations. It is a mixture of eminently sensible and practical ideas including making Bill Clinton the next General Secretary, funding the proposed staff buy-out, forming an America's Regional Group, and putting UN TV on air, completely sensible but non-negotiable ideas, such
- [Cutting the pork](https://owen.org/blog/301/) - Americans call public spending that they don't approve of "pork". Apparently the term comes from the idea of the government giving every voter a barrel of pork (smoked pork products were, at one time, shipped in barrels). And by golly there is a lot of it here in the United States. This is partly because Congress
- [Irrepressible Worstall](https://owen.org/blog/305/) - Regular readers will recall that I occasionally take Tim Worstall to task for some of his opinions about development, especially his articles at TechCentralStation. For example, I disagreed with him on the role of the supply side in development). I don't mean it personally: Tim is the man for whom the term "irrepressible" was invented.
- [Markets everywhere: fish and carbon](https://owen.org/blog/306/) - The Bush Administration plans to introduce tradeable quotas for fishermen. According to the Washington Post: The administration's bill would be the biggest change in fisheries management in a decade. It aims to double by 2010 the number of "dedicated access privileges" programs, which allocate shares of each fishery to individual fishermen, who can then can
- [Separated by a common language: bloggers’ guide](https://owen.org/blog/303/) - George Bernard Shaw, so they say, remarked that the British and Americans are two nations divided by a common language. Now this is normally the time for a lot of tired jokes about "fanny", "fag" and "pants". (We English think it is very funny when Americans talk about their pants). But I shall rise above
- [The cynical business of food aid](https://owen.org/blog/309/) - Today's Financial Times reports that the US has rejected a plan to replace food aid with cash. Under questioning from senators, Rob Portman, the US trade representative, said: "We are not going down that road. "The kinds of radical changes the EU and others are talking about would not be just harmful to our farmers
- [Hurrican Rita](https://owen.org/blog/307/) - Go read Whiskey Bar's spoof White House Press Briefing. Here's a sample. We want everyone to understand that we're taking this hurricane very, very seriously, and the federal government has already set the machinery in motion to delivery vital disaster recovery services – including press conferences, focus groups, overnight polls and photo opportunities with selected
- [Causes of low growth in Africa](https://owen.org/blog/308/) - A fascinating new paper from Lorentzen, Peter L. and McMillan, John and Wacziarg, Romain T., published at the National Bureau for Economic Research finds that adult mortality alone can account for all of Africa’s growth shortfall over the 1960-2000 period. This comprehensive analytical and statistical study finds that high adult mortality induces people to invest
- [What is Westminster Government for?](https://owen.org/blog/310/) - Being in favour of subsidiarity is like being against sin: easy to agree with the general principle, but harder to agree on the details. Subsidiarity, for anybody still blissfully unaware of this grotesque piece of jargon, is the idea that decisions should be taken at the lowest level of government at which they can be
- [South African Land Reform](https://owen.org/blog/311/) - Over at Samizdata, there has been an ignorant and racist discussion of South Africa's land reform policies. Now I don't throw the term 'racist' around lightly - I'll explain below why I consider the comments there to be racist. But first let's deal with the substantive issue. South African Land Reform South Africa has a
- [Aid and growth: Erixon and selective data](https://owen.org/blog/312/) - Jim at Our Word is Our Weapon splendidly refutes the graph published by Fredrik Erixon that purports to show a negative relationship between aid and growth. (See also Jeff Sachs's response to Erixon). As Jim points out, these very simple purported relationships tell us almost nothing. Proper statistical analysis of the relationship between aid and
- [2005 as the year of development](https://owen.org/blog/313/) - 2005 was to be the year of development. There have been some significant advances - particularly on debt relief and funding for vaccines. But as I explain in this longer assessment, overall, 2005 has not lived up to the ambitions that campaigners and some politicians had for it as a year of development. As things
- [What’s left in economics?](https://owen.org/blog/314/) - Splendid contribution from Chris at Stumbling and Mumbling, who asks what a coherent set of left-wing economic policies would look like. He offers: Macro markets to enable workers to insure against falling demand. A citizens basic income. Asset redistribution, including through inheritance taxes Dismantling the corporate welfare state - the DTI and CAP. An excellent
- [From Brighton to Darfur](https://owen.org/blog/315/) - Two quotations from the last two days, worth reading together. Jack Straw's Labour Party Conference Speech, 28 September 2005 At the Millennium Summit two weeks ago, with the UK in the vanguard, major reforms were agreed. New development aid targets; a peace-building commission; a new and more effective human rights council; and, most important of
- [Mobile phones, tax and development](https://owen.org/blog/318/) - This week's Economist reports an interesting study into the taxation of mobile phones. Not surprisingly, developing countries with high mobile taxes generally have far fewer mobile phones per person than those with low taxes. This is important because there is good evidence that access to mobile phones is good for development. Easy! we all cry
- [British music](https://owen.org/blog/319/) - I'm sitting in a coffee bar in Berkeley, which is about my favourite state of being. There's been some good music playing ... Beatles (White Album), David Bowie (Let's Dance), Pink Floyd (Murmur). And I've just realised that all the bands they've played are British. And that we are disproportionately well-represented in the annals of
- [The $100 laptop](https://owen.org/blog/320/) - Who wouldn't want a $100 laptop? Most of the world's poor, at least for now. As usual, Russell Southwood at Balancing Act gets it right: Try going to the informal settlements of most major African cities and explain to potential customers why they might want a cheap PDA or indeed a cheap laptop. Negroponte is
- [Pete’s pond](https://owen.org/blog/316/) - An amazing webcam set up by National Geographic, showing a watering hole in the Mashatu Game Reserve in Botswana. Mashatu is named after trees indigenous to the region, and is in the dry, eastern corner of Botswana. The picture to the right is a screenshot I took of a jackal (I think) drinking at dawn
- [Sir Ian Blair - it is the cover up that does you](https://owen.org/blog/317/) - On August 18th, I argued here that Sir Ian Blair should not be forced to resign because of the comments he made at a press conference which turned out to be incorrect. I noted, however, that Sir Ian Blair may have sought to prevent an enquiry into the circumstances of the shooting of Mr Menezes.
- [How much extra aid has been pledged during 2005?](https://owen.org/blog/321/) - In my recent paper looking at progress so far on the development agenda in 2005, I promised to come back to the question of how much additional aid has been pledged during the "year of development". The UN Millennium Project Report (Investing in Development) estimates in Table 8 that an additional $50 billion a year
- [Vested interests](https://owen.org/blog/322/) - ... the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen
- [He’s rich. got a big car …](https://owen.org/blog/327/) - John Densmore, the drummer for The Doors, has turned down $15 million offered by Cadillac last year for the right to use "Break On Through" to promote its luxury SUVs: People lost their virginity to this music, got high for the first time to this music. I've had people say kids died in Vietnam listening
- [Working paper on UK foreign assistance](https://owen.org/blog/328/) - This will interest you if you have an unusually geeky interest in the institutional arrangements for the UK's development assistance programme. (It might also help with severe cases of insomnia.) Over at the Center for Global Development, I've published a new Working Paper, entitled "Reforming Development Assistance: Lessons from the UK Experience". It is actually
- [The Guardian on Blogging](https://owen.org/blog/329/) - A Guardian poll reported today on the use that young people make of the internet shows some revealing trends: But among those with a web connection at home, 31% said that they had launched their own personal site or blog. Those aged 16 to 17 have taken most avidly to personal online publishing, with a
- [Aid and new money](https://owen.org/blog/330/) - What Tony Blair said in Parliament after Gleneagles is not true: On aid and debt relief, in respect of the new money aspect, I am somewhat puzzled by some of the people who have been claiming that it is all recycled money. It is absolutely clear to me that the EU commitment is additional, the
- [Blogging at the BBC](https://owen.org/blog/332/) - Paul Mason, a Newsnight correspondent, was blogging regularly in the run-up to the G8 summit. He largely ignored the BBC rules and set up a blog at typepad. His blog came to an end on July 12th - his last entry was a thoughtful post about the relationship between blogs and the mainstream media: The
- [The web is the new desktop](https://owen.org/blog/333/) - Google has launched a new online blog reader (known to techies as an RSS feed reader). I've been playing with it this morning. My preliminary view on this beta version are: Pluses: - nice look and feel - using Ajax to scroll through blog entries - allows you to tag posts yourself so you can
- [Joseph Kony Of Lord’s Liberation Army indicted by ICC](https://owen.org/blog/334/) - Joseph Kony, leader of Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court. The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), formed in 1987, is a rebel paramilitary group operating mainly in northern Uganda. The group is engaged in an armed rebellion against the Ugandan government in what is now one of Africa's longest-running conflicts.
- [Running with the lions](https://owen.org/blog/336/) - One of the more significant risks of running on trails in Northern California is that there are Mountain Lions. You hardly ever see them; but they do occasionally attack, kill and eat joggers, so they are best avoided if possible. So we were somewhat alarmed to stumble across a mountain lion on a remote trail
- [Nude vegetarian yoga](https://owen.org/blog/337/) - The lovely lady and I were at a conference in Sonoma on Thursday and Friday, so we decided to spend the weekend at Harbin. Harbin is a California institution – a hippy commune, established in the early 1970s, where people come for yoga, organic vegetarian food, thermal springs, wandering around naked, escape, and generally wearing
- [Lest we forget](https://owen.org/blog/335/) - To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Irish Famine, Boston's Irish community unveiled a memorial park on June 28,1998. The park is in downtown Boston, along the city's Freedom Trail. The text on the plaque reads: Lest we forget. The commemmoration of the Great Hunger allows people everywhere to reflect upon a terrible episode that
- [UK Smoking Ban Stumbles](https://owen.org/blog/338/) - It seems that the UK Government's proposed ban on smoking in public places is faltering. Intellectually, I find it hard to justify a smoking ban in private businesses. It should be for the owner of a bar or restaurant to decide if he or she wants to allow smoking or not, and for customers to
- [(not) Having children & altruism](https://owen.org/blog/339/) - Lionel Shriver had an interesting piece in the Guardian on September 17th. I've only just caught up with it, by way of Natalie at Philobiblion (with whom I completely agree). Shriver says that as we have become richer, we have become less interested in having children, choosing instead to do other things with our lives.
- [Helping Pakistan after the earthquake](https://owen.org/blog/342/) - If you are British, you can donate through the Disasters Emergency Committee here. In America, you can donate through the Red Cross. (However, I would feel more inclined to help Pakistan were it not for it's decision to buy at least two dozen F-16 fighter planes. I'm not thrilled about the the decision of the
- [Why poor countries are not catching up](https://owen.org/blog/340/) - One of the difficult questions in the economics of developing countries is why poor countries are not closing the gap on rich countries. With both more rapid policy convergence and deepening globalization, most economists would have expected poor countries to grow more rapidly than rich countries, so closing the gap. An interesting new paper by
- [Teach a man to fish …](https://owen.org/blog/343/) - I am full of admiration for Justin at Chicken Yoghurt - he writes brilliantly, and is full of passion about all the right things. But I do want to challenge his criticism of the use of consultants by DFID before it enters into the blogosphere as an accepted meme. I know what you are thinking
- [Random blog-related thoughts](https://owen.org/blog/344/) - A propos of not much - some meta-blogging thoughts: The irrepressible Worstall will be wetting himself to be in the running for this - The Blooker Prize, a prize for books based on blogs or websites. (I have never understood the value of dead-tree versions of the internet myself.) On the subject of Timothy, is
- [Does immigration cost jobs?](https://owen.org/blog/345/) - Polly Toynbee thinks that immigration is bad for low-skilled British workers: Globalisation does not apply to the service sector, where 20 million people work. It is a term used to disguise the hard truth that GDP growth is irrelevant to those who don't share in it. GDP per capita is a meaningless statistic that pretends
- [Boris Johnson and the Meaning of Liff](https://owen.org/blog/331/) - Boris Johnson has a wonderful turn of phrase: for the most part this answer has so far drawn a look of anxious blankness, the look you see when people are sure that they ought to have read some classic work, and are in two minds whether to bluff it out or admit ignorance. That is
- [Not on my watch …](https://owen.org/blog/346/) - Sleepless in Sudan reports: There are so many people fleeing from the new attacks on villages that all we can do is scramble to keep up with registrations and emergency distributions for the new arrivals: people are coming to the camps, particularly the bigger ones clustered around state capitals, in droves. Families - mostly women
- [Mrs Thatcher’s economic legacy](https://owen.org/blog/347/) - Chris at Stumbling and Mumbling has an excellent restropsective look at Margaret Thatcher's economic legacy. (The title of Mr Dillow's blog is a total misnomer - it is fluent, well-informed and rarely takes a misstep.) As ever, don't neglect the comments. Chris summarizes Mrs Thatcher's influence on privatisation, labour markets, and macroeconomic policy. He concludes:
- [Vaccination and growth](https://owen.org/blog/348/) - I've got a piece up at my Vaccines for Development blog which looks at a new paper summarizing the cost-effectiveness of vaccination as a development intervention. I don't normally bother to cross-post from here, but this is a very interesting paper. Anew paper by David E. Bloom, David Canning & Mark Weston, The Value of
- [Do they mean us?](https://owen.org/blog/349/) - The Gary Becker and Richard Posner blog has an exchange this week in which they agree on the desirability of the US allowing a larger number of skilled immigrants. As someone who advocates more liberal migration policies, I agree with them that it would be in America's interest to relax its immigration rules. But two
- [How (not) to blog](https://owen.org/blog/351/) - Jacob Nielsen lists the top ten design mistakes of bloggers. It is a very useful summary for all new bloggers, and a useful reminder for the older hands. I would add the following six tips: 11. Retain your own voice. Blogging has evolved as a form of personal expression of ideas and experience, and that
- [For the first time in history …](https://owen.org/blog/324/) - For the first time in history, global economic prosperity, brought on by continuing scientific and technological progress and the self-reinforcing accumulation of wealth, has placed the world within reach of eliminating extreme poverty altogether. Jeff Sachs, Can Extreme Poverty Be Eliminated?, Scientific American September 2005 You are right. We do have an historic opportunity
- [The sports drinks conspiracy that kills](https://owen.org/blog/353/) - If you ever run a marathon, you will be bombarded with advice like this from the "Gatorade Sports Science Institute" (!): Fuel up before the race-Drink at least 16 ounces of a sports drink with carbohydrates about 2 hours before the marathon, then another 8-16 ounces just before the race. Be sure to stop to
- [How to read blogs easily](https://owen.org/blog/354/) - First things first. You can read blogs in web browsers, by bookmarking all the blogs you want to read and switching from one to another. You can, but you would be mad. What should you do instead? There are programmes variously called blog readers, RSS readers, feed readers or aggregators (these all mean the same
- [Diplomatic immunity and my Dad](https://owen.org/blog/356/) - My father, Brian Barder was on Radio 4's Broadcasting House this morning, to talk about diplomatic immunity. The US Embassy in London has apparently decided that it should not pay the congestion charge. I assume the aim was to bring on a crusty retired diplomat to make a fool of himself by arguing for the
- [I warn you …](https://owen.org/blog/326/) - Neil Kinnock's speech in Bridgend, Glamorgan, on 7 June 1983, rates as one of the finest speeches ever made in British politics. It was two days before the General Election. He scribbled the notes from which he delivered the speech in the car on the way to the rally, and his voice was hoarse from
- [Whom the Gods would destroy](https://owen.org/blog/357/) - "For those whom God to ruin has design'd, He fits for fate, and first destroys their mind." ~ John Dryden (1631-1700) English poet, dramatist & critic from The Hind and the Panther According to a CBS poll, most Americans do not accept the theory of evolution. Just over half, 51 percent of Americans, say that
- [Happy Birthday to U](https://owen.org/blog/358/) - Today is the 60th birthday of the United Nations - the anniversary of the signing of the UN Charter here in San Francisco. Read this excellent summary (pdf) of 60 ways the UN makes a difference, ranging from human rights to humanitarian aid; from eradicating smallpox to creating a framework to support international business.
- [KStars in Silicon Valley Half Marathon](https://owen.org/blog/374/) - A group of K-Stars ran the Silicon Valley Half Marathon this morning. All enjoyed it, and Tomas (1:29:53) and Dave O'Connor (1:24:50) achieved personal records. Christine (1:40:20) won her age group. Grethe ran 1:38:07 and I ran 1:21:49. Andy (1:22:56), Dave and I scored for the team. We were not the fastest team but don't
- [International development and blogging](https://owen.org/blog/359/) - Interesting article by Tim Harford and Pablo Halkyard at the id21 website about the role of blogging in international development. The World Bank, and other development organisations such as the UNDP and DFID, will have to work with this new technology, as many large corporations are trying to do. But the playing field is much
- [Scrutiny of public appointments](https://owen.org/blog/370/) - Harriet Miers has withdrawn as a nominee for the Supreme Court. It was clear that, whatever her merits as a person, Harriet Miers was not suitable for a lifetime appointment to a Court for which qualifications include a sharp legal mind, intellectual rigour, and an ability not only to make decisions but communicate the reasons
- [They don’t like it up ‘em](https://owen.org/blog/372/) - As Corporal Jones used to say in Dad's Army, "they don't like it up 'em". Who are we talking about now? Companies. You know, rich people. The sort that read Forbes. Very upset, they are. About bloggers. Yep, us. We, the people, have the temerity to stand up to corporate power. Daniel Lyons has a
- [Why do some politicians try to cover up their mistakes?](https://owen.org/blog/373/) - Scooter Libby has been indicted today on five counts (one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury and two counts of making false statements). He has resigned. Note that an indictment contains only charges and is not evidence of guilt. Libby is presumed innocent and is entitled to a fair trial; the prosecution
- [Amazing announcement on malaria](https://owen.org/blog/375/) - In an amazing announcement, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has announced today that it will donate $258 million to research on malaria, which kills 2,000 African children each day. See more at my Vaccines for Development blog.
- [Blunkett: civil servants should not investigate politicians](https://owen.org/blog/376/) - The Conservatives have demanded an urgent enquiry by Sir Gus O'Donnell, Head of the Home Civil Service and Cabinet Secretary, into allegations that David Blunkett has broken the Ministerial Code by failing to seek the approval of an independent committee before becoming a non-executive director of a DNA testing firm. Whatever the merits of this
- [Would you like some food with your sugar?](https://owen.org/blog/377/) - Finishing a half marathon yesterday in Silicon Valley the only water available was sugared water (misleadingly labelled "Vitamin Water"). No normal water was available for the runners. That's a disturbing new development. You would have expected that runners would tend to have healthier habits than the population as a whole, so why would we want
- [Those wasteful civil servants](https://owen.org/blog/378/) - Perhaps because I started my working life in the Treasury, I take a rather puritanical view about the way civil servants should spend the public's money. So I am with Tim in being outraged by this report that DTI officials apparently used public money to pay for expensive hotels, BMW hire cars, and cocktails. (I
- [The UK and US media](https://owen.org/blog/379/) - A discussion began at The Sharpener about why US blogging has a proportionately bigger readership, and more influence, than UK blogging; and it has been picked up by Martin Stabe and the Curious Hamster. One explanation that has been offered is that the US mainstream media is worse than the UK media - so bloggers
- [Individually irrational & collectively rational](https://owen.org/blog/380/) - It is a great pleasure to see an argument full of hot air punctured with by a the cold, hard, stiletto steel of logic. Tim Worstall argued at the Adam Smith Institute blog that: ... British Airways allows passengers, for a modest sum, to offset the carbon emissions from their flight. Roughly 1 in 200
- [A rule for the size of the state?](https://owen.org/blog/381/) - David Davis has set out his stall on the size of the state and tax cuts: A Conservative Government led by David Davis would introduce a new ‘growth rule’, ensuring that public spending increases by one per cent less than the trend rate of growth in the economy. This would allow for a reduction in
- [Fair Trade 2.0: credit where it is due](https://owen.org/blog/382/) - Alex Singleton, now at the Globalization Institute, has been a leading opponent of Fair Trade labelling. I argued some time ago that his negative view on Fair Trade was inconsistent with his belief in markets. To his credit, Alex seems to be softening his position. He says But I've increasingly found being a critic of
- [New Development Blog](https://owen.org/blog/384/) - The Center for Global Development (which is where I work) has a new blog on international development issues. ... our own new effort at CGD has plenty of company - and plenty of competition for the limited attention span of our audience. Of course, as any development economist knows, competition is good. We are happy
- [Compromise & national security](https://owen.org/blog/387/) - Tony Blair on the anti-terrorism legislation: if we are forced to compromise, it will be a compromise with this nation's security, don't let anyone be in any doubt about that Right. A compromise is exactly what is needed. We have to decide how much risk we are willing to bear and what price we are
- [Is it a good idea to subsidize microfinance?](https://owen.org/blog/386/) - Microfinance is trendy. But is it just another development fad, or is there evidence that microfinance really helps to stimulate economic growth? Even if there is, should donors do more to support microfinance? My take on this is that microfinance, provided on a commercial basis, is self-evidently good. But that does not mean that we
- [Who benefits from globalisation?](https://owen.org/blog/388/) - An interesting editorial in The Business on Sunday with which I largely agree: The evidence from across the globe is overwhelming: governments that “protect” their industries hurt their economies and their people. .. Countries that really believe in free trade should simply make a unilateral declaration to scrap their tariffs without condition on the goods
- [How to share the benefits of globalisation](https://owen.org/blog/389/) - In the comments on my post on "Who benefits from globalisation?", both Ben and Paul ask what we might do to ensure that the poor obtain a greater share of the benefits of globalisation in the future. This is a very interesting question, worthy of a longer reply than I'm going to give it here.
- [Remembrance Day](https://owen.org/blog/391/) - Today we remember the men and women who have served their country. I am not a pacifist and I am grateful for the courage and sacrifices that have been made on my behalf. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them. On a personal note, I was named
- [Normblog profile of Chris Dillow](https://owen.org/blog/392/) - Norman Geras of Normblog interviews a different blogger each week. I find these a fascinating insight into the many bloggers whose virtual company I enjoy. These are people with whom I debate, listen, learn, laugh, bicker, celebrate and mourn. And yet I know very little about them. Normblog's profiles fill that gap. Norm's profile this
- [Do not ask about underwear](https://owen.org/blog/390/) - I am confused about why Martha Kearney chose to ask the two Davids what sort of underwear they wear. If a male interviewer had asked a female politician about her knickers, he would be thrown off the radio. And rightly so. I have two older sisters, and no brothers. So I obviously learned some of
- [Two odd memes about suicide bombing](https://owen.org/blog/393/) - Whenever multiple explosions occur at the same time we are told that the operation "bore all the hallmarks of al-Qaida". Alan Adamson asks a question that has also been on my mind: One meme I still do not get is the one that appears regularly after some attack like the one in Amman, Jordan, today,
- [Youssou N’Dour Live in Berkeley](https://owen.org/blog/394/) - We went to see Senegalese singer Youssou N'Dour on Saturday, live here on Berkeley in the Zellerbach Hall. Youssou N'Dour became well-known outside Senegal after his collaboration with Peter Gabriel, formerly of Genesis, in the mid 1980s. He had popular success in Europe with "Seven Seconds", a big hit in 1994 with Neneh Cherry. He
- [Rolling Stones Live in San Francisco](https://owen.org/blog/395/) - We went to see the Rolling Stones on Sunday evening at the SBC Stadium in San Francisco. I had expected this to be a rather pitiful experience, like watching an elderly performing animal in a zoo - a historical curiosity rather than an enjoyable night out. How wrong we were. Watts, Wood, Jagger and Richards
- [Why we don’t need a Tobin Tax](https://owen.org/blog/398/) - There are two arguments for a Tobin Tax (i.e. a small tax on foreign exchange transactions): it would provide a dedicated source of revenue to pay for increases in aid; it would benefit the economy by reducing volatility by reducing the amount of trading in currency markets. Neither of these arguments stands up to scrutiny.
- [Migration and wages](https://owen.org/blog/397/) - Though I am generally a big fan of the FT, this article by Andrew Balls (FT.com - subscribers only, reproduced free here) created a false impression of the contents of a recent Congressional Budget Office report (pdf) on the impact and role of immigrants in the US labour market. Even the title, Increased migration to
- [Yosemite at Thanksgiving](https://owen.org/blog/399/) - Just back from Yosmite, where we went for Thanksgiving. We hiked to Cloud's Rest (where this photo was taken), visited the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias, and sat by log fires drinking cappucinos.
- [Exciting new aid policy](https://owen.org/blog/400/) - The G7 Finance Ministers met in London this weekend, and agreed to pilot the policy that I have been working on in my day job for the last year. The idea is simple. Pharmaceutical companies do not have sufficient incentive to invest in making vaccines for developing countries, against diseases like malaria and HIV, nor
- [Back in Blighty](https://owen.org/blog/403/) - I am back in the UK, at short notice. I came for a a job interview - not because I am keen to leave California, but because this is a very good job, and one that I think I would have been very good at. Unfortunately, the interview panel did not agree, and I heard
- [Are record companies useful?](https://owen.org/blog/405/) - Interesting article in The Grauniad by Laura Barton who claims that 2005 has seen a decline in the monopoly control of the marketing departments of music companies: This has been the year fans have increasingly taken music into their own hands, rejecting the over-processed diet served up by many major labels in favour of something
- [How I fixed my backup drive](https://owen.org/blog/451/) - Memo to self - this was how I cleaned up my Lacie 500Gb external backup drive which was giving read/write errors. umount /dev/sdg1e2fsck -fyc /dev/sdg1 Then go out for 3 hours ...
- [San Francisco Half Marathon](https://owen.org/blog/453/) - Grethe and ran the Kaiser Permanente Half Marathon yesterday. A beautiful cool, clear day, with sunshine as the race ended and we went for brunch in the city. G ran 1:34:04 - a bit slower than last year but she finished feeling strong, so she could have run faster. I ran 1:18:03, 14 seconds slower
- [Doing the right thing on abortion](https://owen.org/blog/454/) - On the UK response to the 'global gag rule' reintroduced by President George W Bush.
- [Sierra Nevada on Boxing Day](https://owen.org/blog/406/) - I am writing this by the fire inside this restaurant, having hiked here from Granada.
- [What conditions should we attach to aid?](https://owen.org/blog/407/) - Politicians, the media, bloggers and other armchair experts on development almost all agree that aid for developing countries should be conditional on reforms by recipient countries, and that aid should be tied to conditions about how the aid is used. But this approach is generally not supported by people who work in development. I’ve written
- [So you think you know Africa?](https://owen.org/blog/408/) - Try out this Africa Quiz from the excellent Ethan Zuckerman. I'm ashamed to say that I got one wrong. What do you know about Africa_ - Ethan ZuckermanDownload
- [Upgraded to WordPress 2.0](https://owen.org/blog/409/) - I have upgraded to WordPress 2.0 this morning. It took less than ten minutes and seems to be working fine. Not much changed from the point of view of the reader, as far as I can see; but it looks a bit different for the blogger. Kudos to all the team who put WordPress together
- [Why the US-UK extradition treaty should not be ratified](https://owen.org/blog/410/) - The US Senate is choking on the US-UK Extradition Treaty (full text pdf) because they are concerned that it might adversely affect civil liberties of people living in the United States. The irony is that the treaty protects those liberties much better than it protects the liberties of British citizens. But we have no Senate
- [Is Craig Murray right about torture?](https://owen.org/blog/411/) - I begin with a confession that I am an admirer of Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to the Republic of Uzbekistan. He deserves praise for his courage and clarity in speaking out against vicious human rights abuses by the dictatorial regime of Islam Karimov, which (deplorably) receives funding and support from the US and
- [Ending farm subsidies: the New Zealand experience](https://owen.org/blog/412/) - Take a look at this very interesting article from Associated Press about the experience of New Zealand, which ended farm subsidies in 1985: It was 1985, and the government of New Zealand had made a momentous decision - to abolish farm subsidies in a country where farming had been king ever since Britain colonized the
- [Storms in Northern California](https://owen.org/blog/417/) - From time to time I gloat about how much better the weather is here in Northern California than in London, Washington or just about anywhere else. Not this weekend it ain't. This picture is of the town of Napa, the centre of wine country, about an hour north of Berkeley. And Berkeley isn't much better
- [Slow browsing in Linux](https://owen.org/blog/418/) - My web-browsing suddenly slowed to a crawl last night. I knew it wasn't my internet connection, because my Window$ laptop was still working fine. The problem seemed to be with resolving domain names. So in Window$ I checked my DNS nameservers (using ipconfig /all) and found that on my Linux box the nameservers in /etc/resolv.conf
- [Hugh Thompson dies](https://owen.org/blog/419/) - Hugh Thompson, the American hero who stepped in during the Mai Lai massacre, has died. Mr Thompson and his crew came upon US troops killing civilians at the village of My Lai on 16 March 1968. He put his helicopter down between the soldiers and villagers, ordering his men to shoot their fellow Americans if
- [Not on our watch? The Congo.](https://owen.org/blog/420/) - According to a study in this week's Lancet, nearly 4 million people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo as a result of the conflict which began in 1998. Richard Brennan et al report the findings of a nationwide household mortality survey conducted between April and July, 2004. The national crude mortality rate of
- [The Daisy Cutter and the Downfall of Charles Kennedy](https://owen.org/blog/421/) - I thought Charles Kennedy's statement yesterday was brave and dignified. I am not going to comment on that. Instead I want to reflect on the role of Daisy McAndrew in all this. Mr Kennedy's statement was triggered by the intelligence that ITV News chief political reporter, Daisy McAndrew, planned to report the story on the
- [How to write about Africa](https://owen.org/blog/422/) - Binyavanga Wainaina, writing in Granta about how to write about Africa: Throughout the book, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone. Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and
- [Lack of press coverage on Sudan and DRC](https://owen.org/blog/424/) - Ethan Zuckerman comments on the lack of media interest (either mainstream or online) in the continuing conlicts in Darfur and in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He also reports the study in the Lancet of the number of deaths in the DRC, which I reported on Friday. It is shameful that, with the honourable exception
- [“Mission accomplished”: a success for international peace-keeping](https://owen.org/blog/423/) - Given the enormous difficulty that the US and its allies have had in establishing a peaceful democratic future for Iraq, it is natural that many people are sceptical of the idea that international intervention in the internal affairs of another country can ever lead to a successful conclusion. So we should celebrate and learn from
- [The intellectual revolution in international development](https://owen.org/blog/426/) - Alex Singleton has an interesting post at the Globalisation Institute: The intellectual revolution in international development: Three years ago, social justice was a left-wing term, about redistributing income and socialism. Now it means things like welfare reform and community entrepreneurs. That is quite an achievement. And that sort of achievement is what is needed now
- [Six reasons to oppose the monarchy](https://owen.org/blog/414/) - Most intelligent people who are not royalists also do not spend much time worrying about the monarchy. On the whole, we reckon that this is not the system that we would have chosen, but there is little to be gained by trying to change it. But the British monarchy is more than an interesting quirk
- [Linux at home](https://owen.org/blog/428/) - I installed the lastest version of SUSE Linux on my home computer last weekend. Linux is a free alternative to Windows. For technically-minded people, it can be more powerful, safer and much cheaper to use than Windows. It is now widely used by businesses for servers (most webservers run on Linux). Easy-to-use desktop versions have
- [Vietnam: we giveth, we taketh away](https://owen.org/blog/429/) - The rich countries give approximately $2 billion a year in aid to Vietnam, which is about 4% of Vietnam's national income. Aid to Vietnam has inreased in recent years as the Government has pursued a successful policy of market liberalisation, which has brought down the number of people living in poverty and expanded incomes. Despite
- [Trade and TRIPS](https://owen.org/blog/430/) - Alex Singleton makes an interesting point about patent and copyright protection in the WTO (known as TRIPS): Free trade liberals take the view that unilateral liberalisation is good for countries, regardless of what anyone else does. But those, like Pugatach, who believe it would be a disaster to liberalise without an IP agreement can only,
- [Changes to British aid to Ethiopia](https://owen.org/blog/431/) - Hilary Benn, the UK's International Development Secretary, has anounced that the UK will be suspending all its direct budgetary aid to the Government of Ethiopia. I confess that I have been proven completely wrong about Ethiopia's Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi. A few years ago, I believed he would be one of Africa's great leaders. He
- [Haskins on agricultural subsidies](https://owen.org/blog/432/) - The former Chairman of Northern Foods and adviser to Tony Blair has called for EU agriculture subsidies to be scrapped: Subsidies sustain inefficiencies and encourage farmers to grow crops on unsuitable land. Without subsidies, the inefficient will have to pull up their socks or pass production to another grower, almost certainly larger scale. "Without subsidies,
- [End of an era](https://owen.org/blog/434/) - West Wing ends: Executives from NBC in New York confirmed yesterday what many industry-watchers had been expecting and its admirers dreading. They intend pulling the plug on the programme for good when its current season - the seventh - ends in May. I am enjoying BBC's The Thick of It, a kind of a cross
- [Lunch with Quentin Stafford-Fraser](https://owen.org/blog/435/) - I had lunch with Quentin Stafford Fraser, the Executive Director of Ndiyo. Ndiyo! is a project set up to foster an approach to networked computing that is simple, affordable and open. The idea is to use very thin clients - basically small enough and cheap enough to build directly into a monitor - to access
- [Mark Oaten: the shame lies elsewhere](https://owen.org/blog/437/) - On the whole I am not an admirer of the right wing of the Liberal Party and so I have never had much time for Mark Oaten, though he seemed to me to do a good job giving grief to the Labour Government on its indefensible proposals to detain suspected terrorists without trial. As we
- [Google’s philosophy tested](https://owen.org/blog/440/) - Google has agreed to create a censored version of its search engine for China: Initially, Google's Chinese service will be limited to searching Web pages and images. The company also will provide local search results and a special edition of its news service that will be confined to government-sanctioned media. Now is a good time
- [Darfur: time to act](https://owen.org/blog/441/) - I have written here before about the failure of the rich countries to take action to prevent the worsening suffering in Sudan (see here, here, here). Two million people are displaced - living in refugee camps - and three million people are dependent in international relief. The peace talks are grinding slowly, with no immediate
- [Stanford to podcast lectures](https://owen.org/blog/442/) - According to Forbes.com Stanford is going to podcast lectures, speeches and debates In an unprecedented move, Stanford University is collaborating with Apple Computer to allow public access a wide range of lectures, speeches, debates and other university content through iTunes. No need to pay the $31,200 tuition. No need to live on campus. No need
- [Never glad confident morning again!](https://owen.org/blog/444/) - Ethan Zuckerman has been sleuthing to understand the inner workings of Google's system to censor search results on its new China site. The details are unlikely to be interesting to everyone, but Google cannot relish the prospect of public discussions, in excruciating detail, of the machinery they have built to collaborate with repressive Chinese censorship:
- [Capote - a masterpiece](https://owen.org/blog/447/) - G and I saw Capote last night. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Truman Capote, a writer (author of Breakfast at Tiffanys and writer for the New Yorker) who becomes obsessed with the murder of a family in Kansas, and forms a bond with one of the men accused of the murder, Perry Smith (top row of
- [Google’s misleading justification](https://owen.org/blog/448/) - I've been critical of Google's decision to operate a censored search engine in China. Since then, there have been three important contributions to the debate, which I think are worthy of a reply, as they are all based on a false premise. First, Andrew McLaughlin, Google's Senior Policy Counsel, posted this explanation of their decision.
- [Kaletsky on America’s public sector](https://owen.org/blog/449/) - Private affluence, public squalor.
- [Freedom to offend](https://owen.org/blog/450/) - People have the right of religious freedom. Other people have the right to ridicule those religions.
- [We Don’t Make Anything Anymore](https://owen.org/blog/458/) - Russell Roberts at Cafe Hayek has an excellent debunking of the myth that employing people in manufacturing is important for prosperity. He shows that while manufacturing employment has fallen, manufacturing output has increased. But we aren't being hollowed out. We still make lots of stuff. Not that that's the key to our prosperity. But
- [“Operating system not found”](https://owen.org/blog/460/) - Possibly the second worst four words in the English language.* I was travelling with G to Boulder, Colorado, where she is attending a Business School event. I came along because I'd always wanted to visit this town in the Rockies known for its running and other outdoor sports. The pilot had announced that we were
- [The Omnibus Henry VIII Bill?](https://owen.org/blog/457/) - The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill now before Parliament apparently grants ministers the power to make or change legislation by regulation. "Henry VIII powers" is the Westminster slang for legislation which confers on Ministers the ability to amend Acts of Parliament by regulation. (If anybody knows why, please let us know in the comments.) Some
- [My morning run in Boulder](https://owen.org/blog/462/) - Here is me on my morning run in Boulder yesterday. This is at the top of Bear Peak, from which there are great views over the Rockies. Unfortunately I lost Grethe's phone somewhere down the trail coming down. But the views were definitely worth the cost of replacing it.
- [Gladwell on Employer-provided health care](https://owen.org/blog/464/) - Malcolm Gladwell on employer-provided health care: The closest I can come is to imagine if we had employer-based subways in New York. You could ride the subway if you had a job. But if you lost your job, you would either have to walk or pay a prohibitively expensive subway surcharge. Of course, if you
- [My mother’s baked cheesecake](https://owen.org/blog/466/) - Since I can remember, my mother has made New York style baked cheesecake. She learned how to do this when my parents lived in New York in the 1960s from a recipe in Life Magazine. I think of baked cheesecake as part of my cultural heritage, because I was born in Manhatten. Baked cheesecake is
- [Measles deaths halved by international initiative](https://owen.org/blog/472/) - The WHO and UNICEF announced today that The Measles Initiative has halved measles deaths. Global deaths due to measles fell by 48%, from 871 000 in 1999 to an estimated 454 000 in 2004, thanks to major national immunization activities and better access to routine childhood immunization ... The largest reduction occurred in sub-Saharan Africa,
- [Things I like about America (1)](https://owen.org/blog/461/) - As I go about my daily life here in America, I notice things that I really like about this country. Here are some: You can get a proper healthy breakfast almost anywhere here. There must be a profitable business to be made opening a decent breakfast venue in London - selling fruit, porridge, pancakes, omlettes
- [Healthy pancakes for sportspeople](https://owen.org/blog/474/) - What is not to like about pancakes? If you are on one of these crazy, low-carb diets, then I suppose you might give them a wide berth. And if you are, more intelligently, someone who avoids sugar and heavily processed foods, then you may be suspicious of shop-made pancakes. But you can make pancakes at
- [Pedant’s Corner](https://owen.org/blog/476/) - When soldiers in the First World War shot themselves in the foot, they did so because the harm they did themselves (injured foot) was preferable to what would happen to them if they were not injured (going over the top). So the phrase "shooting yourself in the foot" means to do something apparently injurious to
- [Who should test our drugs?](https://owen.org/blog/477/) - So it turns out that one of the many things that is done for us that we would rather not think about is testing our drugs. The terrible story of six men who suffered severe complications in the trial of TGN1412 should make us pause to ask how we choose which of us will test
- [The real innovation behind EBay](https://owen.org/blog/479/) - Everybody knows that E-Bay was a great innovation. By reducing transactions costs, and enabling users to establish reputations, it has enabled millions of people to buy and sell goods in small quantities and of lower value than would have been possible in traditional bricks and mortar stores. But there is another important, and little understood,
- [What can we patent?](https://owen.org/blog/478/) - According to Michael Crichton, writing in the New York Times the observation that doctor should test for the existence of a particular amino acid to determine if a patient needs a vitamin supplement has been patented: The Earth revolves around the Sun. The speed of light is a constant. Apples fall to earth because of
- [I agree with the Cato Institute](https://owen.org/blog/482/) - That's a heading I never thought I would write. The Cato Institute - a right-wing libertarian think-tank in Washington - has published an analysis of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act: The DMCA is anti-competitive. It gives copyright holders—and the technology companies that distribute their content—the legal power to create closed technology platforms and exclude competitors
- [Indefinite detention without trial or being accused of committing a crime](https://owen.org/blog/483/) - The Government has announced new mental health detention plans under which people who are deemed mentally ill with a condition that cannot be treated, and who have committed no crime, can be detained in Lubyanka a mental hospital indefinitely. The Government has concluded that it will not be able to get its controversial draft Mental
- [Who pays when it goes wrong?](https://owen.org/blog/484/) - The Norman Kember affair has raised an interesting question. If a citizen of a country takes risks, or otherwise makes decisions that are likely to have expensive consequences, in what circumstances should other people be expected to pick up the bill? Here are some examples of that problem on which reasonable people might differ: a
- [Who governs?](https://owen.org/blog/485/) - Tim Worstall sometimes gets sloppy when he wants to score points. No individual runs the economy. No individual can. No bureaucracy, no centralized point can run the economy. The best we can hope for is that a Chancellor doesn’t screw it up. Whoever is Chancellor makes decisions that have a huge impact on the economy.
- [A tough Frank Horwill workout](https://owen.org/blog/487/) - Before setting off for New York this morning, we tried a new workout at thetrack. The session is recommended by the legendary British coach Frank Horwill in his book “Obsession for Running”. Frank was the founder of the British Milers’ Club in the 1960s, which nurtured talents such as Sebastian Coe, Steve Ovett, Steve Cram
- [New blog on global health](https://owen.org/blog/488/) - My Vaccines for Development blog, which I have been maintaining for a year, has morphed into a group blog on global health policy. Go take a look.
- [Knackered Tyres](https://owen.org/blog/489/) - The gang that G and I go biking with has got itself matching jerseys. This was us this morning at Peets Coffee, before 50 miles in the hills round Lake Chabot.
- [Knowledge workers and Web 2.0](https://owen.org/blog/494/) - I have just caught up with this very interesting paper by Rod Boothby looking at the way that new web technology will affect knowledge workers. Today, many knowledge workers feel overloaded because they are forced to react to a constant stream of email, phone calls and instant messages. Email, the phone and instant messaging have
- [Champagne time](https://owen.org/blog/492/) - With my sister Virginia visiting from Brighton, England, we have been touring the California wine region, which is an hour north of here. Here is a photo of me and my sister drinking champagne at the Korbel cellars at 10am in the morning, at the start of a hard day's tasting. Grethe made the ultimate
- [New parliamentary report on the trade negotiations](https://owen.org/blog/493/) - The House of Commons International Development Committee has just published a very sensible and well-informed report which attacks the UK and EU negotiating strategy on the Doha trade round. They attack the EU for trying to negotiate a "grand bargain" between the rich countries and the global south: We consider that the Government is on
- [John Kenneth Galbraith dies aged 97](https://owen.org/blog/496/) - John Kenneth Galbraith, the Canadian-born economist and JFK's Ambassador to India, has died. Galbraith was probably the second most well-known and widely read economist of the 20th Century, after John Maynard Keynes. He was the first pop-star economist, a distinction achieved by few others (Paul Krugman and Jeff Sachs are perhaps the other two). He
- [London’s “fashionable South Bank”](https://owen.org/blog/497/) - I have never thought of my gaff in the Elephant and Castle as being in a fashionable part of London - though I personally like the area, and I think it is underrated (and hence relatively cheap, considering how central it is). But I see from this article in The Observer that, unbeknownst to me,
- [A modest proposal to reform the World Bank](https://owen.org/blog/498/) - I am not one of those who believe the World Bank should be shut down. Indeed, if anything, I would prefer to see the multiplicity of bilateral aid agencies and NGOs shut down, and all the money put through a single world institution instead. The World Bank is far from perfect; but it is an
- [A new scramble for Africa?](https://owen.org/blog/499/) - Abraham McLaughlin in the Christian Science Monitor has been writing for some time about the growing role of China in Africa. China is increasingly making its presence felt on the continent - from building roads in Kenya and Rwanda to increasing trade with Uganda and South Africa. ... Under the auspices of the UN, the
- [TOP SECRET: How our legislators are chosen](https://owen.org/blog/502/) - This caught my eye in the Number 10 morning press briefing from 4 May 2006 Asked if the Prime Minister had sanctioned a peerage to Peter Law, the PMOS said that it was not only a party matter, but also, as people knew, the PMOS did not talk about the nomination process for the House
- [More on China in Africa](https://owen.org/blog/503/) - I wrote earlier this week about China's growing role in Africa. Here are six further insights into the implications of China's push into Africa. Foreign Policy: Africa’s China Card In essence, China and its African partners have figured out a way to circumvent the patchwork system of accountability for foreign aid. It’s a maneuver that
- [Easterly vs Sachs](https://owen.org/blog/505/) - William Easterly and Jeff Sachs make a living by disagreeing with each other, though it seems that there is actually quite a bit of common ground. The Los Angeles Times has a head-to-head (free registration required). So far, Easterly is beating Sachs in the readers' poll 2:1. Here are the money points: William Easterly: The
- [The consensus among econmics professionals on immigration](https://owen.org/blog/508/) - Alex Tabarook has written an open letter on immigration from the economics community: Immigration is the greatest anti-poverty program ever devised. The American dream is a reality for many immigrants who not only increase their own living standards but who also send billions of dollars of their money back to their families in their home
- [Should we give aid to government budgets?](https://owen.org/blog/506/) - I've got a piece up on the CGD blog about a new evaluation of budget support, which finds that budget support helps to improve capacity for financial management and accountability in developing countries. I've been a long-time advocate of budget support, as I think it is a very important way to reduce some of the
- [Nigeria rejects constitutional amendment](https://owen.org/blog/507/) - The BBC news reports that Nigeria's Senate has thrown out a move to allow President Olusegun Obasanjo to seek a third term in office next year - an issue which has divided the country. Under current Nigerian law, President Obasanjo is due to stand down in May 2007 at the end of his two terms
- [Economics lessons in British schools](https://owen.org/blog/509/) - According to BBC news the government's clamp-down on junk food in schools has led to a black market in the playground: Ring leaders are buying bars of chocolate and packets of crisps in bulk, and making small profits by surreptitiously selling on to sugar-craving classmates. Even if the school started selling these things again, we'd
- [In praise of the World Bank](https://owen.org/blog/510/) - Clare Short in The New Statesman writes in praise of the World Bank: One of the great problems in the field of development is that there are too many players. Each developed country has its own programmes in the poorest countries, and so do a large number of UN agencies and NGOs. Each has a
- [On animal testing](https://owen.org/blog/511/) - I have been a vegetarian since I was a teenager, and I wear plastic rather than leather shoes. I do this because I believe that animals have a rights, and that it is wrong to kill animals simply for pleasure. I do not regard this as a purely personal choice: I would readily vote for
- [China in Africa](https://owen.org/blog/515/) - There was a fascinating report on today's BBC World This Weekend (you can hear it here for the rest of the week) about China's role in Africa. The charge d'affaires at China's embassy in South Africa, Zhou Yuxiao, gave an interview in said China was just protecting its own interests, and that Beijing does not
- [Taking on religion](https://owen.org/blog/516/) - I have just heard Christopher Hitchens tell the BBC Politics UK program that the job of the intellectual is to confront faith. I admire Hitchens for his advocacy of secular, scientific and rational thought. (He calls himself a "anti-theist" rather than an atheist.) Many people of faith regard it as important to try convince others
- [Don’t be evil](https://owen.org/blog/517/) - I was critical of Google's decision to operate a censored search engine in China. As I said here, the effect would be to limit access to Google's main search engine, so that the establishment of google.cn would reduce, not increase, access to information in China. And so it has come to pass. According to the
- [Congressman Pete King](https://owen.org/blog/519/) - My father writes here about Congressman Pete King, the Europeans and terrorism. As somebody says in the comments, if a European politician had said this about America, there would have been an uproar.
- [A national identity register, done right](https://owen.org/blog/520/) - Summary A national identity register of unique personal identifiers could make a significant contribution to improving government services. We could introduce such a register without allowing the establishment of a surveillance state. The following five conditions would help to protect our liberties: government data should be stored in decentralized databases, not in shared data warehouses;
- [Who to cheer for in the World Cup](https://owen.org/blog/521/) - The World Development Movement has a handy tool to help the ethical football supporter decide which team to support. As I type, Tunisia is beating Saudi Arabia - according to the WDM, this is good news as it means that the 3rd most supportable team is beating the 29th most supportable, on measures such as
- [The British should be proud of this](https://owen.org/blog/522/) - A little-known, but rather impressive, feature of the international development system is process of peer review by which each OECD country submits its development cooperation program to independent scrutiny once every 4 years. The study, which is led by two other countries, is published. The United Kingdom has just be subject to such a review,
- [International Development Bill](https://owen.org/blog/523/) - The International Development (Reporting and Transparency) Bill will today be voted on for its third reading by the House of Commons. The bill requires the government to produce an annual report assessing progress toward the 0.7% target, the UN's millennium goals and the effectiveness of aid. As the second-reading debate showed, there is considerable support
- [Millennium Technology Prize](https://owen.org/blog/524/) - The Millennium Technology Prize has been awarded to Shui Nakamura. Professor Nakamura has developed a new, revolutionary source of light – bright-blue, green and white LEDs and a blue laser. The technology is used in several applications which improve the quality of human life. The world’s largest technology prize, now being awarded by Finland’s Millennium
- [Things I don’t care about (#1)](https://owen.org/blog/526/) - Whales. The whale-hunters might or might not start hunting a species that is not endangered.
- [Open Letter on Immigration](https://owen.org/blog/527/) - Five hundred economists have signed an open letter on immigration. These include five Nobel Laureates—Thomas C. Schelling, Robert Lucas, Daniel McFadden, Vernon Smith and James Heckman. And, for what it is worth, me. The letter says: We must not forget that the gains to immigrants coming to the United States are immense. Immigration is the
- [Abortion and viability](https://owen.org/blog/528/) - It is irritating to see opponents of abortion seeking to restrict abortion by opportunistically using arguments which they think are superficially persuasive but which bear no relationship to their real views and which they know to be irrelevant. There are people who believe that a human foetus is a human life with full moral rights
- [Security by other means](https://owen.org/blog/529/) - A joint project linking the Brookings Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for Global Development presented recommendations for transforming U.S. foreign assistance this morning. The recommendation is for a new government department for global development, based on the British model for development policy. (Full disclosure: I am the author of
- [Help youths affected by war](https://owen.org/blog/530/) - The war in Uganda has displaced millions of people, including thousands of youths kidnapped by rebel forces. Many of these amazing young men and women have terriblestories and are striving for a better life. If you want to help them fulfil their potential, please make a small donation by clicking here. Chris Blattman and Jeannie
- [Best of British Blogs](https://owen.org/blog/531/) - Out now. My Dad is in again.
- [Have we made poverty history?](https://owen.org/blog/532/) - I have got a blog post up at the Center for Global Development blog, Views from the Center, saying that we have got a long way to go. Have We Made Poverty History_ _ Center For Global DevelopmentDownload
- [Radiohead live](https://owen.org/blog/534/) - G and I saw Radiohead on Friday evening. The Greek Theater in Berkeley is a very intimate setting - the audience is close to the stage, and you can sit on concrete seats or on the grass. I felt a bit old as I tucked my earplugs into my bag (in case it was
- [Warren Buffett donation to the Gates Foundation](https://owen.org/blog/535/) - You have probably read everything you want to about Warren Buffett's decision to donate about $37 billion (£20 billion) to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. (If not, go read what my colleague Ruth Levine has written on our global development policy blog, Views from the Center.) I offer two additional thoughts. First, it is
- [The future of the internet hangs in the balance](https://owen.org/blog/536/) - The US Congress is currently discussing an issue which sounds rather technical and dull but which could have profound implications for the future of the internet. If you care about whether the internet remains innovative, vibrant and open you should pay attention to the obscure-sounding question of net neutrality. The issue is simple: should internet
- [Top five trade myths](https://owen.org/blog/537/) - Fascinating article by Alan Beattie (registration required) on what he says are five common myths of world trade: 1. "Ghana is allowed to sell raw cocoa beans to the European Union, but if it exports finished chocolate it gets hit by big tariffs." 2. "Each European Union cow gets $2.40 a day in subsidies, more
- [Are the planned increases in aid too much of a good thing?](https://owen.org/blog/538/) - From the Center for Global Development website: Donor countries have committed themselves to increase aid to developing countries by 60 percent over the next five years; and larger increases would be needed to meet the Millennium Development Goals. But there are concerns that there may be a limit on the amount of aid that developing
- [Shine on you crazy diamond](https://owen.org/blog/541/) - Syd Barrett, one of the founders of Pink Floyd, has died. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Pink Floyd's first album, must rank as one of the finest debut albums of all time, and it is a testament to Barrett's genius. As Barrett became more unreliable, possibly because of his use of drugs, the
- [The problem is not that the US has not ratified](https://owen.org/blog/542/) - I wrote about the US-UK extradition treaty on seven months ago. Now that it is in the news again, I want to to be very clear about the problem with this treaty. The problem is not that the US Senate has not ratified the treaty, nor is that the treaty lacks reciprocity. Those are both
- [G8 Action on Darfur Overdue](https://owen.org/blog/543/) - Human Rights Watch says that the G8 must act on Darfur: “For the third year in a row, Darfur will be on the agenda at the G8 meeting,” said Peter Takirambudde, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “This year, the G8 must make a decisive public statement. As the killings continue, G8 leaders need to
- [Does Free Trade benefit the already rich?](https://owen.org/blog/545/) - The benefits of free trade are hard to explain. Here is a characteristically clear and concise explanation from Chris over at Stumbling and Mumbling. Stumbling and Mumbling_ (Why) does free trade favour the rich_Download
- [An Inconvenient Truth](https://owen.org/blog/547/) - G and I went to see An Inconvenient Truth, which is a documentary about Al Gore's efforts to increase awareness of the threat of climate change. I thought that I was pretty well informed about climate change, and frankly expected to be a bit bored. I did not really see how a film of somebody
- [No drought required](https://owen.org/blog/550/) - The Wasington Post reports on a federal program to support cattle farmers: At first, livestock owners were required to be in a county officially suffering a drought to collect the money. But ranchers who weren't eligible complained to their representatives in Washington, and in 2003 Congress dropped that requirement. Ranchers could then get payments for
- [An international government information exchange model?](https://owen.org/blog/549/) - I wrote here in June about the need for the UK government to work towards decentralized government databases using shared data schemas to allow information exchange between them in a secure, auditable system of information exchange. This would allow us to obtain the benefits of joined-up government systems, while protecting us (at least to some
- [Accenture bets own money on new IT model](https://owen.org/blog/551/) - You may not have heard of service oriented architecture yet; and if you have have, you may think it is just a lot of hype. But if you believe in SOA, you will have noticed that it could be the foundation of a solution to the UK Government's woes in the use of information
- [Google oppresses poor, makes good money doing it](https://owen.org/blog/552/) - Google hails 'impressive' growth Google more than doubled its profits in the second quarter, beating the expectations of analysts. The search giant generated net income of $721m (£390m) in the three months to the end of June, compared with $342m for the corresponding period last year. Google said the "impressive" result was driven by the
- [A primer on foreign aid](https://owen.org/blog/553/) - A Primer on Foreign Aid by Steve Radelet, my colleague at the Center for Global Development: Controversies about aid effectiveness go back decades. Some experts charge that aid has enlarged government bureaucracies, perpetuated bad governments, enriched the elite in poor countries, or just been wasted. Others argue that although aid has sometimes failed, it has
- [Media coverage of Africa](https://owen.org/blog/554/) - According to The World of Shez Today there is a second wind of change blowing across Africa, a trend towards greater democracy and a growing confidence that goes uncovered by the media. Disasters in Somalia, Darfur and West Africa dominate, while transitions to democracy in Kenya, Botswana, Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Namibia, and elsewhere
- [$100 laptop to be rejected by India?](https://owen.org/blog/555/) - The Times of India reports that the Human Resources Department of the Indian Government is opposed to the proposed $100 laptop HRD contends that spending Rs 450 crore on digital empowerment can be better spent on primary and secondary education. "It is quite obvious that the financial expenditure to be made on the scheme will
- [The need to reform technical assistance](https://owen.org/blog/556/) - Santigie Kamara writing in allAfrica.com yesterday may be overstating the case, but only a little: Reports reaching this press indicate that the consultant at the Ministry of Agriculture is a "square peg in a round whole" and yet still he is there, receiving thousands of dollars while our brothers and sisters who are more qualified
- [Getting kids to school in Ghana](https://owen.org/blog/557/) - In Ghana, the primary school gross enrolment rate has risen steadily from 80% in 2002 to 92% in 2005. The abolition of user fees in 2005 - which the government could afford because of debt relief and additional aid - is estimated to have boosted the primary gross enrolment rate by 14 percentage points. Even
- [Giving aid to Ethiopia](https://owen.org/blog/560/) - David Loyn, the BBC Developing World Correspondent (is there really only one?) is extremely sensible and balanced writing about the politics of aid in Ethiopia today on the BBC News site: Aid thinking moves in policy cycles, and the dogma for now, at least for the big European donors, is to give aid directly to
- [Hobbling around the San Francisco Marathon](https://owen.org/blog/561/) - It seemed a good idea at the time. The SF Marathon starts at 5.30am, so we would stay at David's appartment in the city, and I would cycle to the start. It was, after all, only a few miles and mainly downhill. And in any case, this was only a training run: I had not
- [Who killed Doha?](https://owen.org/blog/562/) - Bruce Bartlett blames the US in general, and George Bush in particular, for "the death of Doha": Last week, the Doha Round of trade talks collapsed. Future historians may well conclude that of all the Bush administration's economic mistakes, this one was the biggest. That is because we may have just seen the end of
- [Aid works for redistribution](https://owen.org/blog/566/) - Much of the literature about the effectiveness (or otherwise) of aid revolves around whether aid accelerates economic growth. But there is another purpose to giving aid: to redistribute income and consumption from rich to poor. If aid is taken from people who are quite well off, and used to put food in the bellies of
- [Okonjo Iweala resigns](https://owen.org/blog/567/) - SaharaReports.com reports that the Nigerian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mrs. Okonjo Iweala, who was formerly the Finance Minister, has resigned from the Cabinet, citing “deep personal clashes between her and the president". If so, that is very bad news for Nigeria. She earned the confidence of donors and played a crucial role in negotiating the
- [Farmers on welfare](https://owen.org/blog/568/) - It is good to see some American voices speaking out against farm subsidies. Here is Jonah Goldberg in today's Los Angeles Times: There are few issues for which the political consensus is so distant from both common sense and expert opinion. Right-wing economists,left-wing environmentalists and almost anybody in-between who doesn't receive a check from the
- [What Gordon might do first: abolish the royal prerogative?](https://owen.org/blog/563/) - Arguably Gordon Brown's most successful policy was designed while waiting for office, and implemented as a coup over Labour's first weekend: the independence of the Bank of England. As he waits for the possibility of taking over as Prime Minister, he may well be wondering how he might similarly create an immediate and lasting impact
- [Why do economists blog?](https://owen.org/blog/570/) - This week's Economist asks why there is an invisible hand on the keyboard: Not all economics bloggers toil entirely for nothing. Mr Mankiw frequently plugs his textbook. Brad Setser, of Roubini Global Economics, an economic-analysis website, is paid to spend two to three hours or so each day blogging as a part of his job.
- [British blogs](https://owen.org/blog/569/) - Another Britblog Roundup from Mr Worstall.
- [The battle of ideas](https://owen.org/blog/571/) - Jackie Ashley is good in the Guardian today: To be a liberal does not mean shrugging your shoulders at those who loathe you and hoping that somehow everyone will get on. A world divided between Christian bible-belt fundamentalists, powered by US military and oil interests, and Islamist Qur'an-belt fundamentalists, ruled by misogynistic mullahs, is a
- [Microsoft crippled by its cash cows](https://owen.org/blog/573/) - Niall Kennedy is leaving Microsoft after four months: I was able to borrow resources here and there, but there was no team being built around the platform in the foreseeable future. I could have stayed at Microsoft, waited for the other 85% of the company to ship their products, and then hope support for my
- [Darfur still on the edge of chaos](https://owen.org/blog/574/) - According to the Guardian The Darfur peace agreement is on the verge of collapse with fresh fighting displacing tens of thousands of people and violent attacks on relief workers forcing aid agencies to consider pulling out. Clashes involving government forces, allied militia and guerrilla factions have forced more than 50,000 people from their homes since
- [Will Senator Lieberman be stripped of his Senate committee posts?](https://owen.org/blog/576/) - Senator Lieberman says he is going to run as an independent, having lost the Democratic Party nomination in Connecticut. I don't know much about how party discipline works in the US, but in the UK running against an official party candidate would lead to automatic expulsion from the party. As far as I know, Senator
- [No eternal friends](https://owen.org/blog/575/) - Peter Hitchens in the Mail: I repeat, I love America, think we have much to learn from her, am endlessly glad that she exists, I like Americans and enjoy many aspects of American culture. My heart always lifts when I arrive there and sinks when I have to leave again. But I do not regard
- [Michael Gerson on Foreign Aid](https://owen.org/blog/577/) - Michael Gerson was, until last month, George W. Bush's speechwriter. His views are hard to pigeonhole - perhaps compassionate conservative comes closest - (see this profile in the New Yorker): he is strongly religious, anti-choice on abortion, and instinctively in favour of free markets. But perhaps his defining interest is his passionate belief in the
- [Get the wristband: I buy goods from poorer countries](https://owen.org/blog/579/) - From the Adam Smith Institute. Brilliant. I've asked for some. Hat tip: Tim. Update: they arrived. Proving that even if there is no such thing as a free lunch, there is such a thing as a free wristband.
- [Trade and the poor](https://owen.org/blog/580/) - Have a look at The Filter on Trade, and at Jim's response. Jim says: My bottom line is that I’ll support just about anything that tilts the system in favour of the poor. In so far as selective trade protection does that, I’m in favour of it. In so far as it doesn’t, I’m not.
- [There you go!](https://owen.org/blog/582/) - Enjoy this cartoon book about the development relationship from Survival International. HT: Curious.
- [G runs personal best for 10km](https://owen.org/blog/584/) - G ran a personal best for 10km on Sunday, in a time of 42:16. (I think she may well improve on that some time soon). Here is the report in the ContraCostaTimes Sarah Slaymaker had the best finish among Berkeley-based runners, taking 31st overall. Sarah Smith carried the banner for Piedmont as the 68th overall
- [Congratulations to the intelligence services & police](https://owen.org/blog/583/) - If it turns out that the intelligence services and the police have indeed foiled a plot to commit mass murder on a scale never before seen in the UK - and I have no reason to believe that it won't - then we owe them our thanks and gratitude. We are quick to criticize when
- [Microsoft blog post editor](https://owen.org/blog/587/) - This post comes from the new Microsoft blog post editor. My initial impression is that it will make blogging much easier for people used to Microsoft Word. It is astoundingly easy to set up - for this blog, which uses WordPress, all it needed was my username and password. But speaking personally, I much prefer
- [What does your country do for the world’s poor?](https://owen.org/blog/588/) - There is more to the fight against global poverty than aid. The Make Poverty History campaign in 2005 focused on trade, debt and aid. But even that is just picking some high profile targets. Developing countries get a lot of advice - mainly unsolicited - about what they should differently, on almost every topic from growing
- [Government Cathedrals, Government Bazaars](https://owen.org/blog/595/) - I am sure that you are all avid readers of Public Finance magazine. You'll be fascinated to hear that this week's cover feature is my article calling for the establishment of a service-oriented architecture for IT systems across the public sector. Here is an extract to titillate your tastebuds: The priority for government should be
- [U.S. Dedicates $64 Billion To Undermining Gates Foundation Efforts](https://owen.org/blog/596/) - This article in The Onion is very funny: "If they want to ensure that millions of children receive immunity shots for typhoid, whooping cough, or diphtheria, we will ensure that country's medicine is never received." Added Negroponte: "This bill gives us the power to take on these extremists before they create positive global change that
- [Africa: the problem is not corruption?](https://owen.org/blog/600/) - The Wall Street Journal reports a new paper by Paul Collier about the reasons why growth in Africa has been slower than elsewhere. “African performance has been far worse than that of any other region,” Collier has written. “The explanation for this is not that African economic behavior is fundamentally different from elsewhere, but rather
- [Using aid to buy influence at the UN](https://owen.org/blog/601/) - A new paper by Ilyana Kuziemko and Eric Werker finds that joining the Security Council results in a 60% increase in foreign aid, and an 8 percent increase in aid from UN bodies; and that it returns to normal when the country's time on the Security Council comes to an end. Using country-level panel data,
- [Africa Now Better for Business Says World Bank Report](https://owen.org/blog/605/) - The annual World Bank report, Doing Business, reports an improvement in the business environment in two thirds of countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Tanzania and Ghana are in the top-ten improving countries this year. Other countries that have simplified regulations or improved property rights include Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Gambia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria
- [Returning to DFID](https://owen.org/blog/602/) - After two wonderful years in Berkeley, working for the Center for Global Development, I am returning to the UK civil service to the Department for International Development. I shall be Director of Global Development Effectiveness, responsible for leading the teams that work with other donors and institutions to improve the international system for development, tackling
- [Fair trade coffee workers paid below minimum wage](https://owen.org/blog/603/) - The FT reports that fair trade coffee from Peru is being produced by workers who are not treated as Fair Trade consumers would wish: The FT visited five Peruvian smallholdings, all of which have Fairtrade certification. Each farm hires 12-20 casual coffee pickers during the harvest season. All house and feed their workers, which allows
- [Extreme drug resistant TB](https://owen.org/blog/604/) - Ruth Levine at the Global Health Policy Blog rightly points out that the emergence of Extreme Drug Resistant TB is a further example of the way that our interests, in rich countries, are increasingly intertwined with the interests of poor countries. Recent reports about the emergence of Extreme Drug-Resistant TB in South Africa are disquieting
- [More democratic countries do more for developing countries](https://owen.org/blog/609/) - A new paper by Jorg Faust at the German Development Institute looks at whether rich countries that have more accountable and democratic institutions have more development-oriented foreign policy: ... the results do support the main hypothesis presented here, namely that the level of democratic voice and accountability in OECD countries is one crucial factor explaining
- [Is the tide turning on migration?](https://owen.org/blog/608/) - I'm grateful to my Dad for pointing out the article in today's Guardian by Brendan Barber, General Secretary of the TUC, calling for free movement of people. We live in an increasingly globalised world. Our best response is not to yield to little England, but recognise that the best way of avoiding a rush
- [A Green Revolution for Africa](https://owen.org/blog/610/) - The Gates Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation joined forces yesterday to fund the development of a green revolution in Africa (see washingtonpost.com) The Africa program will begin with a relatively small Gates contribution of $100 million over five years, plus $50 million from Rockefeller, to fund development of more robust disease- and drought-resistant seeds for primary
- [Are Fair Trade cooperatives voluntary?](https://owen.org/blog/611/) - Alex Singleton at the Globalisation Institute reports that all is not well, in at least some fair trade cooperatives Sadly, for too many farmers in poor countries today, they are trapped in not terribly voluntary co-operatives. Out in rural Kenya last week, I found that there was some scepticism towards the traditional view the co-operatives
- [UK hosts arms trade treaty conference](https://owen.org/blog/612/) - The UK Government is today hosting a conference on the proposed Arms Trade Treaty. The treaty is being promoted by Argentina, Australia, Costa Rica, Japan, Kenya and the UK and it would create a framework to regulate the arms trade so that all countries adopt similar standards.While the treaty is not perfect, it would be
- [Proven success of aid for vaccines](https://owen.org/blog/613/) - A new study has found that aid channeled into vaccination has had a significant effect on improving childhood vaccination rates in the poorest countries. Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health, writing in the current edition of The Lancet (pdf), have analyzed how funding provided by aid donors through the Global Alliance for Vaccines
- [The new consensus on aid effectiveness](https://owen.org/blog/614/) - Alex Singleton at the Globalisation Institute writes: Over the past couple of years there has been a growing consensus that conditionality does not work. ... It has failed because imposing good policies on countries that don’t want to do them just results in countries taking the cash and then not doing the agreed policies. ...
- [The development benefits of more migration](https://owen.org/blog/615/) - Sebastian Mallaby writes in the Washington Post highlighting the possible gains to developing countries of a relaxation in the migration policies of rich countries. In " Let Their People Come ," a new book published by the Center for Global Development, Lant Pritchett reports that if rich countries permitted extra immigration equivalent to 3 percent
- [Can Aid Work?](https://owen.org/blog/616/) - Nick Kristof has a review in the current New York Review of Books of recent books by Jeff Sachs, Bill Easterly, Ruth Levine, Robert Calderisi, David Leonard & Scott Straus about the effectiveness of aid. Coincidentally, G and I went to a presentation by Bill Easterly this morning, here in London to promote his new
- [Gone travelling](https://owen.org/blog/617/) - G and I are going trekking in North Africa for a couple of weeks. (Note to American readers: In Europe we have these arrangements called "holidays" during which we stop work for a few weeks and enjoy ourselves instead. You should try it.) We will be offline so there will be no blogging or emails.
- [Back](https://owen.org/blog/619/) - G and I are back from two weeks in Morocco. We went into the desert on camels and slept in tents, and hiked for days in the glorious Atlas mountains. The weather was hot, despite which every adult we met was observing Ramadan. I start work at DFID next week, with a trip to Tokyo
- [Microfinance pioneer awarded Nobel Peace Prize](https://owen.org/blog/621/) - Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank have been awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. This is a powerful statement by the committee (which is appointed by the Norwegian parliament) of the role of poverty reduction in promoting peace. As the Grameen Bank has shown, access to financial services such as credit can make a huge
- [The impact of Foreign Direct Investment in developing countries](https://owen.org/blog/622/) - There is increasing interest in development circles on measures to promote foreign direct investment in developing countres. Thierry Mayer at the OECD has published a new study (pdf) of the interactions between aid, trade and investment policies to inform donor decisions about how to maximise foreign direct investment and its broader benefits. The study
- [Aid Effectiveness](https://owen.org/blog/623/) - At the Asia Regional Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Manila. Shocking fact - Afghanistan received 1,657 donor missions last year. That's more than 4 a day, 365 days a year. How is a government supposed to govern properly if it has its face pointing towards the donors and its rear end facing its own citizens?
- [The public interest vs what the public is interested in](https://owen.org/blog/624/) - Here in Manila, I have had BBC World on the TV in the background. They have just had a story about the apparent breakdown in relations between Paul McCartney and Heather Mills. I cannot see any conceivable public interest in this story. There is no reason for anybody apart from the people themselves to know
- [Win-win from trade liberalisation](https://owen.org/blog/625/) - Very interesting paper by James Harrigan and Geoffrey Barrows at NBER which quantifies the benefit to the United States of ending the Multi Fiber Agreement (which had regulated the global textile trade), and which was ended as part of the Uruguay Round. The paper finds that this change in trade policy was worth approximately $12
- [Hilary Benn and Bill Easterly Debate on DFID](https://owen.org/blog/626/) - Very interesting debate in this month's Prospect between Hilary Benn (Britain's Cabinet Minister with responsibility for International Development) and Bill Easterly, a critic of government aid. For me, the money quote from Hilary Benn is this: All functioning governments have essential features in common: a capacity to do things, good financial and information management, clear
- [Passion and gravitas](https://owen.org/blog/627/) - In principle, it should be possible to sustain gravitas while still conveying passion. I'm here at Wilton Park discussing the scaling up agenda with some world class minds. I find passion easier than gravitas.
- [I’m back](https://owen.org/blog/628/) - There has been a lot going on. We've moved back from California to London, and we have moved back to G's old flat in London. This took some time, as we waited for the tenants to move out, and then had some repairs done. We've been combining our luggage from Berkeley with our old stuff
- [Is the World Bank Effective?](https://owen.org/blog/629/) - The World Bank's Independent Evaluation Group has launched its Annual Review of Development Effectiveness. It is an honest, and somewhat depressing, account of what the Bank has achieved. According to the Washington Post: Among 25 poor countries probed in detail by the bank's Independent Evaluation Group, only 11 experienced reductions in poverty from the mid-1990s
- [Yunus on poverty](https://owen.org/blog/630/) - Mohammaed Yunus, accepting his 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, said: I believe that we can create a poverty-free world because poverty is not created by poor people. It has been created and sustained by the economic and social system that we have designed for ourselves; the institutions and concepts that make up that system; the policies
- [The global war on malaria](https://owen.org/blog/631/) - Ruth Levine, writing at CGD, is spot on (as ever): That's why we have to do better this time, learning from history that to succeed will require big-time funding over the long haul, and a willingness to pay attention to emerging evidence about which combination of strategies is working or failing in different settings. In
- [National identity register](https://owen.org/blog/632/) - I said in June that the national identity register should be a federation of connected computer systems, not a single database. Very sensibly, that is what the Home Office has now announced in the Strategic Action Plan for the National Identity Register. So far so good. There is one protection, however, that the government has
- [Thanks, Uncle Sam](https://owen.org/blog/633/) - Spare a thought for Treasury officials, who are today sending off a cheque for £45 million to the United States Treasury, in the last payment of British war debt to our American, ahem, allies. I suppose very few British people know that we are still repaying the United States for their assistance in World War
- [Linking aid to progress](https://owen.org/blog/634/) - This paper, by me and Nancy Birdsall, recommends that donors should consider linking aid to the progress that recipient countries make towards a small number of high-level goals (eg the number of children in school). The payments would be guaranteed, with no strings attached about how the recipient could use the money (though further payments would
- [Seeing the big picture on global health](https://owen.org/blog/635/) - Laurie Garrett writes in the current edition of Foreign Affairs about the Challenge of Global Health: Few of the newly funded global health projects, meanwhile, have built-in methods of assessing their efficacy or sustainability. Fewer still have ever scaled up beyond initial pilot stages. And nearly all have been designed, managed, and executed by residents
- [Food miles and the poor](https://owen.org/blog/636/) - There is a debate about whether we should buy food from poor countries - which helps farmers, but might damage the environment. Well-meaning people are torn. Ideally, the price of food in the shops would reflect the full social marginal cost of producing it and transporting it. So beans from Kenya would be more expensive
- [More on food miles](https://owen.org/blog/638/) - I mentioned earlier this year the need to be rational about "food miles" - that is, the pressure to buy locally produced food. Interesting to see this article in the Metro today: Too much attention is being paid to how vegetables and flowers imported by air from Africa cause greenhouse gas emissions, said Bill Vorley, of
- [UK Opposition Makes Pledge on Malaria](https://owen.org/blog/637/) - Shadow Chancellor George Osborne has announced that the Conservatives would spend at least £500 million a year on fighting malaria. He also confirmed that the Conservatives will increase aid spending to 0.7% of GDP by 2013. This is a welcome announcement in a number of respects. It affirms that there is a cross-party consensus that,
- [The costs to business of overseas corruption](https://owen.org/blog/639/) - Governments sometimes struggle to take a firm line on corruption overseas. On the one hand governments recognize the damage that corruption does, particularly in developing countries where the proceeds from corrupt payments can sustain unaccountable governments and divert resources that are desperately needed for public services. On the other hand, governments do not want to
- [Limiting the risks of government data sharing](https://owen.org/blog/640/) - The UK Government is going to consult more widely on its proposals for data sharing within government. A national identity register that allows data sharing across government could be the technological underpinning of a huge improvement in the provision of government services. (It is important that the technology will not transform the services: it is
- [Do we learn good?](https://owen.org/blog/641/) - Andrew Jack wrote in the Financial Times on Wednesday about measures to reduce AIDS in Africa. In a nutshell, he says that there has been too little support for campaigns to change sexual behaviour, even though these efforts appear to have worked in Uganda, Zimbabwe and Kenya. By contrast, there has been more investment in
- [What causes uncertainty in vaccine demand?](https://owen.org/blog/642/) - Scientific American discusses the need for better forecasting of need for drugs and vaccines: Unpredictable demand creates a three-way catch-22 problem, as pointed out in a 2002 study commissioned by the GAVI Alliance, formerly the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization. Poor countries have to know the price of a vaccine to see if they
- [Get a First Life](https://owen.org/blog/643/) - Very funny parody of second life: www.getafirstlife.com. I particularly enjoyed the recommendation to "fornicate using your actual genitals".
- [Discriminating for religious reasons](https://owen.org/blog/644/) - Here is my ha'porth, for the record. It is no excuse to say that your religion requires you to discriminate against gays. We would not tolerate the same argument to justify discrimination against people on grounds of race. Nor is it a defence for the churches to say that it is OK for them to
- [Ryszard Kapuscinski should have got a Nobel Prize](https://owen.org/blog/645/) - The Washington Post reports the death of Ryszard Kapuscinski: Ryszard Kapuscinski a Polish writer and journalist who gained international acclaim for his books chronicling wars, coups and revolutions in Africa, the Middle East and other parts of the world, died of a heart attack, his literary agent said. He was 74. His book The Emperor
- [Are Republicans good for the world’s poor?](https://owen.org/blog/646/) - Many progressives here in the UK have a stereotyped view of US politics (roughly speaking: 'Democrats good, Republicans bad'). These assumptions have been reinforced by negative perceptions of the Bush presidency. And so there is an assumption that the Democrats are more likely to pursue policies that are good for developing countries, such as increasing
- [The role of prizes in innovation](https://owen.org/blog/647/) - One of the most important and cost effective ways that rich countries can help poor countries is to invest more in R&D, especially in products that would benefit the poor (such as a malaria vaccine, cheap solar panels, or a cassava plant resistant to mosaic virus). We do have large research programmes; and I
- [Distributional impacts of climate change](https://owen.org/blog/648/) - Among some bloggers (such as Tim Worstall), and now on the BBC, it is becoming fashionable to say that Nicholas Stern's analysis of the economics of climate change overstates the case for intervention to prevent climate change, because it overstates the value we should attach to the income of future generations. In simple language, the
- [Implicit aid contracts](https://owen.org/blog/650/) - I thought this was a very interesting and readable paper about aid effectiveness by François Bourguignon and Mark Sundberg. They describe an emerging consensus for the aid architecture, based on what they call implicit aid contracts: The use of implicit aid contracts, based on monitorable evidence of improvement in final results and the
- [Whitehall and bloggers](https://owen.org/blog/651/) - The Ideal Government blog comments on Gordon Brown's call for Government to make better use of the internet to have an open debate about globalisation and trade. The Times quotes Mr Brown: “We have not had these debates successfully. Why are we so much on the defensive on globalisation, why have we failed on the
- [Africans keeping their promises](https://owen.org/blog/652/) - The African Union has once again refused to appoint Sudan's President, Omar al-Bashir, as its Chairman. Compare this to 1975, when the AU's predecessor, the Organization of African Unity, appointed a murderous buffoon, Idi Amin, as its President. We often complain that Africans need to stand up for better governance and for human rights. So
- [Policy coherence in development](https://owen.org/blog/653/) - The ODI blog uses the debate about BAE in Tanzania as a hook for the broader issue known in Whitehall as "Policy Coherence for Development" - that is, the extent to which our policies on issues other than aid - such as trade, arms exports, financial stability, corruption, climate change, migration, intellectual property – either
- [Accessing a web server from within my network](https://owen.org/blog/654/) - I have a Speedtouch 780 router. Inside my network is a computer that acts as a media server within the house, and as a mail server (which I use for my personal email) for outside the house. Until now, I have not been able to access the web server from within the house using the
- [George Bush says the right things on trade](https://owen.org/blog/655/) - Delivering the State of the Economy report on Wednesday, George Bush made the most effective case for the global trade talks that I can remember him making: ... And the question for America is whether we treat the changes in our economy as opportunity to help improve people's lives, or as an excuse to retreat
- [What does this say about Government IT?](https://owen.org/blog/656/) - I received today (February 7th) the "Government IT Profession Update (January 2007)". (I am, strangely, a member of the Government IT profession, as well as being a member of the Government Economic Service.) This month's update begins as follows: Here is the belated January edition of Government IT Profession Update. It was held up because
- [The singular pleasure of being part of a successful team](https://owen.org/blog/658/) - I am in Rome, at the launch of the Advance Market Commitment. Under this scheme, a group of donors is promising to use $1,500 million to buy a new vaccine, if it is developed, which protects against the strains of pneumococcal infection that are common in the poor countries. This is important because nearly 2
- [Lord Crisp calls for help for global health systems](https://owen.org/blog/659/) - Lord Nigel Crisp - who is also currently working on a review of DFID's leadership capability - has called for a new system to help global health systems: His report calls for an NHS scholarship scheme to help with training and recommends a set amount of aid funds to be set aside for health workers.
- [Do the right thing: buy flowers from Africa](https://owen.org/blog/660/) - Hilary Benn says that we should buy flowers imported from poor countries, even if we are concerned about the environment: some recent research by Cranfield University – who compared the emissions from producing 12,000 rose stems in Kenya with those in Holland, including transporting them to Hampshire - and found that the emissions produced by
- [Freedom of Information - is it a waste of time?](https://owen.org/blog/661/) - Over at The Guardian, David Hencke draws attention to a consultation about possible proposals which would restrict the use that can be made of the Freedom of Information Act: what ministers want to do is to restrict any individual or organisation from asking more than four detailed questions a year - severely limiting the opportunity
- [Mediaeval superstition of the day](https://owen.org/blog/662/) - A man called Roy Jenkins, who calls himself "Right Reverend", was given an uncontested platform on The Today Programme this morning to peddle his wicked superstitions. He said that Kelly Taylor, the brave, terminally ill woman who is fighting for her right to die in dignity, should instead die a painful, lingering suffering death. The reason
- [Nobel prize winner Prescott on globalization](https://owen.org/blog/663/) - Ed Prescott, the joint winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Economics, writes in the Wall Street Journal today (behind paywall): Of all the thankless jobs that economists set for themselves when it comes to educating people about economics, the notion that society is better off if some industries are allowed to wither, their workers
- [Rogue development aid, pots and kettles](https://owen.org/blog/664/) - Rogue development aid by Moisés Naím: States like China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela have the cash and the will to reshape the world into a place very unlike the one where we want to live. By pushing their alternative development model, such states effectively price responsible aid programs out of the market exactly where
- [On supporting African Governments directly](https://owen.org/blog/665/) - Chris McGreal has a piece in the Guardian today about DFID's work in Africa. (Disclosure: I work for DFID). Chris McGreal says: The result, say DFID officials in Africa, is that they are able to direct large amounts of money to areas of greatest need, including putting millions of pounds directly into government budgets. Speaking
- [Canadian Senate challenges future of CIDA](https://owen.org/blog/666/) - The Financial Post reports that the Canadian Senate has challenged the future of the Canadian development agency "Given the failure of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) in Africa over the past 38 years to make an effective foreign aid difference, the government of Canada should conduct an immediate review of whether or not this
- [The Economist on Ghana and on vaccines](https://owen.org/blog/667/) - This week's Economist has a stupid article about vaccinations for diseases in poor countries. The print edition (page 67) says: Amid the figures cited in Rome, one stood out. It was Ghana's per capita health budget, calculated by the World Bank at $31 per day. If only! Ghana's public health budget is in fact $31
- [BBC downloads to be restricted to Windows](https://owen.org/blog/668/) - The BBC is considering changing its "listen again" service to include Digital Rights Management so that it can only be used by people using a recent version of Windows: The only system that currently provides this security is Windows Media 10 and above. Further, the only comprehensively deployed operating system that currently supports Windows Media
- [What do they teach head teachers these days?](https://owen.org/blog/669/) - I heard Des Smith on the BBC this morning. He said: "I was literally hung out to dry by Tony Blair" It seems he said the same to the Scotsman. I find it hard to believe that he was literally hung out to dry. Metaphorically, perhaps? You would think a former head teacher would know
- [Odious debts and vultures](https://owen.org/blog/670/) - The British High Court has ruled that Zambia has to make substantial payments on its debt now held by Donegal International, based in the British Virgin Islands. Donegal International is a so-called vulture fund - that is, a financial organization that buys at a discount bonds that are very unlikely to be repaid, and then
- [Salutory fact of the day](https://owen.org/blog/673/) - I have just learned from DFID's Chief Economist, Tony Venables, that the grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol will feed one person for a year.
- [Giving birth in Burkina Faso](https://owen.org/blog/675/) - On Friday I visited a school, clinic and vocational training centre in Burkina Faso in a village in Bazega province, about an hour south of Ougadougou. La Fondation pour le Développement Communautaire de Burkina Faso supports government schools and clinics, and it operates an agricultural training college. The programme in schools aims to increase school
- [Online identities](https://owen.org/blog/676/) - A new, open source, distributed identity management service called OpenID is making waves in the online community. We need user-centric, trusted identity management system, and this could be it.
- [Food miles](https://owen.org/blog/677/) - Take a look at Clive writing about Food Miles: Food miles are useless. There is no doubt that transport intensity in the food supply system has been increasing - driven by forces of globalisation, consolidation in retailing, larger shops with more choice meeting demand for year-round supply, car-based shopping etc. But "food miles" are barely
- [Scottish Executive Aid Programme Has High Admin Costs](https://owen.org/blog/678/) - According to Nyasa Times: Nearly a third of the £2m spent on Scotland's Malawi programme has gone on running costs, rather than helping those in need, BBC Scotland has found. The amount is about five times the running costs for similar work carried out by a Westminster department [DFID]. The details followed a BBC request
- [Community work for immigrants?](https://owen.org/blog/679/) - According to the Press Assocation, Gordon Brown is going to suggest that migrants should be obliged to carry out community work: Immigrants should undertake community work before they are granted UK citizenship, Gordon Brown is due to say. The BBC reports that Mr Brown is expected to tell a seminar on Britishness the move would
- [Back from Lanzarote](https://owen.org/blog/681/) - Two weeks in Club La Santa in Lanzarote. Feeling fitter, more tanned, and (oddly) a little heavier than when we left.
- [Global Poverty - will it be a US election issue?](https://owen.org/blog/680/) - US Presidential hopeful John Edwards has set out a plan for fighting global poverty: As president, John Edwards will fundamentally transform America's approach to the world. As part of his $5 billion initiative, he will bring high-level attention to help people in three priority areas: primary education, preventive health, and greater economic and political opportunity.
- [Should we cap and trade, or tax, to reduce carbon emissions?](https://owen.org/blog/682/) - If we want to reduce carbon emissions, should we cap the total and then allow trading, or should we impose a tax on all carbon emissions? Organizations and Markets looks at the economics. Here is the conclusion: So the final score is: Permits get a moderate edge on political economy/public choice issues; taxes have a
- [Lord Turnbull changes his mind](https://owen.org/blog/683/) - Andrew ("Lord") Turnbull giving evidence to the Public Administration Select Committee (pdf here) (December 15, 2005): I am going to start like the Vicar of St Anthony's: my text is the Civil Service Code verses 9 and 13: "Civil servants should conduct themselves in such a way as to deserve and retain the confidence of
- [Tradable missions permits for aid agencies?](https://owen.org/blog/684/) - One of the unconscionable practices in international aid is the "mission" - a team of experts from donor countries who fly out to the developing country to supervise the way that aid is used. For large aid projects, these mission teams - sometimes composed of eager but inexperienced development workers - will demand meetings with
- [Is DFID any good?](https://owen.org/blog/685/) - So asks Simon Maxwell at ODI. His conclusion is that DFID is pretty good. In our own work on aid architecture, we asked developing country aid practitioners from 27 countries to rank donors and comment on their strengths and weaknesses. DFID outranked other bilateral and multilateral donors. DFID scored especially highly on efficiency, flexibility, speed
- [The Economist on improving the quality of aid](https://owen.org/blog/687/) - The Economist highlights the importance of improving the way aid is given: Because the aid they receive is such a capricious, volatile commodity, governments dare not make full use of it. They could hire legions of extra teachers, clinicians and civil servants, but only if they are prepared to fire them when the aid spigot
- [Guido Fawkes does not know what a sock puppet is](https://owen.org/blog/688/) - I don't normally read the stream of vitriol that Paul Staines (calling himself Guido Fawkes) spews forth. It seems to me an imitation in the form of a blog of everything that is fetid about the mainstream press - all gossip and personality, with no substance or detail. I'm happy to leave him and his
- [NGOs - are they effective?](https://owen.org/blog/689/) - Not according to Blake Lambert and Wendy Glauser who write about Canadian NGOs: Part of the reason NGOs have difficulty meeting their overall goals is that they often end up measuring day-to-day results rather than long-term progress. As Andrew Mwenda, a Ugandan journalist and political economist who’s currently on fellowship at Stanford University, puts it,
- [Things I learned again yesterday](https://owen.org/blog/692/) - G and I both ran the London Marathon yesterday, on a beautiful warm day. G had a good run - starting at a sensible pace, running even splits, and finishing in 3:28:01. I ran like an idiot - going off way too fast at the start, and (inevitably) hobbling home after my wheels came off
- [Barack Obama on US Aid](https://owen.org/blog/694/) - In a speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Barack Obama has promised to double aid by 2012 if he is elected President: For the last twenty years, U.S. foreign aid funding has done little more than keep pace with inflation. Doubling our foreign assistance spending by 2012 will help meet the challenge laid
- [Are Sachs’s Millennium Villages Projects scalable?](https://owen.org/blog/695/) - Tyler Cowen on Jeff Sachs's Millennium Village project In my view Sach's [sic] work is admirable and will do much to improve the lives of a small percentage of Africans. But I do not think it is scalable. First, I believe the candidate villages are cherry-picked for possible improvement. Armed conflict remains a huge problem
- [A legacy of effective institutions?](https://owen.org/blog/697/) - One of Tony Blair's blind spots - as I think he would be among the first to admit - is that he has tended to underestimate the importance and value of effective and lasting institutions. As he contemplates his legacy he seems now to be coming round to understanding this. Looking back at the successes
- [Ageing Groover from Vancouver](https://owen.org/blog/700/) - Much to the derision of my younger colleagues, we went to see Bryan Adams at Wembley Arena last night. (I went with James - my oldest schoolfriend - who was reluctantly dragged along by his wife Becky. G is in Tanzania.) I had low expectations - I wasn't sure that I would recognize many of
- [Enclosure of the Commons - 21st Century Edition](https://owen.org/blog/699/) - I was pondering for a presentation on Thursday why it is that inequality between countries has grown so markedly over the last 100 years. There are many reasons why the richer countries have grown, but it is harder to explain why poor countries do not catch up as quickly as they did during the previous
- [The Royal Prerogative : will Gordon give up the power?](https://owen.org/blog/702/) - According to Mary Riddell in The Observer Gordon Brown is thinking of transferring to parliament some or all of the powers currently exercised under the Royal Prerogative: The reform programme he is hatching will give some prerogative powers of the head of state to Parliament standing above government and the crown. The monarch will be
- [Apprehensive](https://owen.org/blog/1/) - I am sitting at Heathrow airport, on my way to Ethiopia. It is a big change to move away from home for 3 years. I am excited, as I love Ethiopia; but I am also a bit apprehensive about how much our lives will change.
- [People who do (Marie Stopes)](https://owen.org/blog/4/) - I'm in Tanzania accompanying my partner to the gathering of all the Marie Stopes Country Directors and honchos from headquarters. These people are seriously impressive. People like me write policy papers, attend conferences, and have opinions about how things work, or should work. These people, by contrast, set up and run clinics - navigating their
- [First impressions](https://owen.org/blog/3/) - Flying in to Addis on Monday morning we flew over Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile and readily identifiable by its distinctive shape. It was a nice reminder to me of the wealth of natural resources that this beautiful country has to offer. Addis is a huge building site. From the air you
- [Der Spiegel: Developmental Aid Workers Are Killing Africa](https://owen.org/blog/5/) - Thilo Thielke in Der Spiegel yesterday: Development aid is a planned economy, even if it doesn't have a plan. The belief that food shortages can be overcome in a planned economy is one that has already proved disastrously wrong in the former Soviet Union, North Korea and Cuba. One has to feel sorry for the
- [More Los Angeles than Berkeley](https://owen.org/blog/6/) - The thing you notice most flying in to Addis Ababa is the amount of construction everywhere. This part of Addis, the Bole area, is full of shops and restaurants, and new houses and hotels are being built everywhere. Addis has always benefited from having plenty of great coffee shops (coffee did, by some accounts, originate
- [The involuntary Addis Ababa diet](https://owen.org/blog/8/) - I've been enjoying a new technique for losing weight. First, eat or drink something that does not completely agree with you, in a tropical country like Ethiopia. Then spend three days as fluids gush from every orifice, like a three-cornered fountain in a town square. The fever flushes and shivers last only a day, and
- [Guidance for civil service bloggers](https://owen.org/blog/12/) - The Cabinet Office has now published guidance for civil servants for blogging and participation in online sites. How the Civil Service Code applies to online participation The Civil Service Code applies to your participation online as a civil servant or when discussing government business. You should participate in the same way as you would with
- [We may be illiterate, but we are not stupid](https://owen.org/blog/10/) - Clare Lockhart in Prospect Magazine June 2008 issue 147 (pay firewall): We would like to tell you the story of $150m going up in smoke," said the young villager. "We heard on the radio that there was going to be a reconstruction programme in our region to help us rebuild our houses after coming back
- [This means I should live forever](https://owen.org/blog/11/) - Guzzling coffee may cut heart disease - health - 16 June 2008 - New Scientist The researchers found that women who drank four to five cups per day were 34% less likely to die of heart disease, while men who had more than five cups a day were 44% less likely to die. Guzzling coffee
- [Our father's kitchen](https://owen.org/blog/13/) - Every day, about a 120 children come to get lunch at Beza le Hiwot, a day-centre at near the Merkato in Addis Ababa. Their food is provided by Our Father's Kitchen, set up a year ago by Yasser and Manal Bagersh who own a couple of restaurants here in Addis. Their kitchens provide food every
- [If I were living in London](https://owen.org/blog/15/) - I would be trying to beg, steal or borrow tickets for the Ethiopiques concert at the Barbican Hall, London, on Friday June 27. Here is an extract from an article in the weekend FT: Raider of the lost archives: The golden age of Ethiopian music ran from 1969 to 1978. In the last years of
- [Donors not living up to their pledges](https://owen.org/blog/17/) - I've not seen much press coverage of the 2008 DATA report which aims to hold donors to account for meeting the promises they gave in 2005. This year's report finds that rich countries have so far given only one seventh of the extra aid they promised. This year, the report (with its celebrity backers, Bob
- [Ring road relay](https://owen.org/blog/19/) - Here is the Marie Stopes team for the Olympic Day Ring Road Relay yesterday. Each team of 12 people ran a kilometre each on the newly built ring road, between Meganagna and Bole. It was an out-and-back route, so we got to see the elite athletes going past. Haile Gebrselassie presented the prizes at the
- [What determines successful reform in developing countries?](https://owen.org/blog/21/) - Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, Pablo Querubín and James A Robinson nail it: One can find instances where the root of these distortionary policies is in mistaken economic theories. But this is the exception rather than the rule. Few policymakers create insurmountable entry barriers, hyperinflations or large budget deficits because they think this is good for
- [Rich countries backtrack on aid?](https://owen.org/blog/22/) - According to Hugh Williamson in the FT the 8 richest countries are stepping back from the commitment they gave in Gleneagles to increase aid: Leaders of the Group of Eight rich nations are set to backtrack on their landmark pledge at the Gleneagles summit in 2005 to increase development aid to Africa to $25bn a
- [Using aid to subsidise private investment](https://owen.org/blog/23/) - Justin Muzinich and Eric Werker propose "a better approach to foreign aid" in the form of tax credits for companies that invest in developing countries: tax credits for U.S. companies promise more aid, less waste, and the hope of better institution-building than government-to-government assistance. The next question is how a system of tax credits should
- [Chronic poverty](https://owen.org/blog/24/) - The new Chronic Poverty Research Centre website was launched today; and the second Chronic Poverty Report will be launched next week: Four years ago, the Chronic Poverty Research Centre published the Chronic Poverty Report 2004-05. This was the first major international development report to focus on the estimated 320 to 445 million people who live
- [Do not use text messages for 2-factor authentication if you can avoid it](https://owen.org/blog/10196/) - This article in the Guardian is a cautionary tale. EE texted to say they had processed my sim activation request, and the new sim would be active in 24 hours. I was told to contact them if I hadn’t requested this. I hadn’t, so I did so immediately. Twenty-four hours later, my mobile stopped working and money
- [If not now, when?  (Agricultural trade reform)](https://owen.org/blog/25/) - If we can't get an agreement on cutting food tarriffs and limiting market-distorting agricultural subsidies now, while food prices are surging (see graph), then when we will ever?
- [Brown to press G8 for more progress on Africa](https://owen.org/blog/28/) - According to Andy Grice in The Independent Gordon Brown plans to continue to press G8 leaders to live up to their commitments on Africa: Mr Brown's four-point plan for the annual G8 gathering includes a $60bn boost for health care in developing nations, to recruit more health workers; extra money to meet shortfalls in a
- [Government data and the invisible hand](https://owen.org/blog/51/) - A paper by Princeton academics says that: It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility. Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, we argue that the executive branch should focus on creating
- [The UK should help reform the G8 before it is too late](https://owen.org/blog/31/) - Lawrence MacDonald at the Center for Global Development says we should scrap the G8 Once again the G8 has come up tragically short on climate change and a host of urgent problems affecting poor people in developing countries. Meanwhile, over at Project Syndicate, Jim O'Neill says the G7 and G8 should be reformed by reducing
- [A jaundiced view of volunteers](https://owen.org/blog/32/) - Giving Back - The volunteers descend on Ghana I found a travel blog website and zoned in on Ghana and the stories of this year’s volunteer troups. The diaries and accounts read just like a book. A book I’ve read so many times. The positive attitude reigns – despite being pick pocketed in a trotro,
- [Democracy losing ground in Africa?](https://owen.org/blog/33/) - Democracy is losing ground in Africa - Los Angeles Times In addition to disputed presidential elections in Zimbabwe and Kenya, where longtime incumbents refused to cede power after their opponents declared victory at the polls, last year's ruling party victory in Nigeria was widely condemned as flawed. Uganda's president changed the country's constitution to stay
- [Obama promises to double aid to Africa](https://owen.org/blog/36/) - Obama promises to double US aid I know development assistance is not the most popular program, but as President, I will make the case to the American people that it can be our best investment in increasing the common security of the entire world. That was true with the Marshall Plan, and that must be
- [Fickle donors and unpredictable aid](https://owen.org/blog/34/) - 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 each sub-Saharan African nation’s GDP
- [Al Gore sums it up](https://owen.org/blog/35/) - 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.”
- [Chronic poverty report - praise from Alex Evans](https://owen.org/blog/37/) - 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 I’ve been immersed in for
- [Best out of office reply I've had](https://owen.org/blog/38/) - 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 get back to all as
- [Systems matter: Clinton](https://owen.org/blog/39/) - 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 said. "You can get the
- [Paris declaration is collective colonialism?](https://owen.org/blog/40/) - 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 that (because of their weakness
- [Malthus now writing in the LA Times](https://owen.org/blog/41/) - 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 capita, according to the World
- [Serious brain looking at the brain drain](https://owen.org/blog/43/) - 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 it was a bad idea
- [More news, some of it good, via Google](https://owen.org/blog/44/) - 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 inlocalized editions, and helping dozens of African news sites make their storiesavailable to users worldwide. Google News Ethiopia is here: http://news.google.com.et/
- [Surowiecki understates the case against IP](https://owen.org/blog/45/) - 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. But property rights need to
- [Views about fertility in Amber](https://owen.org/blog/46/) - We went recently to the village of Amber, about 6 hours north of Addis Ababa, to spend some time listening to people telling us about their attitudes to children, marriage, divorce, sex, abortion and contraceptions. (This is part of G's work; I went along to listen and learn.) The most surprising thing to me was
- [Aid to Ethiopia (Le Monde)](https://owen.org/blog/47/) - In Le Monde, David Martin has a rather intelligent piece about aid to Ethiopia: Major operators such as Difid, the British government arm, and USAid play a cat-and-mouse game with the government (GoE) because Meles is sensitive about external pressures in an environment in which domestic critics are almost silenced and expatriate websites blocked. Yet
- [Bill Clinton in Ethiopia](https://owen.org/blog/48/) - In a slightly whimsical account of Bill Clinton's trip to Ethiopia in The Guardian, we find this: Awke Tiruneh and his wife Emaye Beyene are not the only couple who are faintly bemused. They are pleased with their two lightbulbs, one in the main room and a second in the kitchen annexe of their pristine
- [The global development finance non-system](https://owen.org/blog/49/) - Helmut Reisen points out that the global development finance system is dysfunctional: A prerequisite for effective ownership and efficient aid delivery, at the core of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, is to map the rising complexity of multilateral development finance, to help identify areas for consolidation, address fragmentation and poor co-ordination at country level,
- [Why has the price of teff trebled?](https://owen.org/blog/50/) - I've been puzzling for a while about why food prices are rising here in Ethiopia. Teff, the local grain, has trebled in price from about 400 Birr per quintal to about 1,200 Birr for the same amount. There is almost no global trade in teff, so it does not seem to be an effect of
- [Fistula, and maternal mortality](https://owen.org/blog/52/) - The Disease Control Priorities Project has a striking feature article about fistula and maternal mortality ... across much of the less developed world, fistula is an ordinary hazard of childbirth for many women and a permanent blight on countless lives. In those countries, obstetric fistula overwhelming results from obstructed labor, which occurs when the baby
- [Working with the government in Sierra Leone](https://owen.org/blog/53/) - I'm impressed by the idea of the Welbodi Partnership, a charity supporting the Ministry of Health and Sanitation in Sierra Leone: The Welbodi Partnership was established to support the provision of paediatric care in Sierra Leone, where child health statistics are the worst in the world. The cool thing - as Tristan points out -
- [A little less conversation ... a little more action please](https://owen.org/blog/54/) - Nancy Birdsall and Kate Vyborny at the Center for Global Development suggest six concrete steps for the Accra meeting on aid effectiveness: Untie all aid, including technical assistance, and publish information on which providers get contracts in practice. Tell recipients what donors are spending through a concrete set of standards for transparency. Make all evaluations
- [Gheralta Lodge, Tigray](https://owen.org/blog/58/) - Last weekend, we stayed in Gheralta Lodge, about 2 hours drive from Mekele in Tigray, Ethiopia, as our base for seeing some of the countryside and visiting the local rock churches. (See also here and here.) Gheralta is near Hawzien (or Hawzen), a small market town which is the site of an infamous massacre by
- [aidinfo blog launched](https://owen.org/blog/55/) - I'm very excited to have made an inaugural post on the new aidinfo blog. This is the website for the work we are doing to increase the transparency of foreign aid. This RSS feed gives you an update of what is changing on the site - add it to your favourite feedreader today.
- [Africa needs a GM revolution](https://owen.org/blog/56/) - Paul Collier savages Prince Charles for advocating medieval peasant farming, and points out that it is not a solution for hunger in Africa. The GM ban has three adverse effects. It has retarded productivity in European agriculture; grain production could be increased by about 15% were the ban lifted. More subtly, because Europe is out
- [Abuna Yemata Guh](https://owen.org/blog/57/) - This is the entrance to a tiny 13th Century Rock Church in Tigray, called Abuna Yemata Guh. And yes, that's a narrow ledge you have to walk along, with a 200 metre vertical drop to your left, at the end of a terrifying ascent up the side of a cliff to get there. The dangerous
- [What are economists good for?](https://owen.org/blog/60/) - Scott Adams on Economists: If you think it is okay to ignore economists because they are so often wrong, you're looking at the wrong questions. Economists are generally wrong with complicated models but right about concepts. For example, they know that additional domestic drilling won't make much of a dent in the energy problem. And
- [New poverty numbers](https://owen.org/blog/61/) - The World Bank published new estimates of the number of people in poverty yesterday. They are very important and they've been universally misreported. The estimates show: the developing world is poorer than we thought; there are 1.4 billion people living in poverty (about one quarter of the developing world), not 985 million as we previously
- [Riding a dead horse: Buzkashi wisdom](https://owen.org/blog/62/) - A friend in a donor agency (thanks CK!) passes on the following: The wisdom of Buzkashi riders, passed on from generation to generation in Afghanistan, says that 'when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount'. However, in the UN and NGO community a range of far more
- [Why don't we apply NICE-style CBA to development?](https://owen.org/blog/65/) - The ever-excellent Chris Dillow asks: 2. The National Gallery of Scotland wants the tax-payer to buy some paintings from the Duke of Sutherland. Why don’t we apply Nice-style cost-benefit analysis here? Would £100m spent on art really produce £100m worth of increases in quality-adjusted life years (by improving the quality of life, not length of
- [Africa according to the rest of the world](https://owen.org/blog/66/) - Via Chris, from Scarlett Lion. This is scarily accurate. CNN's "Inside Africa" show this week covers three stories: the migration of wildebeest in the Masai Mara, gorillas in northern Congo, and a white man kayaking around Madagascar.
- [Incentives for Global Health](https://owen.org/blog/68/) - Incentives for Global Health have published a new report:"The Health Impact Fund: Making New Medicines Accessible for All" The Health Impact Fund, our flagship proposal, is a new way of stimulating research and development of life-saving pharmaceuticals. To provide wide access, medicines need to be affordable-but low prices don't create strong incentives for innovators to
- [Is God a Democrat?](https://owen.org/blog/70/) - I know that it isn't nice to laugh at the misfortune of others, but you'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at this. First the religious right were asked to pray for rain during the Denver Democratic National Convention: Stuart Shepard of Focus on the Family, one of America's leading evangelical
- [Why don't early warning systems give us early warnings?](https://owen.org/blog/71/) - About 12-13 million Ethiopians need food relief or emergency assistance as a result of the failure of the short rains in southern Ethiopia, according to AFP: The lack of rain in the main February to April wet season has left at least 75,000 Ethiopian children under age five at risk from malnutrition, OCHA said. ...
- [International Aid Transparency Initiative to be launched in Accra](https://owen.org/blog/73/) - The Guardian reports that the UK is pushing for greater transparency of aid in an initiative to be launched tomorrow: The UK wants donor countries to provide full and detailed information of all the financial assistance provided to each country; details of individual projects and their aims; and reliable information on future aid flows so
- [New Development News Podcast](https://owen.org/blog/74/) - The inauguaral edition of my new development news podcast, Development Drums, is now online. Simon Maxwell, Director of ODI, joined me for a discussion of this week's Accra Agenda for Action, the UN MDG Gap Report, and the latest poverty statistics from the World Bank To listen to the podcast, you can use this link:
- [Running on New Year's Day](https://owen.org/blog/76/) - Yesterday was New Year's Day here in Ethiopia - it was the first day of 2001 on the Ethiopian Calendar. Grethe and I celebrated by going for a run in the hills overlooking the city.
- [If you think evaluation is expensive, try ignorance](https://owen.org/blog/78/) - The PSD Blog, citing Chris Blattman, wonders if randomized evaluation is too expensive: In some circumstances, simple monitoring and evaluation without randomization might be enough, even if it leaves us with less certainty about the outcomes. Perhaps it's time to develop more formal cost-benefit guidelines for randomized evaluations? Our problem is that we are investing
- [The Digital Generation Divide](https://owen.org/blog/79/) - Dan Kimmerling on Techcrunch says that Facebook is the new Outlook for the younger generation for young people, who really only care about functionality, Facebook succeeds because it is the killer web application for communications and personal information management. Facebook Mail is not without its problems, but the combination of Facebook Mail, Facebook Chat, and
- [Sunday morning on Entoto](https://owen.org/blog/80/) - We ran ten miles this morning at the top of Entoto with a great group of runners. The Entoto national park is a beautiful place to run, with views across Addis Ababa. As the elevation chart below shows (full size), it is at over 10,000 feet, so you feel the lack of oxygen. All the
- [Donate to Planned Parenthood in the name of Sarah Palin](https://owen.org/blog/81/) - I know this is all very immature, but I thought this was a funny idea (via): when you make a donation to Planned Parenthood in her name, they'll send her a card telling her that the donation has been made in her honor. Here's the link to the Planned Parenthood website. You'll need to fill
- [Second episode of development podcast](https://owen.org/blog/82/) - The second episode of Development Drums is at http://developmentdrums.org. You can also subscribe on iTunes. Professor Adrian Wood and Peter daCosta joined me to discuss whether donors should cap aid to Africa; the power-sharing agreement in Zimbabwe; the Care International paper criticising wasted aid; and the new Doing Business survey. But is it too long?
- [Growth blog launched](https://owen.org/blog/85/) - Growth Commission Blog We are launching the Commission on Growth and Development BLOG (The Growth Blog) today, while unprecedented changes in the financial markets are underway. These changes have the potential to reconfigure financial systems and manner not seen since the 1930s. I found the Growth Commission Report strangely disappointing. Let's hope the blog
- [Foreign aid - last in, first out](https://owen.org/blog/86/) - There has been a lot of discussion about the debate between the candidates for Vice President, Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, focusing on the lack of a train smash. But there was one important policy adjustment which has had very little attention. Joe Biden gave this answer: IFILL: ... I want to get -- try
- [How the financial crisis affects Ethiopia](https://owen.org/blog/87/) - The BBC sub-editor picked an angle, with the headline Prudence pays off in Ethiopia and the teaser: With the financial turmoil affecting many of the world's economies, Elizabeth Blunt in Addis Ababa considers how Ethiopia and other parts of Africa may escape the worst of the credit crisis. But that headline does not seem to
- [Which countries in Africa are the best governed?](https://owen.org/blog/88/) - The Ibrahim Index of African Governance was published today. It ranks African governments in five dimensions (safety and security, rule of law & transparency, participation & human rights, sustainable economic opportunity, and human development) and then puts these together to arrive at an overall ranking. Mauritius comes top again this year; and the top 5
- [Top tips for basic computer users](https://owen.org/blog/89/) - I know a few people who would benefit from reading: David Pogue's Tech Tips for the Basic Computer User. As usual, don't neglect the comments which include some other top tips. Sadly, most of the people who would benefit from these tips don't read blogs, so they won't be reading this.
- [DFID starts to blog](https://owen.org/blog/90/) - The UK Department for International Development has started a group blog. This is great news for those of us who believe that it has a good story to tell. DfID has a very good reputation abroad, but hardly anybody in the UK knows anything about it, or appreciates how much DfID contributes to positive perceptions
- [The cult of sustainability](https://owen.org/blog/91/) - Alanna Shaikh complains about the use and abuse of "sustainability" in development: I also hate this word because it so many things to so many different people. I am also uncomfortable about the notion of sustainability, but for slightly different reasons. There seems to be a consensus that development assistance is only politically defensible if
- [How To Spend It](https://owen.org/blog/93/) - I've never liked the name of the FT's lifestyle section, "How To Spend It". But with financial markets as they are now, it seems particularly ludicrous. How to spend what, exactly? Sitting in the airport lounge in Washington DC today, I was a bit surprised to find a "bonus issue" of How To Spend It
- [Do women write better about Africa than men?](https://owen.org/blog/94/) - Michela Wrong on writing books about Africa A book must be the biggest act of presumption it is possible to commit. If you're a white westerner writing about Africa, that arrogance reaches dizzying levels. What gives a spoilt bourgeois, who didn't even grow up there, the right to interpret the continent for the world? The
- [Dear Banks: A message from one of your new bosses](https://owen.org/blog/95/) - Every time I have suggested things you might do differently, I have been told that this is impossible as you are under an obligation to pursue the interests of your shareholders. Now that I am - unexpectedly - one of your shareholders, I expect you'd like to know what I would like you to do. Here are seven new instructions to be getting on with.
- [World Bank Reform](https://owen.org/blog/96/) - Because everyone is so concerned with the financial situation, little attention has been paid to the other aspects of the World Bank and IMF meetings last weekend. The Development Committee Communique says: An additional Board seat for sub Saharan Africa on the Bank's Board will be created. DTC voting shares in IBRD and IDA will
- [World Food Day - Worry about incomes, not food production](https://owen.org/blog/97/) - Today is World Food Day. There are 967 million people living below the hunger line. In one of DFID's splendid new blogs, Howard Taylor, Head of DFID Ethiopia , emphasizes the need for greater agricultural production: In the long-term, development assistance needs to prioritise agricultural growth and productivty, if we're to make sure that in
- [Modernising US foreign assistance](https://owen.org/blog/98/) - The Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network has a new website. This is a coalition of American thinkers who are campaigning for change in the way that US foreign assistance is provided. They are asking for the following changes: Core Principles for Modernizing U.S. Foreign Assistance: Elevate global development as a national interest priority in actions as
- [Do we need a shock-fund for developing countries?](https://owen.org/blog/100/) - Ray Fisman writing in Slate asks whether falling commodities prices cause civil wars in commodity-rich countries: To reduce violence in Colombia and other commodities-rich countries, care has to be taken to recognize how fluctuating prices actually affect the situation on the ground. If lower coffee prices drive poor farmers to desperation, we need to do something
- [The Daily Mail, to which donkeys are more important than Africans](https://owen.org/blog/103/) - So help me I've read some rubbish in the Daily Mail over the years - and I know it to be a potent brew of prejudice and lies. But this article must rank in the top-ten for stupidity. The headline - "A heart rending dispatch from Ethiopia" - seemed promising. Could it be that the
- [Development Podcast](https://owen.org/blog/101/) - The third edition of the development podcast, Development Drums, is now online. This week's guests, Ngaire Woods and David Roodman, discuss the impact of the financial crisis on developing countries, and on proposals to reform international institutions.
- [Policies to tackle child soldiering](https://owen.org/blog/104/) - Chris Blattman and Bernd Beber are looking at the economics of child soldiering. Why do rebel armies, such as the Lords Resistance Army in Uganda, recruit adolescents? According to Blattman and Beber, because younger children are ineffective soldiers; and adults are too difficult to indoctrinate. Chris Blattman has this graph What I find interesting about
- [De-escalating the paperwork in development](https://owen.org/blog/106/) - Alanna Shaikk writes about the good and bad of working in international development. Here is a big part of the bad: ... You’re a bureaucrat. An awful lot of every expat’s job involves paperwork. Most people picture international work as feeding hungry people, providing health care to refugees, or building schools. In reality, it makes
- [Google Alerts: now by RSS](https://owen.org/blog/107/) - If you have Google Alerts for your own name, or your company or website, you can now get your alert by RSS not just email: Until now, alerts have been delivered via email only, but those days are over. Now your News, Web, Blog, Video, and Groups alerts are more easily accessible than ever. A
- [Two new Development Drums podcasts](https://owen.org/blog/108/) - There are two new episodes of the Development Drums podcast now online. Episode 4 with Shanta Devarajan discusses the impact on developing countries of the financial crisis; latest developments in the food crisis; the award of the Mo Ibrahim prize for good governance in Africa. Sheila Page discusses moves towards a Free Trade Area from
- [Josh Lyman to be Chief of Staff](https://owen.org/blog/109/) - As a West Wing junkie, I'm thrilled that Rahm Emmanuel may become President Obama's Chief of Staff. Emmanuel is apparently the model for the character of Josh Lyman (played by Bradley Whitford - pictured right) from his days in the Clinton White House. Lyman has always been my hero in West Wing (except for that
- [Development assistance as permanent global redistribution](https://owen.org/blog/111/) - Jean Michel Severino says something you don't often hear: What is at stake with the MDGs is the creation on a global scale of the same sort of public redistribution mechanisms that were progressively established in the world’s richest societies over the course of the twentieth century. As most of today’s financial, environmental, or sanitary
- [Will Barack Obama reverse the global gag rule?](https://owen.org/blog/112/) - On his first day in office in 2001, President George W. Bush reinstated the so-called Mexico City Policy -- known to critics as the global gag rule. It prevents the US government from giving money to organizations that provide counseling and referral for abortion, lobby to make abortion legal or more available in their country,
- [Budget support and corruption](https://owen.org/blog/113/) - Why it makes sense to give aid to governments in countries that suffer from corruption.
- [Paved with good intentions](https://owen.org/blog/114/) - In a very thought-provoking post, Alanna Shaikh lists four ways that an NGO can unintentionally do harm to the community it's trying to serve. 1) You can waste the time and effort of a community by initiating projects which have little chance of success. It's hard to identify a good project for a small community.
- [Secrecy, leaking and the law](https://owen.org/blog/115/) - I am in favour of more openness in government, and against leaking by civil servants. Almost everyone recognises the need for secrecy in some discrete areas of government, such as security and defence, and for information about individuals to be protected. But there is debate about whether information about other areas of government policy should
- [Cash on Delivery Aid](https://owen.org/blog/119/) - Jean Michel Severino likes the idea of "Cash on Delivery Aid". I think it could be the basis of a new consensus - linking a (broadly European) agenda of giving governments in developing countries more freedom to choose their own approaches to development with a (broadly North American) agenda of ensuring that aid is more
- [Entoto today](https://owen.org/blog/120/) - Tom (second from the left) visiting from the UK ran for the first time at altitude (his usual run is along the waterfront in Ayr). More photos here. Here's the elevation graph:
- [Aspiring dictators](https://owen.org/blog/122/) - Let me be the nth person to link to The aspiring dictator's guide from the Mail & Guardian Online. Here's an extract. Rule 3. Make America or China happy. Make Israel and Saudi Arabia very happy. Become a Muslim, like Idi Amin. Visit Moammar Gadaffi often. He likes African leaders. We do not know why.
- [Please stop using internet explorer](https://owen.org/blog/123/) - Serious flaw in Internet Explorer not fixed yet (according to AP): Users of all current versions of Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer browser might be vulnerable to having their computers hijacked because of a serious security hole in the software that had yet to be fixed Monday. Seriously, people: if you are still using internet explorer,
- [Fingers crossed for Robert Fowler](https://owen.org/blog/125/) - There is still no news of Robert Fowler, the UN special envoy to Niger. He is a good man.
- [Bread and Cake](https://owen.org/blog/124/) - Phil in Afghanistan writes about giving money to a girl who may never eat a fruit tart.
- [We are hiring (advert now fixed?)](https://owen.org/blog/126/) - Advert for a job at aidinfo
- [Site update](https://owen.org/blog/2055/) - I've upgraded my website, to use Wordpress 2.7, and changed the design. Solution to the error message 'You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.'
- [Who should profit from charity?](https://owen.org/blog/2059/) - Nicholas Kristof mused on Christmas Day in the New York Times on whether NGOs should pay high salaries. He seems to come down - though equivocally - on the side of saying that sometimes they should: In the war on poverty, there is room for all kinds of organizations. Mr. Pallotta may be right that
- [Whitehall does not get the internet](https://owen.org/blog/2063/) - Jeremy Gould, one of the few civil servants who "gets" the internet, is leaving to spend more time with his family. I’ve been scouting around for a new challenge in Whitehall for a long time now but the truth is that beyond building and managing corporate websites, those roles don’t exist. There’s been a lot
- [Internet disruption continues in Ethiopia](https://owen.org/blog/2065/) - Spare a thought for those of us trying to use the internet in Ethiopia. It isn't great at the best of times. When it went down during the rainy season I rang technical support and was told that "the firewall has flooded". Apparently there is a single computer through which the entire nation's traffic passes
- [Will the net generation suffer in the recession?](https://owen.org/blog/2067/) - The Economist has a stupid article, Managing the Facebookers which claims that the net generation will suffer int he recession: Once again, the touchy-feely management fads that always spring up in years of plenty (remember the guff about “the search for meaning” and “the importance of brand me”) are being ditched in favour of more
- [Should you do a PhD in randomized evaluation?](https://owen.org/blog/2075/) - Chris Blattman asks us to comment on his advice to aspiring graduate student who want to be an impact evaluator: If your goal is to improve the delivery of aid, and truly advance development, many more skills and knowledge are involved than the randomized evaluation. See here for more. But in short: a well-identified causal
- [Ethiopia's new civil society law](https://owen.org/blog/2086/) - International reaction to the new Ethiopian Civil Society Law is hysterical. It isn't a great law, but nor is it unreasonable for the Ethiopian Government to want to limit international funding in its politics.
- [Donors not giving promised aid; financial crisis will make things worse](https://owen.org/blog/2103/) - Our evidence to the House of Commons International Development Committee shows that donors are not on track to meet their commitments to increase aid, which they made in 2005. As a result, millions more people are living in poverty. The financial downturn is a "quadruple whammy" for developing countries.
- [Bill Sonnenschein - in memoriam](https://owen.org/blog/2113/) - Bill Sonnenschein, educator, civil rights activist, roadie, and friend, died on 29 December 2008. Bill had been a special advisor to President Marc Ravalomananat of Madagascar for the last few months. He taught leadership at Berkeley, which is where I first met him, and helped to run the Environmental Leadership Program there. Grethe, who was
- [Esther Duflo is the new Sartre?](https://owen.org/blog/2115/) - Esther Duflo runs the Poverty Action Lab at MIT. They do great analysis of what works in development. And Esther is a big hit in France. According to the The Independent Mme Duflo is the youngest woman ever to be asked to lecture at this prestigious, 500-year-old institution at the heart of the Left Bank.
- [Barder: rodmaker](https://owen.org/blog/2117/) - Edward Barder is a not-very-distant relative who makes fishing rods. According to a quote from the Independent, quoted on the The Edward Barder Rod Company Website "Barder is unquestionably Britain’s finest rod-maker" Personally, I'm for banning fishing, though I wish Edward well.
- [Dubai Marathon - Ethiopians get 8 out of top 10 men and women](https://owen.org/blog/2120/) - In today's Dubai marathon, Ethiopians had 8 out of the top 10 men, and 8 of the top 10 women.
- [Teza - a film by Haile Gerima](https://owen.org/blog/2122/) - We went to see Teza last night, a newish film by Haile Gerima which won Best Screenplay and the Special jury prize at the Venice film festival last year. The film is in Amharic with English sub-titles. The film is about Anberber (played by Aaron Arefe - shown left) who returns to his village in
- [The Addis Ababa market](https://owen.org/blog/2127/) - Andrew Mueller in this weekend's FT writes about the Merkato, Addis Ababa’s market district To wander (and flinch, and wince, and boggle, and marvel) within its limits is to acquire the quickest and most bracing imaginable appreciation of Africa’s industry, its possibility, its genius for improvisation, its insuperable will, despite everything, to live. Dead right.
- [The Trouble With Aid - Development Drums podcast](https://owen.org/blog/2128/) - In the latest edition of the Development Drums podcast, I talk to Jonathan about his book, The Trouble with Aid.
- [Obama supports aid transparency (well, sort of)](https://owen.org/blog/2135/) - My colleague Simon nails the link between the Obama team's idea of openness and what we are trying to do with aid data: The pitch for the idea states: “We can unleash a wave of civic innovation if we open up government data to programmers. The government has a treasure trove of information: legislation, budgets,
- [DFID Permanent Secretary on social protection](https://owen.org/blog/2137/) - Here is a very interesting article by Minouche Shafik, the Permanent Secretary at the UK Department for International Development. (For our cousins elsewhere, a Permanent Secretary is the most senior civil servant in a government department, ranking somewhere just below a Minister). Minouche makes two key points: first, social protection schemes seem to be working
- [And so it starts](https://owen.org/blog/2165/) - Ireland announces aid cuts. Value of UK aid falls. Quadruple whammy for developing countries now beginning to emerge.
- [Aid and institutions](https://owen.org/blog/2176/) - According to Iqbal Quadir in the Wall Street Journal Aid empowers bureaucracies, promotes statism, and weakens government incentives to boost tax revenues through growth. Economic assets are often kept in the hands of the state, leading to monopolies, stagnation and extortion. All of this hurts entrepreneurs, who have the potential to create wealth and promote
- [Africa policy: should it be more hippocratic and less hypocritical?](https://owen.org/blog/2178/) - Jean Herskovits says that the Obama administration should adopt a hippocratic Africa policy The past decade of U.S. Africa policy has made some wish most for policies that would “first, do no harm.” A Hippocratic test could be useful for President Obama’s new Africa team at the NSC and the State Department, as they reflect
- [Seen while running](https://owen.org/blog/2189/) - Our Sunday runs start on Entoto, the mountain to the edge of Addis Ababa. We start and finish at an altitude of about 3,000m. Here are some things we've seen on our runs in the last two weeks: a leopard, crossing the path about 20 metres in front of us about 15 hyenas sunning themselves
- [Accelerating aid disbursement in a financial crisis](https://owen.org/blog/2203/) - Interesting idea from Homi Kharas at the Brookings Institution That is why the G20 should consider declaring a development emergency for 2009. They should urge aid agencies to take every step possible to accelerate the disbursement of already approved funds. They should support staff and managers for taking risks to speed up the flow of
- [Latest Development Drums online](https://owen.org/blog/2205/) - The latest edition of Development Drums is now online. I fear it may not be of universal interest. The Chair of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the OECD, and the Director of the Development Cooperation Directorate of the OECD, talk about whether donors are living up to their promises, and the next steps on
- [Microfinance Open Book Blog](https://owen.org/blog/2207/) - David Roodman at the Center for Global Development has begun an "open book" about microfinance. He is publishing chapters as he goes, with space for readers to comment. As well as an interesting way of working, this threatens to be a very interesting topic. David is not starry eyed about the role that microfinance (and
- [Alex De Waal on The Beginning of the End for ODA?](https://owen.org/blog/2209/) - Alex De Waal writes: The last ten years has been a remarkable experiment in using official development assistance (ODA) as a motor for development in Africa (and other developing countries too). It has been a bonanza for the aid industry and especially the favoured elements such as HIV/AIDS, which have often found themselves in the
- [UK Government Director of Digital Engagement: poisoned chalice?](https://owen.org/blog/2221/) - Here is a job I might have applied for if I were in London: Director of Digital Engagement: Develop a strategy and implementation plan for extending digital engagement across Government But I'm quite glad not to be eligible. Here are some phrases from the job description that should give pause for thought to anyone with
- [Paul Collier on Development Drums](https://owen.org/blog/2223/) - Paul Collier is interviewed on Development Drums about his new book, Wars, Guns and Votes, and his previous best-seller, The Bottom Billion.
- [Not so different](https://owen.org/blog/2225/) - Scarlett Lion writes about girls in Liberia. This is how Janice Pratt begins addressing her peers. She’s a slight girl with a strong voice that says to anyone willing to listen: I’m going to be someone. I am always struck whenever I travel in developing countries how similar people all around the world are in
- [DFID conference and White Paper in Development Drums](https://owen.org/blog/2227/) - The latest Development Drums - a podcast about development issues - includes an interview with DFID Permanent Secretary Minouche Shafik and a discussion about the Conference with Nancy Birdsall and Simon Maxwell.
- [Does British Foreign Aid Prefer Poor Governments Over Poor People?](https://owen.org/blog/2229/) - AidWatch lay in to British Government aid for giving financial support directly to governments. They have got their facts wrong, and their arguments are knee jerk reactions. They should do a proper analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of budget support.
- [Six people you will meet in every expat bar](https://owen.org/blog/2265/) - BraveNewTraveler describes the six characters you’ll meet at every expat bar. It’s never hard to find your way there – all you need to do is follow the American music which is old enough to feel stale without being old enough to feel hip and look for a chalkboard sign advertising a European football match.
- [Other reviews of "Dead Aid" by Dambisa Moyo](https://owen.org/blog/2247/) - Dambisa Moyo's book, Dead Aid, has had a lot of attention in the media. I'll post my own, excessively long review of the book here on the blog. In the meantime, here are some other reviews: Broadly unsympathetic My review Adekeye Adebajo in Business Day Michael Clemens in Finance And Development David Roodman at CGD
- [Yet Another Review of "Dead Aid" by Dambisa Moyo](https://owen.org/blog/2250/) - This is a summary of a longer (8 page) review which you can read in full here. Dead Aid should have been an interesting and challenging book. Moyo is originally from Zambia, she has degrees from Harvard and Oxford, and she has worked at the World Bank and at Goldman Sachs. Disappointingly, while the book
- [Innovations in Aid: The End of ODA](https://owen.org/blog/2272/) - Severino and Ray argue that the definition of ODA is out of date. Is this a good idea?
- [The budget and the world's poor](https://owen.org/blog/2274/) - First the good news. In its Budget today, the UK Government forecast for overseas aid next financial year is unchanged at £9.1 billion, as projected in the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) in 2007. With GDP falling, this represents a bigger share of GDP than was originally expected. Kudos to the Government for resisting the temptation
- [Medicines, research and the developing world](https://owen.org/blog/2280/) - Edinburgh University forces firms to supply cheap medicines to developing world: Edinburgh is to become the first British university to help make cheap medicines available to the developing world by licensing research to pharmaceutical companies only on condition that poorer communities get life-saving drugs at cost price. That's great. Differential pricing is good for everyone.
- [The sustainability delusion](https://owen.org/blog/2283/) - The aid industry has become too obsessed with finding the deepest causes of lack of development. Every project has to be catalytic or self-sustaining. This rules out very worthwhile aid programmes that enable people to live better lives while development is happening. We should have a more comprehensive understanding of poverty reduction that validates this as a goal of aid. My new Working Paper, What is Poverty Reduction, has been published by CGD here: http://www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/1421599
- [President Kagame on aid](https://owen.org/blog/2288/) - Paul Kagame, the President of Rwanda, writes about aid in today's Financial Times: Dambisa Moyo’s controversial book, Dead Aid, has given us an accurate evaluation of the aid culture today. The cycle of aid and poverty is durable: as long as poor nations are focused on receiving aid they will not work to improve their
- [The mother of Parliaments](https://owen.org/blog/2291/) - In which I pedantically criticise Nick Robinson, the BBC Political Editor, who should know the meaning of the phrase "Mother of Parliaments".
- [Should development agency staff fly business class?](https://owen.org/blog/2294/) - So asks Chris Blattman: I seldom fly business myself, even on Bank and UN consultancies, mostly to conserve my project funds for research assistants and survey expenses. My incentives are just right: money I spend on me comes out of money I'd spend making my research projects just a little better. Not so the rest
- [Aid is a precious lifeline](https://owen.org/blog/2300/) - Says Fr Joe Komakoma: ... I lost my young sister. She died of HIV-related complications. She should still be alive today since she was on ARVs. But ARVs go hand in hand with good nutrition. My sister could not afford proper daily meals since she was looking after a large extended family. Besides her three
- [What would the UK Conservatives do on development?](https://owen.org/blog/2302/) - In the latest edition of Development Drums, Andrew Mitchell MP talks about the policy of the British Conservative party on international development. If the Conservatives win the next General Election, Mr Mitchell is set to become the Cabinet Minister responsible for international development. You can subscribe to Development Drums (free) in iTunes - or you
- [China in Africa: plus ça change](https://owen.org/blog/2311/) - Here in Ethiopia it is common for little children to shout ferenj when they see a white face. I am told that this comes from the Amharic word for a French person, ፈረንሳዊ (pronounced färänsawi), because French people were among the first white people Ethiopians had seen. Today G and I were running down a
- [Reduce meat not air travel](https://owen.org/blog/2316/) - Air travel is a public good; eating meat is a public bad. The livestock industry is responsible for 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions - more than all forms of travel put together. So why are we so fixated on the carbon footprint of air travel and not on reducing meat consumption?
- [Google Maps Discovers Africa](https://owen.org/blog/2325/) - Google Maps now has detailed moaps for 27 more African countries.
- [Philanthrocapitalism discussed on Development Drums](https://owen.org/blog/2328/) - In the latest episode of Development Drums, Matthew Bishop and Mike Green talk about their book, Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World and Why We Should Let Them. Development Drums 14 is here. You can also download Development Drums free using iTunes: search for ‘Development Drums’ in iTunes or click this link. I would welcome
- [Food aid - good, better, best](https://owen.org/blog/2332/) - Kudos to the US Government for giving food aid to Ethiopia. This is good: USAID has provided an additional 87,910 metric tons of emergency food aid, valued at approximately U.S. $50 million, to the Joint Emergency Operational Plan in response to the Ethiopian Government's January 2009 appeal. This emergency food aid will provide a full
- [Installing Ubuntu Jaunty](https://owen.org/blog/2338/) - Installed the latest Ubuntu Linux (9.04 Jaunty) - overcoming a problem with the installation programme by removing RAM from my computer.
- [Armchair auditors](https://owen.org/blog/2341/) - David Cameron is right to call for transparency in public spending.
- [Give a man a fish](https://owen.org/blog/2348/) - Cashewman quotes a friend: “You can give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. You can teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime. But did you ever ask him if he wanted a fucking fish in the first place? And it’s not as simple as a fish anyway.”
- [Is Dambisa Moyo shifting her position?](https://owen.org/blog/2355/) - In the FT debate on aid, Dambisa Moyo, author of Dead Aid, seems to be adjusting her position: To focus on the five-year aid-reduction example that my book offered as an illustration of an exit strategy deliberately misses the point, which is that Africa desperately needs to wean off aid. Obviously, a blanket five-year plan
- [Abortion by amateurs](https://owen.org/blog/2364/) - The New York Times describes what happens if women do not have access to safe abortions: Worldwide, there are 19 million unsafe abortions a year, and they kill 70,000 women (accounting for 13 percent of maternal deaths), mostly in poor countries like Tanzania where abortion is illegal, according to the World Health Organization. More than
- [Why Africa Matters: My Father's Despatch of 1991](https://owen.org/blog/2368/) - My father was a diplomat. When he left his last post in Africa (as High Commissioner to Nigeria) to become High Commissioner to Australia, he sent a message to the then Foreign Secretary reflecting on a career spent mainly in Africa. (These messages from Ambassadors are known in Foreign-Office-speak as a despatch). Thanks to the
- [Aid to government, aid to NGOs - both working in different ways](https://owen.org/blog/2371/) - The UK Department for International Development is to be commended for encouraging some of its staff to maintain a blog to explain to the public what they do. In Bangladesh, Adam Jackson has posted some interesting reflections on his visit to a health programme (in which DFID supports the government) and a Chars Livelihood Progamme.
- [Advance Market Commitment launched.](https://owen.org/blog/2373/) - For two years I worked at the Center for Global Development on Michael Kremer's idea that donor nations should create stronger commercial incentives for drug companies to develop and manufacture drugs and vaccines needed for developing countries by guaranteeing to pay for them if they are produced. On 12th June, a group of donors signed
- [The moral duty to donate money to people in extreme poverty](https://owen.org/blog/2375/) - The latest Development Drums podcast on development issues is a discussion with Peter Singer about his new book, The Life You Can Save. Professor Singer argues that we have a duty to give more of our income to help people in extreme poverty. Download Develoment Drums from iTunes or from http://developmentdrums.org/246.
- [Development & Geeks.  Cool.](https://owen.org/blog/2377/) - If you are a geek who is into development, and you are somewhere near Washington DC, you are going to want to come to the International Development Data Barcamp. In fact, even if you are not near DC you may want to come - I'm flying all the way from Ethiopia for it. Here's the
- [Development podcast: US-Africa policy, and False Economy](https://owen.org/blog/2379/) - I'm inordinately proud of the latest two episodes of my development podcast, Development Drums. In Episode 17, Todd Moss (Center for Global Development) and Chris Blattman (Yale, and blogger) join me to talk about President Obama President Obama's speech in Ghana about US policy towards Africa. In Episode 16, FT World Trade Editor Alan Beattie
- [That's a different Owen](https://owen.org/blog/2385/) - I was touched to receive the following message through my website yesterday: i am one of the proud person in the world when in heard that you are going to man utd but please i am applealing to you that gambia are in need of your support because we need a very good accademy in
- [Gordon Brown: technology has changed foreign policy](https://owen.org/blog/2388/) - The BBC reports Gordon Brown's speech at the TED conference today: The power of technology - such as blogs - meant that the world could no longer be run by "elites", Mr Brown said. Policies must instead be formed by listening to the opinions of people "who are blogging and communicating with people around the
- [15 beliefs on workplace management](https://owen.org/blog/2496/) - Bob Sutton offers us fifteen tips on workplace management. Most resonate with me. Especially these two: 3. In organizational life, you can have influence over others or you can have freedom from others, but you can't have both at the same time. ... 13. Err on the side of optimism and positive energy in all
- [What to bring to Africa](https://owen.org/blog/2498/) - Scarlett Lion has this list. Her main advice is to keep it to a minimum. Here is our list, intended for visitors to Ethiopia. So apparently zip off safari shorts/trousers make you look stupid. I guess I don't care - I think they are quite a good way to travel light in a country that
- [Special advisers and civil servants](https://owen.org/blog/2500/) - Danny Finkelstein in The Times sticks up for Special Advisers. Alex Evans, who was a Special Adviser in DFID, tells a funny story about being put at the end of a corridor I returned from leave to discover that my office had halved in size: the wall had been moved six feet. To create a new
- [Charging the poor for services](https://owen.org/blog/2505/) - Tim Harford has an interesting article in this weekend's Financial Times about private health and education in developing countries: Imagine that your daily earnings were less than the price of this newspaper. Would you consider buying private education and private healthcare? Before you make up your mind, here are a few considerations: government healthcare and
- [Running for Fitness website updated](https://owen.org/blog/2518/) - About six years ago I threw together a website, www.runningforfitness.org, to make running-related calculations (for example: if I can run a 10km in one hour, how long might it take me to run a half marathon?). Today I've changed one of the calculations because I made a mistake when I programmed the "Cameron Formula" (which
- [25 years of PowerPoint - tips from the BBC.](https://owen.org/blog/2520/) - Bizarrely, the BBC online magazine has an excellent article on "The problem with PowerPoint" with some tips for giving presentations that many people in the development business and in government would do well to heed. Here is the main point, as far as I am concerned: ... all too often the slides are verbal crutches
- [Adair Turner: who are you calling economically illiterate?](https://owen.org/blog/2523/) - Adair Turner, Chair of the Financial Services Authority, says that the FSA should not be expected to curb city bonuses: Lord Turner, head of the Financial Services Authority, said it was "economic illiteracy" to expect his organisation to be able to dictate to banks what they paid their staff. He complains that is is beyond
- [Tobin Tax and International Development](https://owen.org/blog/2528/) - It worries me that people who are interested in reducing world poverty leap so readily on the Tobin Tax bandwagon. There are three questions to answer: should we spend more on reducing global poverty?(my answer: yes, if we have to) should we tax transactions in financial markets?(my answer: maybe, though I am not persuaded) should
- [What will happen to your pet after the rapture?](https://owen.org/blog/2538/) - I love this idea for making money from people who believe that the rapture is coming: We are a group of dedicated animal lovers, and atheists. Each Eternal Earth-Bound Pet representative is a confirmed atheist, and as such will still be here on Earth after you've received your reward. Our network of animal activists are
- [Why IP is not like other property](https://owen.org/blog/2554/) - Peter Mandelson has not thought this through: First, taking something for nothing, without permission, and with no compensation for the person who created and owns it, is wrong. Simple as that. With respect, it is not as simple as that. The reason this looks plausible is the use of the word "taking". If I take
- [All aid is used for imports: get over it](https://owen.org/blog/2559/) - All foreign aid is, in the end, used to pay for imports. In a few moments we’ll discuss why this is true and why it matters. But let me offer two apologies. To those for whom this is a statement of the bleedin' obvious, sorry for wasting your time. Please feel free to skip down
- [Alchemy & Oxfam](https://owen.org/blog/2566/) - I know it is a cliché, but if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Oxfam's new campaign urges us to believe that they have designed a package of measures that would give $280 billion to the world's poor "without putting any extra burden on ordinary taxpayers." That would be terrific. But
- [Back to school with development podcasts](https://owen.org/blog/2569/) - Ryan Briggs has a good round up of development-related podcasts Fall classes have started again so my time on the DC metro has increased greatly. The commuting has meant that I’ve been blowing through podcasts at an alarming rate, and I’ve come across a few that are worth sharing. These links are to the webpages
- [How big is Africa (amazing graphic)](https://owen.org/blog/2575/) - This is an amazing graphic You can buy the poster here.
- [Time for more Advance Market Commitments?](https://owen.org/blog/2565/) - Over on Huffington Post, Seth Berkley and Orin Levine make a plea for the United States to consider an Advance Market Commitment for an AIDS vaccine: Traditionally it has taken up to 20 years for new vaccines to reach children in developing countries. The AMC can fix this inequity. Through the pneumococcal AMC, and with
- [Transplants and free riders](https://owen.org/blog/2591/) - I've just watched Steve Jobs at the Apple event today. I was glad he paid tribute to the man whose liver he received, and that he called on others to register as organ donors. But it is less impressive to see people come to this issue only after they themselves need an organ. I don't
- [Do 'they' know it's New Year's Day?](https://owen.org/blog/2594/) - Here in Ethiopia, 2001 is drawing to a close. Tomorrow is the first day of 2002 in the Ethiopian calendar. It is a time of renewal and celebration here - perhaps more than in European cultures (something like a cross between Christmas and New Year). The rainy season is coming to an end; the hungry
- [Thank God we don't have them here](https://owen.org/blog/2598/) - The Ethiopian Government has been running posters in the southern part of Ethiopia to warn farmers about the risk of tsetse fly (which kill cattle and cause sleeping sickness). To reinforce the message, and to make sure that farmers know exactly what they are looking for, they have been using posters with huge images of
- [When is innovative finance good for development?](https://owen.org/blog/2601/) - There are bad reasons and good reasons for supporting the use of innovative finance for development. Unfortunately, some development advocates seem williing to back any proposal that they think might raise more money for development, instead of focusing on mechanisms that will improve the way that money is used. When is innovative finance good? Innovative
- [Tobin Tax - My interview on the BBC](https://owen.org/blog/2611/) - I was on the BBC World Business Report yesterday, talking about proposals for a Tobin Tax (a tax on financial market transactions with the revenues allocated to poverty reduction). David Hillman from Stamp Out Poverty discussed the issue with me. I said I could not see the logic of linking measures to reduce capital market
- [It's our money - where has it gone?](https://owen.org/blog/2615/) - Have a look at this video produced by the International Budget Partnership. The video is about the way that a civil society organisation in Kenya, MUHURI, has enabled a local community in Mombassa to hold their government to account. (Disclosure: I work on aidinfo - a small research team which promotes the adoption of open
- [A market for aid](https://owen.org/blog/2631/) - My new working paper, Beyond Planning: Markets and Networks for Better Aid is on the Center for Global Development website in the innovations in aid series. In the paper I argue that more planning and coordiation among donors will not overcome the political constraints that prevent better aid. The aid system is in a political
- [Is blogging a waste of time?](https://owen.org/blog/2633/) - Chris Blattman has a thoughtful post about his decision to continue blogging. He gives a bunch of reasons - to paraphrase, they are: (a) it is way to have influence; (b) it is probably a good career more; (c) it forces the author to think more carefully about the issues and to think about the
- [Global Prosperity Wonkcasts](https://owen.org/blog/2636/) - Good news: the Center for Global Development has started a new podcast series, the Global Prosperity Wonkcast. In this first episode, host Lawrence Macdonald talks to Todd Moss about his new paper, Saving Ghana from Its Oil: The Case for Direct Cash Distribution. Todd proposes ways for the citizens to have more oversight of Ghana's
- [FT Undercover Economist on aid effectiveness](https://owen.org/blog/2639/) - Tim Harford at the FT has an article in today's FT weekend magazine which endorses the ideas in my recent working paper, Beyond Planning: Markets and Networks for Better Aid. I'm envious of Tim's ability to express the ideas so much more succinctly and clearly than me. He writes: it might be easier to change
- [Development footprint league - UK drops 6 places](https://owen.org/blog/2641/) - One of my favourite scorecards is the Commitment to Development Index produced each year by the Center for Global Development. The 2009 index was published on Thursday. What I especially like is that this analysis does not focus only on aid. Too often, we measure the extent of our international solidarity by the amount of
- [Should we stop poaching health workers from developing countries?](https://owen.org/blog/2647/) - Not according to Michael Clemens at the Center for Global Development. Read his "Think Again" piece in Foreign Policy. Here's a sample: This common idea that skilled emigration amounts to "stealing" requires a cartoonish set of assumptions about developing countries. First, it requires us to assume that developing countries possess a finite stock of skilled
- [Development Drums - with guest host Alison Evans](https://owen.org/blog/2649/) - Alison Evans, the new Director of ODI, stepped in to my seat to present the latest edition of the Development Drums podcast. She interviewed me and Roger Riddell about my paper, Beyond Planning. Thanks to all the folks at ODI for collaborating with me on this. The next two episodes in the pipeline are Mushtaq
- [Does aid promote economic growth?](https://owen.org/blog/2652/) - Here is a new paper by Channing Arndt, Sam Jones, and Finn Tarp on whether aid leads to economic growth. The econometrics are done carefully, and it finds that aid inflows of about 10 per cent of GDP lead to an increase in economic growth of about 1 percentage point. (Reassuringly, this is also broadly
- [Support TWACIB](https://owen.org/blog/2660/) - I love this black humour about useless NGOs: It reminds me of a joke that we had in Malawi about the proliferation of useless (and often fraudulent) NGOs – we talked about the NGO TWACIB, which stood for “Two wankers and a computer in Blantyre. On a recent trip to London I was taken aback
- [Pneumonia](https://owen.org/blog/2664/) - On the first World Pneumonia Day, spare a thought for the mothers and fathers of the five thousand children who will be killed today by pneumonia. Pause for a moment in silent thanks to the staff of the GAVI Alliance which works to get immunisation to children in developing countries. If you pay taxes in
- [Apricot and chick pea curry](https://owen.org/blog/2669/) - The sweetness of the apricots offsets the spiciness of the curry in this dish which I am sure has no connection with India at all. It is a very quick and easy vegan dish. I usually serve it with brown rice mixed with fried onions and green peas. I saw this recipe once about 20
- [Is a wall to keep people out better than a wall to keep people in?](https://owen.org/blog/2677/) - Martin Wolf in the Financial Times says he is calling for "a debate" about immigration but his article is, in truth, a thinly-veiled diatribe against immigration on the grounds that it harms the economy, the environment and society. The most important step in his argument is the first one. Wolf says: I, for one, have
- [Can you help orphans in Wolaita?](https://owen.org/blog/2690/) - I have been contacted through my website by somebody saying: we are working to save lives orphans in south Ethiopia, Wolaita. but still we don't have our own website to spread our works and sounds of orphans. please try your best to help us. I don't know anything about this organisation but it sounds like
- [Trip to the south](https://owen.org/blog/2705/) - G and I went to Shashemane and Awassa this weekend. I wanted to see how things are looking in the (usually quite fertile) south towards the end of the growing season. As you can see from this photo (right) taken on our morning run, things seemed pretty green. The anecdotal view from locals was that
- [The lethal effects of development advocacy](https://owen.org/blog/2717/) - Aid budgets are limited by the amounts that rich countries are willing to allocate for foreign assistance. There are limits to the generosity of parliaments, finance ministries and taxpayers. At the same time, in developing countries there is not enough money to pay for everyone's basic needs for food, water, shelter, health and education. Because
- [Fine athletes, and us](https://owen.org/blog/2778/) - G and I had the privilege of joining great athletes and olympians including Haile Gebreselassie, Paula Radcliffe, Richard Nerurkar, Millon Wolde, Hugh Jones, and sponsors of tomorrow's Great Ethiopian Run, for dinner at Castellis Restaurant in Addis Ababa. Here is a picture of G chatting with Paula. The Great Ethiopian Run is Africa's largest road
- [Keeping promises](https://owen.org/blog/2784/) - On 29 September 2009, Gordon Brown told the Labour Party Conference: (my emphasis) And let me say what was once an aspiration – 0.7% of national income spent on international development aid, has become with Labour a promise, and will in future become a law. We will pass legislation that the British government is obliged
- [Great Ethiopian Run 2009](https://owen.org/blog/2792/) - Thirty four thousand runners gathered today in the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, for Africa's biggest road race, the Great Ethiopian Run. Koreni Jelila and Tilahun Regassa won the women's and men's races respectively, both with new course records. The world record holders for the marathon, Paula Radcliffe and Haile Gebreselassie started the race and
- [Making cows cooperate](https://owen.org/blog/2803/) - I was fascinated to read remarks by the President of Israel, Shimon Peres on the efficiency of milk production in Ethiopia: In Israel, we have 100,000 cows that produce the same amount of milk as the 4 million cows in Ethiopia. I'm urging them to work together to increase yields. It is an interesting observation
- [Raining when it shouldn't](https://owen.org/blog/2812/) - 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
- [Who says aid doesn't work?](https://owen.org/blog/2828/) - The Independent reports Bob Geldof's recent trip to Ethiopia: Though 35 per cent of Ethiopian children are malnourished, and 40 per cent are stunted when they start school, the number who die below the age of 5 is down 40 per cent on what it was 15 years ago. A shocking 381,000 children died from
- [Aid works even if it does not cause development](https://owen.org/blog/2831/) - My article on OpenDemocracy today discusses whether aid works. Some supporters of aid have made what seem to me to be extravagant claims that aid should aim to bring about economic and social transformation of developing countries, so accelerating economic growth and industrialisation. But this is a very high bar to set. Aid may well
- [aidinfo is hiring](https://owen.org/blog/2842/) - The aidinfo team which I lead at Development Initiatives is hiring. Click here for our job advertisement (pdf). Closing date: 22 January. Feel free to ask me if you want more information. (Job descriptions now online here.)
- [Cash on Delivery Aid: Response to CAFOD questions](https://owen.org/blog/2864/) - A few years ago, Nancy Birdsall and I proposed that donors might consider a scheme to give aid to developing countries based on the services they actually deliver. For example, donors could promise to pay $100 for each additional child who completes primary school and takes a standardized competency test. The Center for Global Development
- [Linking aid to results: why are some development workers anxious?](https://owen.org/blog/2852/) - The Center for Global Development is working on an idea which they call Cash on Delivery aid, in which donors make a binding commitment to developing country governments to provide aid according to the outputs that the government delivers. I think this is a good idea in principle, and hope that it can be tested
- [Getting deliveries right this Christmas](https://owen.org/blog/2889/) - My sister was sent this card. I thought it was funny. Please do send a goat to Africa this Christmas. It will change somebody's life, and it will make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Or you can send cow. I promise you that either will add more happiness to the world than a
- ["Dead Aid is a work of self-flagellating simplicity"](https://owen.org/blog/2898/) - In Business Day, Adekeye Adebajo, the executive director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution, Cape Town, takes the gloves off in criticising Dambisa Moyo's book, Dead Aid: ... This is a work of self-flagellating simplicity, totally devoid of any thinking by leading African research centres or scholars, making the book often read like a Harvard
- ["Don't let anyone tell you that what's right is impossible"](https://owen.org/blog/2924/) - Michael Clemens from the Center for Global Development talks about immigration - which he describes as "The Biggest Idea in Development that No One Really Tried". In this TED-talk style video, he addresses criticisms of open borders such as the idea that open immigration would impoverish rich countries (it wouldn't), and that it is politically
- [The universal cynics' answer to why your aid project won't work](https://owen.org/blog/2903/) - Whenever anybody makes a suggestion for improving foreign assistance, there is a long queue of vested interests thoughtful people ready to pour scorn on it offer constructive criticism. To save everyone effort in future, here is a cut-out-and-keep, one-size fits all template for criticising every possible aid proposal. I hope you will find it useful
- [Pop singer makes two excellent points on development](https://owen.org/blog/2993/) - I know it is fashionable to denounce celebrities who get in involved in international development, but I admire both Bono and Bob Geldof. They are smart enough to take advice from smart people, and they put serious amounts of time and effort into visiting developing countries and getting to know the people and understand the
- [The Kindle in Ethiopia](https://owen.org/blog/2998/) - I've had a Kindle here in Ethiopia for a few weeks now, and I'm lovin' it. I bought the international edition, with a 6 inch display (the Kindle DX with the larger 9.7 inch display is expected to be available in an international edition some time in 2010). Update (6th January): coincidentally, the international edition
- [One day, all this will seem very strange](https://owen.org/blog/3003/) - This post is cross-posted on the aidinfo blog. My colleague Judith Randel has made a very interesting point about aid transparency. It was not long ago that donors conducted Consultative Group meetings in Paris about their planned aid to each developing country. Representatives of the recipients were not invited (they were subsequently given observer status
- [Markets and aid](https://owen.org/blog/3008/) - I am grateful to Oxfam's Duncan Green for his fair and thoughtful review of my paper about improving aid, Beyond Planning: Markets and Networks for Better Aid. I'm glad that Duncan and Chris, his Oxfam colleague, endorse a key argument of the paper, which is that the development industry will improve through evolutionary change rather
- [Lindsay on unpredictability](https://owen.org/blog/3022/) - Lindsay Morgan describes the problem of unpredictable aid: And although more aid, even disbursed on short notice, might seem like a good thing, it's difficult for governments to spend on useful things when they can't predict what next year’s aid will amount to. For example, governments can't hire teachers with a boost in aid this
- [Google gets its mojo back](https://owen.org/blog/3024/) - When Google decided to set up a censored version of its search engine in China in 2006, I was among those who criticised the company for its decision (here and here). As well thiking it was the wrong decision in principle, I worried that a company that says one thing ("Don't Be Evil") and does
- [It is all decided by a Professor in New York](https://owen.org/blog/3029/) - Jeff Marlow writes in the New York Times about Koraro, a Millennium Village Project village in Northern Ethiopia: As the project’s first five years wind down, its ultimate goals remain elusive, and the five-year initiative has swelled to 10. The extension, naturally, will require more spending: The financial injections to date—over $5 million per year
- [Protect development from party politics](https://owen.org/blog/3034/) - On January 13th, a leader in The Times and Kevin Watkins in The Guardian attacked the development policies of the UK Conservative Party, from opposite sides of the political spectrum. The Times Leader says that the Conservatives are wrong to commit themselves to increase aid to 0.7% of GNI; and Kevin Watkins says that the
- [Ethiopian Airlines](https://owen.org/blog/3055/) - I was very upset to hear of the loss of an Ethiopian Airlines plane from Lebanon to Addis Ababa this morning. Many Ethiopian and Lebanese families will be grieving. Ethiopian Airlines has an outstanding safety record. The staff are professional, courteous and efficient. I will be flying from the UK to Addis on Friday on
- [Why is fragmentation a problem?](https://owen.org/blog/3062/) - Emmanuel Frot and Javier Santiso write about why fragmentation is a problem for international aid: .. the real issue at the heart of fragmentation is too little competition. Numerous donors only multiply monopoly costs, without bringing the benefits expected from competition. This has implications for how the donor community tackles fragmentation. The current approach is
- [What to read on foreign aid](https://owen.org/blog/3071/) - John Gershman offers a reading list on "What to Read on Foreign Aid" in Foreign Affairs. I'm obviously pleased that my paper, Beyond Planning, and the amazing work of my colleagues at aidinfo, are included in the list. Does anyone reading this blog have anything to add to or delete from John Gershman's list?
- [Aid, income and dutch disease](https://owen.org/blog/2928/) - One argument that aid sceptics like to use - often without really understanding it - is that aid damages recipient countries through a macroeconomic effect known as "Dutch Disease". The issue has been raised again in a new working paper: so let's go back to basics and think about what is going on and whether
- [To them that hath ... a fifth poverty trap for Africa?](https://owen.org/blog/3084/) - Paul Collier’s last book, The Bottom Billion, proposed that there are four “traps” in which the poorest countries can become enmeshed (a conflict trap, resource trap, geography trap and governance trap). He vividly explains why he thinks that “business as usual” will not lift these countries out of poverty, creating the prospect that 58 countries,
- [Why I am not a fan of the "Robin Hood tax"](https://owen.org/blog/3092/) - No less a scholar than Bill Nighy urges us to support a “Robin Hood Tax” to take money from the bankers and speculators and give to the poor. The Robin Hood tax appears at first sight to be a way to kill three fairly succulent birds with one stone. It offers an attractive combination of:
- [The Brain Gain](https://owen.org/blog/3099/) - Laura Freschi at AidWatch lists four ways in which the brain drain from Africa is a good thing. Her analysis includes (a) gains to the migrants; (b) gains to the migrants' families; (c)the benefits of exchange of ideas; and (d) the stimulation of the accumulation of skills. This is consistent with what Michael Clemens at
- [Actionable ideas for shared prosperity](https://owen.org/blog/3103/) - On the CGD blog, Nancy Birdsall proposes "Ten Actionable Ideas ... for a 21st-Century Global Development Agenda" What are examples – some realized and some on the table but untested – for practical action in the interests of global prosperity? Where do good ideas come from? How do they get translated into action? Nancy's ten:
- [The bike bus](https://owen.org/blog/9555/) - I love this.
- [Geeky stuff about browsers](https://owen.org/blog/3111/) - Obviously I don't use Internet Explorer because it is (a) not compliant with standards; (b) not safe; (c) Microsoft. And I don't use Safari because Steve Jobs is a control freak and I don't wish to be locked up in his world. So like most geeks I've been using Firefox, which is faster
- [Faith based aid organisations](https://owen.org/blog/3124/) - Nick Kristof writes approvingly in the New York Times about faith based aid organisations: Some liberals are pushing to end the longtime practice (it’s a myth that this started with President George W. Bush) of channeling American aid through faith-based organizations. That change would be a catastrophe. In Haiti, more than half of food distributions
- [The Addis Sheraton and People in Rags](https://owen.org/blog/3129/) - The satirical aid blog ("Hand Relief International") is clearly written by someone who knows the aid system pretty well. Their description of aid workers at the Addis Ababa Sheraton is pretty much spot on: One of the meetings I attended last week was in Addis Ababa where my stay in the dignified Sheraton Hotel was slightly
- [Government on the web: the next revolution](https://owen.org/blog/3132/) - Seventeen years ago this month, I set up the first British government website. I was a young economist at the UK Treasury, and I thought the budget documents should be available online. I proposed this to the Treasury Management Board, most of whom had no idea what I was talking about, but Terry Burns was
- [Priorities for improving US Development Policy](https://owen.org/blog/3147/) - Ray Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America, writes on the Modernizing Foreign Assistance blog that US foreign assistance should be more transparent, more predictable, reduce reliance on US contractors and NGOs, use local NGOs, use country-based rather than Washington-based planning, and focus on outcomes rather than outputs. This is very good stuff (and particularly commendable for
- [How can aid be improved?](https://owen.org/blog/3156/) - Over at The Atlantic Community there is a discussion this week on how aid can be improved. First up is Lawrence Haddad, with Six Ways to Improve Aid Effectiveness. In summary, his six are: fix the broken feedback loop. communicate the successes and risks of aid in a less ‘public relations’ way. publish results of
- [Variation and selection: improving the development system](https://owen.org/blog/3140/) - All effective complex systems got that way by a process of evolution. Evolution requires both variation and selection. The development industry has quite a lot of variation, but not enough selection. Better selection is not just a matter of more rigorous top-down evaluation, but also bottom up pressure from the intended beneficiaries.
- [Should we worry about fungibility of health aid?](https://owen.org/blog/3201/) - A new article published in The Lancet by Chunling Lu with Chris Murray, Dean Jamison and others, has caused quite a stir in development circles. They use data on health aid and government spending on health to estimate that for every $1 given in health aid, the recipient government shifts between 43 cents and $1.14
- [Fungibility and sloppy thinking](https://owen.org/blog/3224/) - The term fungibility has been misunderstood and misused in development circles, so creating confusion that leads to inappropriate policy conclusions. This post goes back to basics and tries to bring a little rigour and clarity to the question of fungibility of foreign assistance. As we will see, the technical concept of fungibility is irrelevant to
- [Development blogs you should read](https://owen.org/blog/3150/) - It would be invidious to recommend particular blogs, and what's the point of having a blog if you can't be invidious? So, if you only read a few development blogs, here is my list of who I think you should be reading. I expect I have embarrassed myself by leaving out somebody crucial - if so,
- [The coming collapse of the development system?](https://owen.org/blog/3184/) - Clay Shirky, who writes about the social and economic effects of the internet, draws on Joseph Tainter's book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, to describe why complex business models collapse: Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies
- [Spare a thought for exporters from poor countries](https://owen.org/blog/3254/) - In among the many problems caused by the decision not to fly in the ash-cloud, spare a thought for several very poor African countries who earn important foreign exchange by selling fresh fruit, vegetables and flowers to European markets and depend on air cargo to do so. This evening here in Addis Ababa I bumped
- [Achieve complex goals obliquely](https://owen.org/blog/3257/) - I'm not sure how I missed John Kay's article in the Financial Times on March 20th, which has important implications for how we think about development policy: It is hard to overstate the damage recently done by leaders who thought they knew more about the world than they did – the managers and financiers who
- [What can we learn from randomized evaluation? (podcast)](https://owen.org/blog/3260/) - You may have heard talk about randomized evaluation as a way to understand the impact of development programmes. In the first of a new series of the Development Drums podcast, Rachel Glennerster, the Executive Director of the Poverty Action Lab at MIT, explains what we can learn from randomization. She explains why randomization is an
- [Development policy in the UK election](https://owen.org/blog/3270/) - We have been told that the three largest parties in the UK are committed to retaining DFID as a separate government department, with its own Cabinet Minister, and with a budget that rises to meet the UK's commitment to increase aid to 0.7% of GDP. If we want to help to accelerate development, then some of the time we will need to put the UK's broad, long-term interest in building a safer, more equal and prosperous world ahead of the UK's narrower and short-term commercial or political interests. The most important international development question for the UK election should be: which of the political parties is willing to do that?
- [Gates discovers (at last) that vertical health programs don't work?](https://owen.org/blog/3273/) - Apparently Bill Gates now acknowledges that you fight diseases by strengthening health systems.
- [Can aid create incentives for politicians in developing countries?](https://owen.org/blog/3275/) - A post which argues: (a) Donors cannot, in practice, create incentives for developing countries through the promise of aid. That is why aid conditionality does not work. (b) It is absurd to measure the success of aid by the policy change it brings about. We should measure aid’s success by the services which are provided. And (c) Cash on Delivery does not depend on the assumption that developing countries need incentives to provide key services. There are good reasons for testing the idea even if you do not believe that incentives are needed or would work.
- [Gapminder on the desktop](https://owen.org/blog/3279/) - Gapminder Desktop has been released and it is free. Now you can do the same kind of graphs that Hans Rosling does in his amazing TED talks (see here and here). I've been playing with it this morning and I find it captivating. Perhaps that just shows that I'm a data geek. This is a
- [Aid projects and the wisdom of crowds](https://owen.org/blog/3286/) - An extraordinary thing happened yesterday: an aid project (1 million t shirts for Africa) was subjected to impromptu crowd-sourced appraisal on twitter and the blogs. Is this the beginning of a new, post-bureaucratic way of doing project appraisal?
- [How to get feedback from aid beneficiaries?](https://owen.org/blog/3294/) - What are good ways to get feedback from the intended benefiaries of an aid programme? Can we use text messaging and other technologies to crowdsource monitoring? Over at Virtual Economics, Matt is interested in good examples to learn from.
- [Hunger in an age of plenty](https://owen.org/blog/3298/) - In the latest Development Drums podcast, Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman talk about their book Enough: Why The World’s Poorest Starve In An Age of Plenty. I found it interesting that these two Wall Street Journal journalists lay the blame so comprehensively at the policies and behaviour of industrialised-country governments. You can listen to Development Drums
- [Political pedantry](https://owen.org/blog/3301/) - Since there will be a lot of politics on our TV screens in the next 48 hours, I should like to take this opportunity to issue some timely pedantic reminders: England, not the House of Commons, is the "Mother of Parliaments" "Big Ben" is a bell which is found in the clock tower of the
- [There's an app for that? The need for a shared platform in development](https://owen.org/blog/3316/) - Bill Easterly writes about how much he loves his iPad. This is ironic for the man who sees the world divided between searchers and planners, and who complains about the grip of planners. The iPad is a testament to control-freakery by one man on a grand scale. Steve Jobs controls the design down to
- [How should development workers live?](https://owen.org/blog/3320/) - Ravi Kanbur has written an interesting paper (pdf) about how he feels as someone who makes a good living from analysing and writing about poverty. Here is an extract, but it is worth reading the whole, thoughtful piece: What is striking about the class of poverty professionals (of whom I am one) is that the
- [Less information, more data, please](https://owen.org/blog/3339/) - There is a growing trend towards publication of data, rather than or as well as information and analysis. Aid agencies need to move in this direction; and they need to do so in a way that enables the data to be analysed from the perspective of a user - such as a citizen in a developing country. To make this task tractable requires some cooperation among donors to standardize the way the data are published.
- [Aid effectiveness after Paris](https://owen.org/blog/3348/) - Why the Paris agenda won't deliver aid effectiveness: my presentation at the Ethiopia Donors Assistance Group meeting yesterday. Also my first experiment with publishing a narrated presentation.
- [Megatrends affecting development](https://owen.org/blog/3381/) - An international organisation working on development, which shall remain nameless, has asked some of its staff each to suggest three "megatrends" which they think will shape the context for its work most powerfully over the next five years. They've also been asked to give a subjective guess - on a scale of 1 to 5
- [Tech tips for development workers (1)](https://owen.org/blog/3390/) - Most of the people who read this blog are interested in development rather than computers. Many of you live in developing countries, where the internet can be slow and expensive, and computer support can be difficult. So I thought it might be useful to give you some non-technical suggestions for how to manage if you
- [Wired | Tired | Expired](https://owen.org/blog/3397/) - I've been gratified by the number of people who have contacted me (by email, twitter and on facebook) to say how much they liked one of the slides in my recent presentation on aid effectiveness. The slide borrows a format from Wired Magazine - it shows what I think is expired, tired and wired in
- [Aid in the 21st Century - Oxfam paper](https://owen.org/blog/3423/) - A new Oxfam paper, written by the excellent Jasmine Burnley, looks at 21st Century aid. Here is a good summary paragraph: "We are now at a crossroads. On the one side, is politically motivated or ineffective aid – much of which still exists today. On the other, and looking to the future, is aid fit
- [(Not) about Ethiopian politics](https://owen.org/blog/3431/) - People sometimes ask me to write more about political situation in Ethiopia (eg in a comment yesterday on my website). This has caused me to consider why I don't write much about Ethiopian politics. I decided that there are two reasons, which shed a little light on my attitude to our relationship with developing countries,
- [How to read blogs [tech for non-techies 2]](https://owen.org/blog/3449/) - This is a non-technical introduction to how you can "subscribe" to blogs and webpages so that you can read lots of blogs quickly and easily. It explains the benefits of Google Reader and the other ways you can read many blogs without having to go from one webpage to another.
- [How can the aid system be overhauled?](https://owen.org/blog/3466/) - Two interesting new articles start with the premise that the aid system needs to be overhauled, and then reach radically different conclusions about what this means in practice. First up, Roger Riddell says we need a radical rethink of foreign aid: The gap between what it does and what it could do is widening fast. ... The
- [The real Owen](https://owen.org/blog/3478/) - Today's Guardian newspaper has an article about Robert Owen, after whom I was named: the Scottish parliament spent part of yesterday debating whether Robert Owen's face should appear on Scottish banknotes. The explanation, as those who know the history of the school reform and co-operative movements will realise, is that Owen's enlightened management principles at
- [Trillions of dollars of aid?](https://owen.org/blog/3512/) - Aid sceptics like to say that the west has spent more than a trillion dollars on aid to Africa since independence. See for example Dambisa Moyo in the Wall Street Journal or The Catholic Herald. Bill Easterly makes the same claim on page 4 of The White Man's Burden. This claim is often made by
- [Tech tips for development workers (3) - software](https://owen.org/blog/3403/) - This is the third post in a series providing non-technical advice about affordable and practical IT for people working in developing countries, especially where internet access is not great. In the introductory post, I talked about the basic set-up - getting a computer and making sure it is secure and properly backed up, and getting
- [An important step towards aid transparency](https://owen.org/blog/3531/) - I was in Paris last week for meetings about aid transparency. At the International Aid Transparency Initiative meeting, signatories and the Steering Committee members agreed a very important step forward. Donors comprising more than half of global official aid agreed the details of what will be published under phase one of the IATI initiative. More details are
- [Devex on Precision Development](https://owen.org/blog/9042/) - Good article on Devex Pro about Precision Development based on an interview with our excellent India Country Director, Niriksha Shetty. How-to-realize-the-potential-of-digital-extension-services-for-farmers-_-DevexDownload
- [Private Eye Covers](https://owen.org/blog/1151/) - Here is a great collection of all the covers of Private Eye. I think this may be the best Private Eye cover of all time, back from 1966, on the assassination of the South African Prime MInister, Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd
- [Firing blanks](https://owen.org/blog/1139/) - After a vasectomy, you have to give two semen samples, two weeks apart, to confirm that the operation has been a success. In a small number of vasectomies, the tubes join themselves back together; and it takes some time for the sperm to be cleared out of the system, so you need to do this
- [Back from backpacking in the alps](https://owen.org/blog/3559/) - We are back in Addis after backpacking through France, Italy and Switzerland on the Tour de Mont Blanc. Highly recommended: if you are interested, the details are elsewhere on this site. I've come back buzzing with energy. (Memo to Americans: you guys really need to take more vacation. I reckon they increase my average productivity,
- [Innovation and prizes](https://owen.org/blog/3580/) - An interesting Economist article about the uses of prizes to promote innovation is a missed opportunity to explain the economic logic of prizes for innovations for developing countries. The reported comments by Tachi Yamada at the Gates Foundation about the value of market success do not seem to take account of the shortcomings of the system of patents and markets when it comes to developing drugs for diseases that mainly affect developing countries, nor to the problem of ensuring access in developing countries for new drugs.
- [Spreading some love](https://owen.org/blog/3599/) - Here is really nice animated talk by Dan Pink on what really motivates us. He says that monetary incentives work for simple, straightforward tasks, but they don't work at all well for tasks that require conceptual and creative thinking. According to him, what motivates people is autonomy, mastery and purpose. One conclusion I draw from this is that there are probably a lot more people than you might think who would be willing to spend a lot of time and effort helping to make the world a better place by reducing poverty, if we did a better job of enabling them to give their time and abilities.
- [How to use and understand statistics: good briefs](https://owen.org/blog/3669/) - Regular readers will have noticed that things have been quiet around here for a while. I'll be back to blogging properly in a while. In the meantime, I am dead impressed by this collection of very accessible briefs from the House of Commons Library (of all places). The briefs are easy to understand, and they
- [Would you be tempted to steal for 2 years' salary?](https://owen.org/blog/3698/) - A story of characteristic Ethiopian honesty, from Dessie.
- [What is the value of exports?](https://owen.org/blog/3854/) - I've now seen the same annoying elementary (but quite common) mistake twice in two days, and I'd like to knock it on the head before it gets repeated. According to a blog post yesterday by Malaka Gharib at ONE, Daniel Yohannes, the CEO of the U.S. government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation, believes this: If Africa captured captured
- [Tackling neglected diseases](https://owen.org/blog/3885/) - Pharmaceutical companies do not have many fans among development workers. This is a shame, because the development of effective pharmaceuticals has been one of the most transformative new technologies of the last century, increasing life expectancy and the quality of life in industrialised countries and developing countries. One reason that pharmaceutical companies get a bad
- [How to spend $1m reducing climate change](https://owen.org/blog/4105/) - We would get three or four times as much bang for our buck - in terms of climate change benefits - from population policies and girls' education as we would from the most cost-effective investments in forest management, and in addition we'd get the broader economic and social benefits for the people of developing countries.
- [Robin Hood Tax revisited](https://owen.org/blog/4130/) - Development activists should not try to bypass the systems of democratic control of spending priorities, nor should they advocate taxes which do not make good tax policy on either distributional or microeconomic grounds.
- [Could donor proliferation lead to better aid?](https://owen.org/blog/3604/) - Tim Harford had an interesting article in the FT in August arguing that we are better off in most walks of life if there is experimentation and a multiplicity of approaches. But how do we value diversity in the aid business, when the prevailing consensus, embodied in the Paris Declaration, is that proliferation of aid agencies
- [How can we raise awareness in Darfur of how much we are doing for them?](https://owen.org/blog/4181/) - The Onion says that “the majority of people in Darfur are still unaware of how many people in America are raising awareness of the genocide there.”
- [Tech tips for development workers (4): online services](https://owen.org/blog/3410/) - This is the fourth post in a series providing non-technical advice about affordable and practical IT for people working in developing countries, especially where internet access is not great. The previous posts have been: tech tips 1: the basic set-up – getting a computer and setting it up. tech tips 2: blogs - easy ways to read
- [The new bottom billion [podcast]](https://owen.org/blog/4266/) - Andy Sumner has published a new paper which argues that the global poverty problem has changed because the countries in which most of the world’s poor liver are no longer classified as low-income countries (LICs). In 1990, about 93 per cent of the world’s poor people lived in LICs. Today, there are still about 1.3 billion
- [Visibility is not the same as transparency](https://owen.org/blog/4289/) - Here is part of my piece on the Guardian website today welcoming moves from the US and Europe towards a global standard for publishing aid information: Go to the website of any aid agency and you'll find a cornucopia of information about the good work that it is doing. The problem is that it doesn't
- [Seven tips for new runners](https://owen.org/blog/4291/) - Lots of people decide to start running at this time of year, usually to lose weight, look after their health or control stress. This year perhaps some people will have been inspired to become more sporty by the Queen's Christmas message. In the hope that it will help other people to be happy runners
- [Innovation, complexity and development](https://owen.org/blog/4380/) - A shortened version of this article was published on the Guardian Development website on 28 January 2011. Innovation, complexity and developmen We are surrounded by complex adaptive systems: animal biology, the internet, complex ecosystems, competitive markets, and many others. These systems have many common characteristics. They are open and adaptive. They include their own sources of
- [Show, don't tell](https://owen.org/blog/4520/) - Using a headline I borrowed from a smart colleague in DFID, there is an article by me in the current edition of the Public Service Review, which focuses on on international development. You can download a PDF of the article here. My article begins with a quote from Brian Eno: We expect that the next
- [Sad farewell, exciting horizons](https://owen.org/blog/4540/) - It seems like only yesterday that we moved to Ethiopia, but our three years has come to an end. Without wanting to be too sentimental, I have loved getting to know Ethiopia better and especially its people, culture and history. (I won’t be sorry if I never have to eat injera again, however.) I’ve visited
- [Then may we boast](https://owen.org/blog/4555/) - Michael Woolcock sent me this excellent quote from Thomas Paine: When it shall be said in any country in the world, ‘My poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not
- [What to read on budget processes in developing countries?](https://owen.org/blog/4557/) - Someone working on the budget process in a developing country contacted me with the following question: I noticed in your most recent post you mention that you are a budget wonk. I am currently working in [the budget section of an African government] as an ODI Fellow ... But there is no formal training and
- [Is budget support less fungible than project aid?](https://owen.org/blog/4580/) - Something about which I am not particularly bothered is the possibility that, if we give aid to a country to contribute to its school system or health clinics, the effect may be that the government chooses to spend less of its own money on these services, and instead to spend more of its money on
- [A lesson in winging it](https://owen.org/blog/4614/) - This piece by Simon Kuper in the Weekend FT is so close to the bone it makes you wince: I recently went on a business trip with three members of the British ruling classes. The late-night banter over drinks was predictably excellent. Sometimes, though, we had to work. When that happened, my companions showed up
- [Appointing the next Managing Director of the IMF](https://owen.org/blog/4628/) - Dominique Strauss-Kahn has been accused of a horrible crime. Like everyone else he is entitled to the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. We may, however, soon find ourselves looking for a new Managing Director of the IMF, either because DSK is involved in a legal case or because he has declared himself a candidate
- [Do economists have better tools?](https://owen.org/blog/4638/) - The interesting question in development is not whether aid works or does not work. Not surprisingly, the answer is that some aid works and some doesn't. A more interesting question is: what kind of aid works best? Nick Kristof has a good article (if a little simplified) in the New York Times today about randomized trials,
- [Who is implementing the aid transparency agreement?](https://owen.org/blog/5012/) - Here is a useful graphic from the International Aid Transparency Initiative about which donors are implementing it, and when.
- [Let’s help the Philippines — but not like we helped Haiti](https://owen.org/blog/7113/) - There is an article in the Washington Post about humanitarian relief in the Philippines by Vij Ramachandran and me. We argue that the aid effort could be significantly improved by the use of technology and transparency.
- [The International Finance Facility for Education: The Wrong Answer to the Right Question?](https://owen.org/blog/8779/) - Donors are considering a proposal for a new “innovative finance mechanism” to increase funding for education, based on recommendations from Gordon Brown’s Education Commission. We agree that we need to finance an expansion of education in the developing world. But sadly, the International Finance Facility for Education (IFFEd) proposal is too good to be true.
- [In praise of David Mepham, arguably the inventor of DFID](https://owen.org/blog/8788/) - David Mepham, who died this week, has a strong claim to be the person who did most to bring about the establishment of the UK's Department for International Development.
- [The eternal opportunity](https://owen.org/blog/8759/) - A list of announcements that for the first time in history we can eradicate poverty.
- [Brian Barder 1934-2017 - A life well lived](https://owen.org/blog/8734/) - On the death of my father, Brian Barder. A life well lived.
- [Otepää Ironman 70.3 Race Report](https://owen.org/blog/8715/) - We had the pleasure of taking part of the Otepää Ironman 70.3 in both 2016 and 2017. Highly recommended.
- [Have we reached peak global?](https://owen.org/blog/8696/) - Better global policies have brought about unprecedented improvements in many people's lives. The right response to the present political challenge to this agenda is to do a far, far better job of making sure that we properly manage the negative effects for people who have lost out, and work much, much harder to share the gains more widely.
- [Navigating with the Garmin Forerunner 920XT](https://owen.org/blog/8683/) - How to get turn by turn directions on a Garmin Forerunner 920XT
- [Google and the Trolley Problem](https://owen.org/blog/7308/) - Driverless vehicles will be guided by algorithms programmed in advance. How should they weigh up the risks to the lives of other road users and the passengers in the car? A blog post in which Philippa Foot meets Isaac Asimov.
- [Give us the courage to change the things we can - the serenity prayer for development](https://owen.org/blog/8667/) - Let’s have the serenity to accept the things we cannot change; but give us the courage too to change the things we can.
- [What Can International Development Learn From Britain’s Olympic Team?](https://owen.org/blog/8646/) - Getting on the bandwagon of identifying lessons from Team GB's relative success at the 2016 Olympic Games.
- [Do middle-income countries really get more aid than low-income countries?](https://owen.org/blog/8585/) - Hans Rosling, using ODI data, said that middle income countries get three times as much aid as low income countries, per person in poverty. Actually low income countries get 79% more aid per poor person than middle income countries.
- [Whose aid is most effective? Are generous donors less effective?](https://owen.org/blog/8622/) - The most effective aid donor in the world is probably not who you think it is.
- [Aid transparency: are we nearly there?](https://owen.org/blog/8571/) - There is good news and bad news in the 2016 Aid Transparency Index, which is published today.
- [Eight lessons from three years working on transparency](https://owen.org/blog/4433/) - I’ve spent the last three years working on aid transparency. As I’m moving on to an exciting new role this seems a good time to reflect on what I’ve learned in the last three years. Busy readers may want to read just the 8-point summary.
- [Why taxing global companies is hard](https://owen.org/blog/8532/) - Should the profits on scotch whisky be taxed in Scotland, where it is made, or China where it is sold? And what about Google?
- [Share the Road](https://owen.org/blog/8523/) - Why cyclists cycle in the middle of the lane.
- [Will we be the first generation to eradicate malaria?](https://owen.org/blog/8509/) - This isn't the first time that Bill Gates and the UK government have announced a $3bn plan to eradicate malaria.
- [Price discrimination and welfare costs](https://owen.org/blog/8493/) - There is nothing inherently wrong with price discrimination. But some of the mechanisms firms use to enforce it have huge welfare costs.
- [World Bank sets data free](https://owen.org/blog/3263/) - The World Bank is today launching a new website, data.worldbank.org, from which you can get a huge range of statistics and indicators about development. In the past you had to pay to use World Development Indicators, or buy a CD-ROM. From today you can find, download, manipulate, use, and re-use the data compiled by the
- [Aid policy vs development policy](https://owen.org/blog/3266/) - The development policy debate focuses too much on aid. Aid policies may help to improve the living conditions of people in developing countries, but it is development policies that will result in lasting transformation. If we are serious about promoting long-term change, we should talk less about aid, and more about the other rich-world policies and behaviours that affect developing countries.
- [When the US Secretary of State reads your blog posts](https://owen.org/blog/8485/) - One of my blog posts (written with Kim Elliott) ended up on Hillary Clinton's desk according to the latest batch of released emails.
- [Strings attached](https://owen.org/blog/8479/) - The Economist considers the implications of the UK's new aid strategy.
- [Fat cats](https://owen.org/blog/8472/) - By the end of today, the average Chief Executive of a FTSE 100 company will have been paid more than the average employee earns all year. The same average employee will have been paid more than the average Ethiopian earns all year.
- [Vague about the Constitution](https://owen.org/blog/8422/) - There was nothing unconstitutional about yesterday's decision by the House of Lords.
- [XKCD on World Polio Day](https://owen.org/blog/8415/) - XKCD teases the innovation fetish in international development.
- [China in Africa - Deborah Brautigam [podcast]](https://owen.org/blog/4567/) - The latest edition of the Development Drums podcast is now online. It was the last one I recorded before leaving Ethiopia. Deborah Brautigam, a scholar renowned for her work on China-Africa relations, discusses her book, The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa. There has been a lot of nervousness about China's growing engagement
- [Tony Blair on Development Drums](https://owen.org/blog/4643/) - Tony Blair is my guest on the latest Development Drums. He talks about his Africa Governance Initiative, and more broadly about democracy, leadership, globalization, DFID, and his own future.
- [Should we pay less for vaccines?](https://owen.org/blog/4649/) - Progressive development thinkers have welcomed the announcement of new money for the Global Alliance for Vaccination and Immunization (GAVI), and support the partnership between governments and the private sector. A minority of NGOs have criticized GAVI on the grounds that it is too cozy with pharmaceutical companies. But we should be encouraging more, not less,
- [Choosing a new President of the World Bank](https://owen.org/blog/5387/) - Nominations for the head of the World Bank have now closed, and there are three candidates: Jim Kim, nominated by the United States; President of Dartmouth College, former head of HIV at the World Health Organization, and a founder of Partners in Health; Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, nominated by Nigeria, South Africa and Angola; finance Minister of
- [World Bank gets open; Google not so much](https://owen.org/blog/5064/) - This blog post first appeared on the Center for Global Development Views from the Center on March 30, 2012. The World Bank has responded to concerns about its recent agreement with Google with a welcome announcement that it will only support mapping collaborations which make crowd-sourced data publicly available – and that means not collaborating
- [Giving what we can [Development Drums podcast]](https://owen.org/blog/5495/) - My guest in the latest Development Drums podcast is the moral philosopher Toby Ord.Toby has made a commitment to give away the majority of his lifetime income to charities working in the poorest countries.
- [Development Drums: ask not what women can do for development ...](https://owen.org/blog/5634/) - In the latest edition of Development Drums, Andrea Cornwall of IDS and Prue Clarke of New Narratives explore the relationship between working for women and girls, empowerment and development.
- [Complexity and development [presentation and podcast]](https://owen.org/blog/5723/) - My 2012 Kapuściński Lecture considered the implications of complexity thinking for development economics and development policy. This post presents an updated version as a narrated online presentation which lasts about 45 minutes.
- [What is development?](https://owen.org/blog/5783/) - This the first of three blog posts exploring the implications of complexity for development. In my lecture on complexity I argue that development is an emergent property of the economic and social system. This blog post explains what that means.
- [All that glisters: the golden thread and complexity](https://owen.org/blog/5808/) - This second of three blog posts looking at development policy through the lens of complexity thinking considers whether David Cameron's 'golden thread' is good development policy.
- [In school not learning](https://owen.org/blog/4715/) - George Bush famously asked, ‘Is our children learning?’. That’s also the question by Uwezo, a coalition of NGOs working in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Their report published today makes dismal reading about the quality of schools. First, a word about the report. This is not a study by the World Bank, or a group of
- [The Liberia Marathon and 10km](https://owen.org/blog/4734/) - The first Liberia Marathon is on 28 August 2011.
- [We are the first generation in human history ... again](https://owen.org/blog/8375/) - Jim Yong Kim, President of the World Bank, says that the world is moving closer to the historic goal of ending poverty by 2030: This is the best story in the world today -- these projections show us that we are the first generation in human history that can end extreme poverty ... This new forecast
- [Humanitarian Cash Transfers](https://owen.org/blog/8371/) - The Free Exchange column in this week's Economist discusses the work of the High Level Panel on Humanitarian Cash Transfers.
- [Global goals can deliver 2C and new development finance – here's how](https://owen.org/blog/8360/) - How emissions trading can both tackle climate change and generate development finance. (This article by Alex Evans, Alice Lépissier and Owen Barder first appeared in The Guardian on 25 September 2015)
- [Is truth stranger than fiction? [podcast]](https://owen.org/blog/8349/) - The latest Development Drums features Todd Moss, a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development and a bestselling fiction author.
- [Transforming Humanitarian Aid with Cash Transfers: High Level Panel Report](https://owen.org/blog/8351/) - A High Level Panel on Humanitarian Cash Transfers, which I chaired, has concluded that much more humanitarian aid should be provided as cash, rather than as vouchers or in-kind; and that this change should be used to bring about broader reforms of humanitarian aid.
- [Innovative financing for development: as if social returns, incentives, and value for money really mattered](https://owen.org/blog/8346/) - There is an article by Theo Talbot and me in the latest edition of ECDPM's Great Insights Private Sector Matters. We argue that rather than subsidising inputs or reducing risk to leverage private finance for development, it would be more effective for public sector actors such as donors to provide subsidies linked to a firm’s
- [Here's a simple way to help refugees: give them cash](https://owen.org/blog/8338/) - Rather than giving refugees food, shelter, water and medical care, it is often better to give them cash.
- [On World Humanitarian Day: Could We Do Better with Cash?](https://owen.org/blog/8330/) - World Humanitarian Day is an opportunity to celebrate the courage of humanitarian workers, but also to think about how to improve the system. I am chairing a High Level Panel looking at the role of cash transfers in humanitarian aid.
- [Addis: A Good First Step, but a Terrible Last Word, for 2015](https://owen.org/blog/8324/) - The Financing for Development Conference in July 2015 in Addis Ababa was never going to solve all the world’s development problems. The policy framework is pretty good, but will only be important if government, companies and organisations now take specific actions.
- [What to expect from the Addis Ababa Financing for Development conference](https://owen.org/blog/8319/) - This article appeared in The Guardian Development Professionals Network on Friday 10 July, 2015. Development economist Owen Barder gives an insight into what the coming five days of plenaries, roundtables and side events will be all about
- ["we can be the first generation that ends poverty..."](https://owen.org/blog/8309/) - Ban Ki-Moon says that we can be the first generation that ends poverty. An update of the list of occasions on which this claim has been made.
- [The Pledge](https://owen.org/blog/7532/) - I have resolved not to participate in a panel that does not contain at least one woman (not including the chair of the panel).
- [Financing for development - where the treasure is buried](https://owen.org/blog/8291/) - We won’t get development from global and domestic “tax and spend” alone. We should be focusing more on the huge untapped wealth locked up by policies and behaviour which distort the global economy, creating massive economic, environmental, and welfare losses for most of the world’s population.
- [A dollar a day](https://owen.org/blog/4690/) - There seems to be some confusion about what the international definition of poverty actually means. The Millennium Development Goal is to halve, between 1990 and 2015, the number proportion of people living in extreme poverty. The poverty line was originally defined as living on $1.08 a day (usually referred to as 'dollar a day' poverty).
- [Does corruption cause poverty, or is it the other way round?](https://owen.org/blog/2672/) - Daniel Kaufmann and Mushtaq Khan talk about corruption in the latest edition of Development Drums.
- [My goals as a manager](https://owen.org/blog/548/) - My intentions as I return to a senior management position in DFID.
- [Podcasts are "back" - so what are you listening to?](https://owen.org/blog/8218/) - Podcasts are back in fashion - here is why, and a list of what I am listening to.
- [The Development Set](https://owen.org/blog/116/) - Ross Coggins wrote about The Development Set back in 1976 (poem below). More than thirty years later, his critique still feels very contemporary (though were he writing today, I am sure that white landcruisers, satellite phones and blackberries would feature somewhere). I'm just back from the Doha Financing for Development Conference (about which more later,
- [Imprisoning people for crimes they might commit](https://owen.org/blog/4703/) - I suspect most people in Britain think that detention without trial is a problem limited to dodgy dictatorships and Guantanamo Bay. In fact more than 3,000 people are being held in prison in Britain on the basis that they might commit a crime in the future. Under the system of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs) people sent to
- [Poverty porn and fundraising](https://owen.org/blog/3018/) - If you want to raise money for international development you will eventually encounter a dilemma. You want potential donors to be interested in their fellow human beings and to feel a connection with the people they are helping. You know that you will raise more money, and sustain a longer-term relationship with your donors if
- [Can aid work?](https://owen.org/blog/4738/) - Living in Ethiopia for the last three years, I saw aid working every day. I saw children going to school, health workers in rural villages, and food or cash preventing hunger for the poorest people. The academic debates about aid effectiveness seem surreal when you are surrounded by tangible, visible evidence of the huge difference
- [More on the case for higher vaccine prices](https://owen.org/blog/4753/) - Duncan Green has been awaiting "the inevitable response from Owen" to a recent post by Dr Kamal-Yanni of Oxfam and Daniel Berman of Médecins Sans Frontières about different approaches to getting vaccines into developing countries. The main point of disagreement is how vaccines first developed with rich countries in mind can best be made available quickly and at
- [Famine and drought](https://owen.org/blog/4818/) - Two things to keep in mind about famine and drought. First, famine is not caused by drought or overpopulation or insufficient food production. Second, development aid works.
- [Incessant barking](https://owen.org/blog/4855/) - (h/t Amanda Glassman)
- [Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow](https://owen.org/blog/4863/) - The Center for Global Development, where I work, has a shiny new transparency policy. From now on, our presumption is that when authors post publications on cgdev.org that involves quantitative analysis, they will also post the data and computer code needed to reproduce their results in full. That way, any visitor to the web site can
- [The war on knowledge](https://owen.org/blog/4882/) - I really believe that this is how some organisations and government departments view knowledge sharing: (h/t Ian Thorpe)
- [Government kill switch for social media?](https://owen.org/blog/4896/) - David Cameron said in the House of Commons that the Government is going to consider a social media kill switch: Mr Speaker, everyone watching these horrific actions will be stuck by how they were organised via social media. Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill.
- [Measuring Aid Effectiveness Effectively: Being clear about objectives](https://owen.org/blog/4909/) - This blog post was first published on the CGAP Microfinance blog. It seems extraordinary that after 50 years of international aid, there is still no consensus on whether it works. Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo (Dead Aid) has argued that aid is not only ineffective, but is actually detrimental to development. Bill Easterly (The Elusive Quest for
- [Form a posse?](https://owen.org/blog/4921/) - On Friday the World Bank London office had a meeting on 'the Future of Aid'. The meeting was, according to the tortuous language of the invitation, "conducted in an informal manner with interested stakeholders from governments, civil society, private sector, media and academia with a view to explore new ideas on how best to
- [Power of Information Conference](https://owen.org/blog/4941/) - Here is my talk at the Power of Information Conference about open aid data.
- [What happens when donors fail to meet their commitments?](https://owen.org/blog/4944/) - This joint post with Rita Perakis first appeared on the CGD blog. Has the aid industry introduced the reforms it agreed in 2005 to make aid more effective? No, according to the survey published last week by the OECD DAC. In this blog post we reflect on why this matters, and what it means for
- [Podcasts for development](https://owen.org/blog/6980/) - Here are some suggestions for podcasts for people interested in development (and/or economics).
- [What is GAVI's business model, and what should it be?](https://owen.org/blog/2757/) - I like GAVI (the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization) a lot. Childhood immunization is a hugely cost-effective way to help people in developing countries, and GAVI does very good work helping to get vaccines to children in developing countries. And it is because I like GAVI that I was alarmed to read this recent
- [Aid or immigration?](https://owen.org/blog/4954/) - There was an interesting programme on BBC Radio 4 on Monday night, Analysis, which looked at the following question: The government is committed to protecting the aid budget. Frances Cairncross asks whether a more relaxed policy on economic migration might help the developing world more. I was interviewed for the programme, and there were three
- [Conservative Party gives up party political broadcast](https://owen.org/blog/4964/) - This is very impressive. Here in the UK we do not have paid political advertising: instead political parties are given a limited number of slots on British TV for a 'party political broadcast' to put their point across. This year the UK Conservative party gave up their party political broadcast which usually coincides with the
- [Don't waste your time living someone else's life](https://owen.org/blog/4969/) - Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow
- [In praise of Special Advisers](https://owen.org/blog/4971/) - From the Financial Times comes news that David Cameron and Nick Clegg are planning to employ more political special advisers than the previous government; while the media and public try to work out whether there is anything improper about the Defence Secretary's working relationship with Adam Werritty. The role of Special Adviser was invented by
- [How committed are we to development?](https://owen.org/blog/4985/) - This joint post with David Roodman first appeared on the Guardian Poverty Matters blog. Does Britain's remarkable political consensus supporting foreign aid obscure a more ambiguous overall footprint in the developing world?Though by no means unanimous, Britain's cross-party agreement to protect the aid programme from budget cuts is admirable. It reflects an understanding that it is ultimately
- [What would Google do? (Aid effectiveness edition)](https://owen.org/blog/4999/) - This post first appeared on the CGD Rethinking US Foreign Assistance blog. Information, not coordination, is the key to aid effectiveness. Some donors such as USAID are becoming interested in a more decentralized ‘Google Maps’ approach to aid coordination, to facilitate well-informed decisions by people on the ground. For this to work, donors need to
- [Effective and transparent donors](https://owen.org/blog/5018/) - In two weeks there will be a huge international meeting on aid effectiveness in Busan, South Korea. Ban Ki-moon and Hillary Clinton will be among the two thousand delegates who gather together to discuss improvements in how aid is delivered. Though David Cameron and Barack Obama said (in a joint statement) that they would ensure that Busan "transforms the
- [The Simpsons go to little Ethiopia](https://owen.org/blog/5073/) - Bart (eating injera and wot): "I wish I lived in Ethiopia". Lisa: "Exotic. Vegetarian. I can mention it in a college essay. Mom: this is amazing!". Simpsons Ethiopian Restaurant from Folu Aladelusi on Vimeo.
- [Will donors hide behind China?](https://owen.org/blog/5081/) - Will the largest aid donors hide behind China to excuse their inability to make substantial improvements in foreign aid? How can Busan balance the desire to be more universal with the pressing need for real changes in the way aid is given? Much of the development policy world converges on Busan this week for the
- [The open data revolution comes to aid](https://owen.org/blog/5125/) - This blog post first appeared on the aidinfo site. More than two thousand delegates have gathered today in Busan, South Korea, for the fourth installment of a succession of meetings aimed at making aid more effective. There has been significant progress since the meeting in Accra in 2008 towards improving transparency of aid. This is important because
- [Warming to the Open Government Partnership](https://owen.org/blog/5121/) - This joint post with Stephanie Majerowicz first appeared on the Views from the Center blog at the Center for Global Development “The defining division these days is increasingly: open or closed? Are we open to the changing world? Or do we see its menace, but not its possibilities?” —Tony Blair, A Global Alliance for Global Values,
- [Is multilateral aid better?](https://owen.org/blog/6128/) - I recently tried to explain to a parliamentary committee why I believe multilateral aid is likely to be more cost-effective than bilateral aid. This post sets out the arguments in a bit more detail.
- [DFID transparency policy is a game-changer](https://owen.org/blog/6360/) - Christmas came early yesterday for campaigners for more effective and accountable aid, with an announcement from DFID which has raised the bar for aid transparency.
- [What happened in Busan?](https://owen.org/blog/5131/) - "In years to come, I expect that we will look back on the Busan agreement as a reflection of changing realities, including the growing range of different kinds of donors and shifting geopolitical power. I think it less likely that we will look back on Busan as having done much to shape those realities."
- [End of year reflections](https://owen.org/blog/5211/) - The Guardian development blog is running a series of end of year reflections on development, including one by me. Many of the articles are upbeat about progress in developing countries, but pessimistic about the short term economic prospects for the industrialised world and for global cooperation to tackle shared global problems. The series so far includes:
- [What are the results agenda?](https://owen.org/blog/5228/) - People who talk about 'the results agenda' in aid mean at least four different things. The differences might be important.
- [Why success always begins with failure](https://owen.org/blog/5245/) - In the latest episode of Development Drums, I talk to author Tim Harford. Known to readers of the Financial Times as The Undercover Economist, Tim's latest book Adapt is a magnificent explanation of how complex systems emerge through a process of trial and error. In Development Drums, Tim and I focus on the implication of this
- [A new smart sanction which deserves to be tried](https://owen.org/blog/5331/) - A disarmingly simple but effective way to put more pressure on illegitimate regimes: declare that any future contracts will not be enforceable against their successors.
- [Seven worries about focusing on results, and how to manage them](https://owen.org/blog/5483/) - This post sets out seven worries about the results agenda; four reasons why the results agenda is vital; and a series of measures aimed at balancing these concerns.

## Pages

- [[Homepage]](https://owen.org/) - Current projects Moonshot: A Policymaker's Guide to Innovation After three decades of working on innovation, technology and public policy, from various perspectives, I am working on a book setting out a policymakers' guide to innovation: why does it matter, which innovations are priorities, and how should the government go about supporting them? The book both
- [Intellectual Property And Market Failure](https://owen.org/writing/ip/) - the economic ideas, for non-economists a personal view: not endorsed by any organisation “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and
- [Targets do more harm than good](https://owen.org/writing/targets/) - Targets are the tools of command and control The public service reform agenda has taught us to focus more on outputs and outcomes, to be more people-centred, and to delegate. We talk about coaching, training, diversity, and empowerment. These are changes for the better, but we are stuck inside a model in which the bosses
- [Seven Effective Habits for Marathon Training](https://owen.org/running-cycling/running/7habits/) - In 1998 I made an ambitious New Year's Resolution to run a marathon in under three hours. I spent six years trying. In that period, I have learned a lot about what does not work; and even wrote a book about running on the basis of my experience. In 2004 I finally reached my goal,
- [Cycling in Ethiopia](https://owen.org/running-cycling/cycling/cycling-in-ethiopia/) - In 2002, Grethe Petersen and Owen Barder spent two weeks cycling in Northern Ethiopia. Ethiopia is an amazing country. It has beautiful and dramatic scenery, and an extraordinarily rich history and culture; the people are intelligent, welcoming and proud. It is fairly unusual to go on cycling holidays in Ethiopia. We planned our own route
- [Running & cycling](https://owen.org/running-cycling/)
- [TESFA Trek](https://owen.org/ethiopia/excursions/tesfa-trek/) - If you only do one thing outside Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, do a trek with TESFA. TESFA organises treks mainly in the mountains around Lalibela. You can choose the length of your trek, and they can arrange it to be easy or tough, depending on your fitness and appetite for exercise. You'll be accompanied by
- [Running](https://owen.org/running-cycling/running/)
- [Cycling](https://owen.org/running-cycling/cycling/)
- [Ethiopia](https://owen.org/ethiopia/) - Welcome to our pages about visiting Ethiopia. We plan to use these to keep track of what we learn about this beautiful country. We hope that all our family and friends who visit us will help us by sharing what they learn.
- [2005 : Passing by on the other side](https://owen.org/writing/2005passing/) - 2005 was to be the year of development. There have been some significant advances - particularly on debt relief and funding for vaccines. But overall, 2005 has not lived up to the ambitions that campaigners and some politicians had for it as a year of development. The last significant opportunity in 2005 to make major
- [Comparison of aid pledges for 2010 made in 2004 and 2005](https://owen.org/writing/2005passing/aid_table/) - Source: 2004 Pledges 2005 Pledges
- [Sickly sweet](https://owen.org/writing/sugar/) - Summary Sugars are simple, sweet-tasting carbohydrates. There are a number of different forms of sugar, each of which has a slightly different chemical structure. From the narrow point of view of where we get our energy, it does not matter much which sort of carbohydrates we eat: our body can break down food into glucose
- [What sort of conditions should there be on aid?](https://owen.org/writing/conditionality/) - Politicians, the media, bloggers and other armchair experts on development almost all agree that aid for developing countries should be conditional on reforms by recipient countries, and that aid should be tied to conditions about how the aid is used. But this approach is generally not supported by people who work in development (though some
- [Moonshot - synopsis](https://owen.org/moonshot-synopsis/) - Moonshot - A Policymaker's Guide to Innovation Moonshot is a book about the why, what and how of innovation with social value. The author, Owen Barder, is a respected economist who has worked on public finance and on the economics of innovation. Owen led the team which designed and implemented the first Advance Market Commitment,
- [About](https://owen.org/about/) - About me I work at the intersection of public policy, innovation, and digital transformation, and I have had the good fortune to have had a varied career so far, ranging from private secretary to the Prime Minister to building a global data and technology business supporting governments to deliver digital services. I have been a
- [Contact](https://owen.org/contact/) - My public encryption key is here.
- [What to bring](https://owen.org/ethiopia/befor/what-to-bring/) - What to Bring For Addis Ababa Passport, plane tickets Camera Pullover or sweater for the evening (it gets cool at night) Clothes that are respectful of the fact that this is a highly religious country (both Christian and Muslim); it is not culturally acceptable to wear very skimpy clothes here, especially not in rural areas
- [Writing](https://owen.org/writing/) - Innovation & public policy Marking Markets for Vaccines - Full Book (with Ruth Levine and Nancy Birdsall) Advance Market Commitments: A Policy to Stimulate Investment in Vaccines for Neglected Diseases(with Michael Kremer and Heidi Williams) Intellectual Property And Market Failure (January 2004) Investing in Social Outcomes: Development Impact Bonds (report of the Working Group on
- [The Pledge - I will not be part of male-only panels](https://owen.org/pledge/) - The pledge "At a public conference I won't serve on a panel of two people or more unless there is at least one woman on the panel, not including the Chair." To sign the pledge, please contact me. Frequently asked questions What happens if we have tried to find women but there is nobody available?
- [Debre Libanos and the Portuguese Bridge](https://owen.org/ethiopia/day-trips/debre-libanos/) - Debre Libanos is a monastery in Ethiopia, lying northwest of Addis Ababa in the Oromia Region. Founded in the thirteenth century by Saint Tekle Haymanot, the monastery's chief abbot, called the Ichege, was the second most powerful official in the Ethiopian Church after the Abuna. The monastery complex sits on a terrace between a cliff
- [Practical information](https://owen.org/running-cycling/cycling/cycling-in-ethiopia/general/) - Passports &Visas UK and US citizens need a full passport, valid for at least 6 months after the date of entry. A visa is needed, and can be obtained easily from the Ethiopian Embassy in 3-5 days. You will need a return ticket to be allowed to enter the country. Vaccinations and malaria You should
- [Public encryption key](https://owen.org/contact/public-encryption-key/) - To obtain my public encryption key, run: gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 9C6BED32 The fingerprint of this key is: 4AC2 AF9E EF95 2EFE 7132 5235 D160 E0CC 9C6B ED32 Alternatively you can download my public key here.
- [Tour de Mont Blanc 2010](https://owen.org/running-cycling/running/tour-de-mont-blanc-2010/) - G and I hiked the Tour de Mont Blanc at the end of July, 2010. This is a well-known 100 mile (160km) hiking route through France, Italy and Switzerland. Timing We did the tour anticlockwise in eight days, which included tackling the higher passes (Col Des Fours & Fenetre d'Arpette). That was pretty comfortable for
- [TESFA Trek: Abuna Yosef](https://owen.org/ethiopia/excursions/tesfa-trek/tesfa-trek-abuna-yosef/) - The trek to Abuna Yosef is, according to TESFA, the most physically demanding of their treks. On the first day, we hiked from the centre of Lalibela to Ad Medhane Alem (which you can just see from Lalibela, perched at the top of the escarpment to the North of the town). This took us about
- [Hawassa and Shashemane](https://owen.org/ethiopia/excursions/hawassa/) - Hawassa is a very pleasant lakeside town. It is about 275 km from Addis Ababa on a good tarmac road (about 5 hours drive). The former capital of Sidamo region, the coffee is excellent, as you would expect. There are two lakeside hotels - the former Wabe Shabelle hotels have been privatised. One of them,
- [Harar](https://owen.org/ethiopia/excursions/harar/) - Philippa writes: Harar is an amazing ancient, predominantly Muslim city in the east of Ethiopia, said to be the fourth holiest Muslim city in the world after Mecca, Modena and Jerusalem. It is definitely worth a visit. You can fly to Dire Dawa from Addis, and from there it is an hour to Harar by
- [Excursions](https://owen.org/ethiopia/excursions/) - Possible excursions from Addis - requiring more than a day - include: Negash Lodge Wenchi Crater Lake A TESFA Trek Gheralta Lodge Kuriftu Resort and spa in Debre Zeit Lake Langano Lalibela (rock churches - must see) The Historic Circuit (Bahir Dar, Gondar, Axum, Lalibela) Gambela Dire Dawa and Harar (mediaevel walled city) Awash National
- [Gheralta Lodge](https://owen.org/ethiopia/excursions/gheralta-lodge/) - Gheralta Lodge website. My blog entry is here Juliet writes The Gheralta Lodge is gorgeous. I was lucky to have three nights there. I could happily have stayed for a couple more. Apart from the rock-hewn churches in the Tigrai region, the market at Hawzien is meant to be amazing. Unfortunately I didn't find out
- [Kessem Gorge](https://owen.org/ethiopia/day-trips/kessem-gorge/) - Two hour drive from Addis with the current roadworks (2009). Very attractive gorge. Rocky path down to the river bed. Directions - Drive out on the Dessie Road to Sendafa (about 40km from Addis Ababa) where you will see a police station on the left. 15km after Sendafa turn right onto a good gravel road.
- [Day trips](https://owen.org/ethiopia/day-trips/) - Here are some day trips you can do from Addis Ababa. Debre Libanos & Portuguese Bridge - About 120km north of Addis, over the Entoto mountains; visit the 13th Century monastery of Debre Libanos. Overlooking Jemma River Gorge, a tributary of the Blue Nile, the Monastery owns ecclesiastical, cultural and historical relics. Nearby is a
- [Two guides to day trips from Addis Ababa](https://owen.org/ethiopia/day-trips/guides/) - Here are two guides to day trips from Addis Ababa (both in .PDF format) 21 Day Trips from Addis Ababa by the Ethiopia Heritage Trust (1993) Jane Barder's 1983 Guide To Addis Ababa
- [Wenchi Crater Lake](https://owen.org/ethiopia/excursions/wenchi/) - Wenchi Crater Lake is 155 km west of Addis Ababa, between Ambo and Welliso. An extinct volcano (the top of which is 3380 metres above sea level) the crater contains a large lake, hot mineralsprings, waterfalls and beautiful valleys and farmland There is an old monastery with a church is situated on one of the
- [Negash Lodge](https://owen.org/ethiopia/excursions/negash/) - Negash Lodge is a privately-owned lodge in Welliso, about 2 hours drive from Addis Ababa (125km on a tarmac road to Welliso, then turn left for 5 minutes down a gravel road). There are lots of different kinds of rooms. We stayed in Afar - a tukul-like room with a TV and a nice shower,
- [Public goods defined](https://owen.org/writing/ip/public_goods/) - Public goods are goods or services that can be consumed by everybody in a society, or nobody at all. They have three characteristics. They are: non-rival one person consuming them does not stop another person consuming them. eg TV broadcasts, lighthouse non-excludable if one person can consume them, it is impossible to stop another person
- [Great Ethiopian Run 2002](https://owen.org/running-cycling/running/ger/) - A 10km road race on Sunday 3 November 2002, Addis Ababa We took part in the second Great Ethiopian Run in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. Sixteen thousand runners took part (there were more than 20,000 in the fourth running of the race in 2004) - making this the largest run in Africa. The
- [Himalayas 100 Mile Stage Race: Pre-Race Diary](https://owen.org/running-cycling/running/hsr/prediary/) - about the event our event diary Delhi We spent only a day in Delhi - not because we didn't want to see the sights, but because we thought it important to get to altitude (in Darjeeling) as quickly as possible (a judgement which was later confirmed, as we found it a bit easier to adapt
- [Himalayas 100 Mile Stage Race: Grethe's and Owen's diary](https://owen.org/running-cycling/running/hsr/diary/) - about the event what we did before the race Arriving in Mirik The hotel in Mirik The race headquarters is at the mountain resort of Mirik. Mirik is pleasant enough, and the accommodation is better than adequate. There is a "new town" near the lake - not much more than a row of shops and
- [Himalayas 100 Mile Stage Race](https://owen.org/running-cycling/running/hsr/) - our race diary our pre-race diary The Himalayas 100 mile stage race is one of the most beautiful running events in the world. We took part in the 2003 event, the thirteenth consecutive running of the race. The race takes place over five days. For the competitive runners (a minority), this is a stage race
- [Our route](https://owen.org/running-cycling/cycling/cycling-in-ethiopia/route/) - 1. Addis Ababa to Debre Birhan (120 km) via Sendafa, Sheno The road was tarmac all the way to Weldiya. The road rises out of Addis, past Mount Entoto, and rapidly opens out into open countryside. Debre Birhan is a bustling town, mainly spread along the main street. The old town centre is on the
- [History and sights](https://owen.org/running-cycling/cycling/cycling-in-ethiopia/history-and-sights/) - A brief history Ethiopian tradition has it that the first king, Menelik I, was the son of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon, in 10th Century BC. Ethiopia largely converted to christianity in the 4th and 5th centuries, AD (well before most of Europe). With the rise of Islam in the 7th century, the
- [Frequently asked questions](https://owen.org/running-cycling/cycling/cycling-in-ethiopia/faq/) - Did you feel awkward going on holiday in a country so poor? Ethiopia is a very poor country, though it is rich in natural resources. The Ethiopians are an independent people, justly proud of their country. Tourism offers a good source of income for many people. You can help the Ethiopian people to lift themselves
- [Information for cyclists](https://owen.org/running-cycling/cycling/cycling-in-ethiopia/cyclists/) - Suitable bikes The road surface is hard-top in Addis, and for some of the way on the main roads from Addis to the main towns. The road south to Kenya is tarmac all the way. (See our route description for more precise information.) Where there is no tarmac, the roads are gravel of varying quality.
- [From Davos to Venice](https://owen.org/running-cycling/cycling/venice/) - Cycling in the Swiss Alps and round the Italian Lakes in 2000. By Owen Barder and Grethe Petersen Background Though we are relatively fit, we we were not very experienced cyclists. We spent a couple of weeks in the Alps and Northern Italy in the Summer of 2000. These notes are intended to help anyone
- [From Bordeaux to Gerona through the Pyrenees](https://owen.org/running-cycling/cycling/pyrenees/) - Check the Trento bike pages for lots of information about bicycle touring and mountain biking in Europe and the Mediterranean. Introduction These notes describe the route that 3 CTC members, Owen Barder, Eleanor Grey and Steven Kovats, took from Bordeaux to Gerona in 1993. We are not experts in this region, and we don't claim
- [From Davos to Naples](https://owen.org/running-cycling/cycling/naples/) - July - August 2001, by Owen Barder & Grethe Petersen For the second year running, Grethe Petersen and Owen Barder travelled to Davos for the Davos Marathon, part of the annual running festival, and then set off on bikes for a two week cycling tour. This year the aim was Naples, via Siena. Day 1

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