The best graph of the election

There is next to no difference between the main parties’ tax and spend plans.

From the BBC

Easy rider

My heap-of-junk car finally packed in for good a couple of weeks ago. The cost of repairing the engine is now more than the car is worth. So yesterday I bought myself a new red shiny Senke motorbike.

1 hour lesson from a boda-boda driver.

$10 for the boda driver.

4 large patches of sunburnt skin for me.

Approximately 14 stalls.

0 crashes.

Wish me luck.

PS. Yes mum, I have a helmet.

PPS. Do let me know if you’re in need of a Hilux Surf for scrap

Thrilla in Manila

Call for Papers: Microinsurance Conference (Manila, November 2010)

Deadline is 31 May. More here.

Election Day Morning Round-up

Still no response to my question about international development policy from my local Labour Party candidate.

So Hilary Myers (Lib Dem) gets my vote (assuming my proxy voter doesn’t cheat me) , for saying

We remain committed to increased coherence between UK development, trade, investment, migration and agriculture policies.

Sam Lampert just told me about fivethirtyeight.com which is frankly awesome – model-based seat estimates (generally more reliable than polls) with cool graphics. Trust the americans to cover our election better than we can.

If it is this tight the regional parties (Scottish and Welsh nationalists) are really going to come into play.

Results are also in from the Give Your Vote project – UK voters have pledged their votes to people from Afganistan, Bangladesh and Ghana.

 

I bet Nick Clegg wishes his electorate was Bangladeshi.

I’ll watching at Sam’s place (we love you Sam!), and playing election bingo courtesy of the BBC.

I’ll leave you with John Stuart Mill (1866)

"The Conservative Party is, by the law of its constitution, necessarily the stupidest party. I do not retract that assertion... stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it."

The next 4 years are going to suck. But with any luck, the massive cuts will make everyone hate tories again, and there will be a wonderful Lib/Lab coalition in 2014 with proportional representation and House of Lords reform and rules against going into stupid wars and a truly social liberal progressive domestic agenda that is fiscally responsible and “coherence between UK development, trade, investment, migration and agriculture policies.”

I can’t wait.

Maybe grievances do cause conflict after all

Another counter-intuitive freakonomics-finding-fail?

Everyone knows that civil wars are driven by grievances right? Israel-Palestine and all that. Until along came the quants who found no relationship between measures of ethnic diversity or grievances with civil war. The claim was that diversity and grievances are too ubiquitous to be able to predict isolated incidences of conflict.

Until now. A new, more detailed GIS dataset from researchers at Zurich is finding some effects.

Our most recent dataset GeoEPR, which was published earlier this spring, offers a “bird’s eye view of ethnic settlements” around the world … the new dataset offers geo-coded information about ethnic groups’ settlement areas around the world from 1945 through 2005.

Based on this information, we show that excluded and downgraded groups are much more likely to experience civil-war violence. Furthermore, our most recent research, conducted by Lars-Erik Cederman, Kristian Gleditsch at University of Essex, and Nils Weidmann at Princeton University, uses GeoEPR data suggesting that ethnic groups that are either considerably less or more wealthy than the country average are also exposed to higher conflict risks. Such “horizontal inequality” has previously been associated with conflict, but our research is the first to do so globally with the help of geographic information systems (GIS).

From Lars-Erik Cederman at the University of Zurich Political Science blog.

You can download the data here.

Charlie Brooker on David Cameron

Like an ostensibly realistic human character in a state-of-the-art CGI cartoon, he's almost convincing – assuming you can ignore the shrieking, cavernous lack of anything approaching a soul. Which you can't.

I see the sheen, the electronic calm, those tiny, expressionless eyes . . . I glimpse the outlines of the cloaking device and I instinctively recoil, like a baby tasting mould. Don't get me wrong. I don't see a power-crazed despot either. I almost wish I did. Instead, I see an avatar. A simulated man with a simulated face. A humanoid. A replicant. An Auton. A construct. A Carlton PR man who's arrived to run the country, and currently stands before us, blinking patiently, blank yet alert, quietly awaiting commencement of phase two. At which point, presumably, his real face may finally become visible.

The Guardian

Banerjee and He on Making Aid Work

We live in an age of aid pessimism. There is a strong, if rarely completely articulated, presumption that aid can at best help people survive, but it cannot promote development. The U.S. government’s new initiative, the Millenium Challenge Account (MCA), is based on the idea that the whole idea of aid giving needs to be rethought. In particular, it wants to tie aid to country performance: only countries that pursue economic policies that the U.S. government approves of will be eligible for aid from this account. The premise is that aid has not been working because the policy environment is not right. While it is clear that this is a problem – there are countries where the risk of the money ending up in a government official’s pocket is substantial – the thrust of our argument is that the way money is planned to be spent is also a very big problem, but a problem whose source lies in the way the donor organizations function. Combined with the fact that many of the world’s neediest live in the countries that will not make it onto the MCA list and that we expect the incentive effects of the MCA to be minimal, this suggests to us that the MCA approach amounts to abandoning a large part of the world’s poorest for no fault of their own. A more effective and less unfair challenge may be to try to see if it is possible to design projects that work in the countries with the biggest problems. If we could make that work, we would not only help those who need it the most, but what is perhaps even more valuable, we will raise expectations and build hope where there is none.

I am intrigued by the last sentence. How do we measure the value of raising expectations and building hope?

Read the whole thing here.

Malaria almost eradicated from Zanzibar?

Apparently rates have fallen from 38% in 2008 to less than 1% in 2010. Too good to be true?

IRIN via African Politics Portal

Twitter Round-up

1. The Guardian is backing the Lib Dems http://tinyurl.com/2vsxzuj
2. New blog from DFID India's Economist (via @owenbarder) http://tinyurl.com/2d9v7ek
3. RachelStrohm Amartya Sen on Adam Smith - well worth a read http://j.mp/cfdWAg
4. ilovemigrants Check out the I Love Migrants website! http://ilovemigrants.wordpress.com/
5. bill_westerly comrade-in-arms barbarian egonomist @rovingbandit #followfriday
6. The Economist backs the Conservatives http://tinyurl.com/2bxfo39
7. sunny_hundal RT @moogyboobles: #iloveimmigrants because I'm a human being and we share a planet with other human beings.
8. TimHarford On @r4today this morning figuring out how big the mystery spending cuts will be after the election. £1350 - £2000 per household per year
9. xtophercook I'm going to Germany next month - bit worried. I might be assaulted by their dangerously hung parliament.
10. Only Liberal Democrats would end child detention | Alex Morrison http://tinyurl.com/28vdrgv
11. RIP, Angus Maddison http://tinyurl.com/29ms5ff
12. jjaron RT @RichardA: Debate advice for Nick Clegg: in answer to every question, slam down fist on podium and roar "I'm Nick fucking Clegg!"
13. stephenfry Frankly I'm tempted to vote Lib Dem now. If we let the Telegraph and Mail win, well, freedom and Britain die.
14. oliver_m_wright Great artists (satirical) map of London, can be seen at the British Library! http://icio.us/igo2st
15. owenbarder RT @GlenTarman: 1 million children <5 will probably die around the world during UK election + no Q from SKY on world poverty #LeadersDebate
16. Hey Sudanese abroad - GoSS is recruiting Directors - http://tinyurl.com/2exob2b
17. maggie4Enough Beautiful photos from Sudan's polls: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/04/scenes_from_sudan.html
18. IMF revises world growth forecasts up http://tinyurl.com/2f8dg82
19. loomnie RT @whiteafrican: "The Macroeconomics of Mobile Money" http://bit.ly/bHg3bl via @mpayconnect (via @creditsms)
20. corduk Check out @vote_global - an Int. Dev. Manifesto for the UK Gen. Election http://bit.ly/bkuMkI #ukelections #voteglobal

To follow me on Twitter go here: http://twitter.com/rovingbandit

Angus Maddison 1926-2010, and long-run historical economic development

Angus Maddison was the first guy to create historical GDP estimates.

Adrian Wood gave my class this chart in university and told us all to stick it on our walls and spend some time staring at it.



You can play with the Gapminder version here or buy the book here.

Update: Here is the Economist

Beyond Aid – Going after corruption

Owen Barder has written a great post on the difference between aid and development policy – between providing temporary alleviation from the worst effects of poverty, and supporting structural transformation.

Aid is best-suited to poverty alleviation, and other “beyond aid” policies such as trade, security and migration are more suited to transformational development.

Hilary Myers mentioned one of these “beyond-aid” issues on this blog: cracking down on tax havens, improving transparency and tackling corruption – particularly by making it harder for western banks and financial institutions to facilitate that corruption.

How important are these illicit financial flows out of developing countries? Derrill Watson draws my attention to these figures from the Global Financial Integrity Programme of the Center for International Policy.

Quite important.

Liberal Democrats on International Development

Hilary Myers (Liberal Democrat) is the latest candidate  in my constituency to offer her views on international development policy (see also here and here). I am blown away, I really didn’t expect any answers this good. I particularly like these two paragraphs on going beyond aid.

Liberal Democrats do recognise that financial aid is not necessarily the most important or effective way of delivering support in developing countries. Trade also has a vital role to play. We remain committed to increased coherence between UK development, trade, investment, migration and agriculture policies.

Coupled with this, Liberal Democrats recognise the importance of improving taxation and transparency and tackling corruption in the developing world. In our recent paper, Development in a Downturn, we set out plans to reform international financing systems by cracking down on tax havens, improving transparency and tackling corruption – particularly by making it harder for western banks and financial institutions to facilitate that corruption.

Read the whole thing here. Steph Booth for Labour (the incumbent party) is the only candidate who hasn’t yet responded. But she is going to have to say something special to beat this.

Twitter Round-up

1. Could the Lib Dems win outright?
2. owenbarder Big and welcome news: the World Bank sets its data free: http://is.gd/bAmt8

3. Rigged in the north, more or less fair in the south - The Economist on Sudan elections

4. Give Your Vote http://www.giveyourvote.org/

5. Russia says Sudan elections fair by 'African standards' - er....

6. WTF?! Women to blame for earthquakes, says Iran cleric

7. owenbarder Development bloggers you should be reading: http://is.gd/bzfBQ

8. Spare a thought for exporters from poor countries

9. Why Humanity Loves, and Needs, Cities

10. KCB opening new branches across Southern Sudan

11. Set research free

12. What if NGOs had a customer care line?

13. Pro bono economics

14. Nigeria’s foreign trade policy (there isn't one)

15. Eritrea and Ethiopia's first ever “trending topic” on Twitter: #whereislemlem? http://tinyurl.com/yc65hvf

16. Sudan People's Liberation Movement is on twitter: @splmvoices

17. Dani Rodrik's father-in-law arrested on coup charges in Turkey

18. nancymbirdsall My op-ed in @GlobalPost on better aid to Haiti (and how trade & immigration matter even more!) http://bit.ly/9mP3oc
19. GorvidCamerown We're the party of the people, especially our own people. Join the Labservatives http://bit.ly/aHN0Bx
20. DrEvanHarris Yes my seat is marginal. 6% Tory swing will lose it. If you want to help pls email info@evanharris.org.uk. I'll suggest how u can. Thanks!
21. whiteafrican Direct lending platform between Sudanese diaspora to Sudanese business entrepreneurs: http://peacediv.com

22. Blattman: more MBAs for Africa

23. WrongingRights via @cblatts, African farmers team up to save impoverished British Theatre (video spoof) http://tinyurl.com/ycqhlk6. Hilarious!

24. 83% of UK election candidates are using Facebook in their campaign

25. robertcottrell What if the Rapture already happened, and only about three or four people disappeared, so few having met the standard? http://bit.ly/bzNbcG
26. robertcottrell How to cook bacon using a machine-gun: http://bit.ly/aUrREC

27. Tsvangirai marries his late wife's sister

28. Now is the time to cut $200bn a year in US & European farm subsidies

29. JoshRuxin One Laptop Per Child in Rwanda - enlightening piece in The Guardian: http://ow.ly/1rZS1

The Manga Bible

I've been meaning to read the bible at some point. For literary purposes or something. But I'm too lazy. Until ARISTOC bookstore came to the rescue with this. Recommended.