Our Word is Our Weapon

Tim Worstall has just taken the TechCentralStation dollar again, with an article that meets both of the TCS requirements: (a) it’s wildly speculative, and (b) it bashes the United Nations. This time he’s blaming them for killing lots of Niger farmers in the future. Readers with a long memory might be entitled to wonder if he’s any more well-informed on this situation than he was when he swallowed a bunch of lies about the Asian tsunami relief effort, and readers with only a very short memory might be entitled to wonder why he has omitted this righteous criticism of the United States in his article for the US-based TechCentralStation.

But those are side-issues. More important is that the World Food Programme has been providing food, most of it bought with cash either in Niger itself or from nearby countries, to starving people in the area since August, but Tim seems to be under the impression that the only food aid the WFP is providing will arrive “after the harvest”. And he also seems to have ignored the headline on that New York Times story - “In Niger, Hungry Are Fed, but Farmers May Starve”. What is happening is that the hungry are being fed, and what may happen is that farmers will starve. For Tim, clearly the hypothetical is more worthy of note than the actual. Neither is there any recognition of how difficult these decisions are to make - despite the fact that Medecins Sans Frontieres are criticising the WFP for thinking of ending free food handouts too soon, Tim apparently just knows that the WFP ‘bureaucrats’ are making the wrong decisions in handing out any free food at all, which is an interestingly unequivocal view from someone plonked behind a keyboard in Portugal. He condemns the WFP for “killing” farmers by “not listening” to market signals, but MSF seem to think they’re listening too hard, and this quote from their spokesman certainly suggests they’re paying attention to the market:

“We are constantly doing assessments, so when this year’s harvests arrive in a month’s time, we’ll know exactly who is most vulnerable and most in need,” WFP spokesman Greg Barrow told the BBC News website.

“The priority is always to feed the hungry, but the last thing you want to do is to destroy the livelihoods of farmers, by flooding the country with general free distributions of food aid when the harvests are coming in.”

It might surprise Tim to learn that the World Food Programme was initially reluctant (page 2 here) to get into the business of providing free food distribution in Niger. But as the crisis deepened and the inital response was exposed as inadequate, the WFP and other agencies had a choice - they could, I suppose, have taken the route Tim suggests, “dropping dollars out of helicopters”, in the hope that somehow these dollars would reach only and all of the people who needed it, but in the knowledge that it would certainly drive up already inflated prices and make those who didn’t happen to collect their bundle worse off. Or they could have tried to get emergency food rations to the people who were starving, in the knowledge that this would have the side effect of bringing down prices. I’m not sure that millet prices dropping 14% in a week is such a terrible side effect, given that the biggest problem in the first place was that the price of millet and other foods had approximately doubled while the incomes of pastoralist farmers had fallen.

I’m generally in favour of supporting the incomes of people affected by famine instead of free food aid, but where people are starving right now and prices are already very high, free food seems a reasonable solution in the short term. As long as the process doesn’t go too far in the other direction and end up causing mass starvation of the farmers, I think WFP have generally made the right decisions, if belatedly (and that’s witholding judgement on how well the decisions have been implemented, which the jury is still out on). If that process does go too far and we do get mass starvation of farmers as a result of too much free food aid, the WFP deserve all the criticism Tim can throw at them. But until that hypothetical situation transpires, might it be too much to expect some recognition of the work these people have done and the lives they’ve saved, even though they have the gall to work for the hated United Nations?

A few days ago I posted on the subject of a graph by Fredrik Erixon that mysteriously omitted the recent years in which his posited negative relationship between aid and growth seems to have been reversed. Here’s his graph again.

And here’s one I drew up, using the same data he said he used (World Bank Development Indicators Online - thanks to Owen Barder for supplying me with the data).

It’s mostly a copy, except for three important differences:
(a) I’m using data for Sub-Saharan Africa only. This should actually aid clarity, as North Africa gets comparatively little aid. And I should note again that I don’t know where Erixon gets the idea that aid was ever 15% of GNI in Africa - the real level is much lower, but the trend of rises and falls over time is similar.
(b) I use the annual figures, as well as five-year averages, instead of the ten-year averages Erixon employs. There is no good reason for using ten-year averages, unless you think the most important thing about a chart is how smooth the lines are - in fact, it effectively hides interesting short-term patterns. Five-year averages are a compromise.
(c) I use the most recent data available - aid data up to 2003, growth data up to 2004.

As well as the notable jump in both aid and growth in recent years, there’s also an interesting period in the early 1990s when aid drops significantly and, the following year, so does growth. This is only suggestive of a relationship, rather than conclusive - the point of me producing this graph is not to try to prove a positive relationship between aid and growth, but simply to show that by going into a bit more detail and extending the time period used Erixon’s choice of graph becomes a lot less supportive of his “more aid, less growth” position.

Anyway, this brings me onto a second rather important quibble I have with Erixon’s representations of the data. In the above chart he compares aid with growth, which is perfectly reasonable. Strangely though, this is the last time in this more detailed paper that he compares aid to growth rates. In subsequent charts, he compares aid to levels of national income or to levels of savings. This unexplained switch is particularly significant in the case of Botswana. Erixon writes:

No other country in the world has grown faster than Botswana in the last three decades - not even China … Aid dependency has decreased (also when measured as aid per capita) relatively fast and GNI per capita has risen sharply (Figure 12). It’s not difficult to explain Botswana’s economic success - it’s the policy, stupid!

Here’s that Figure 12:

So it seems Erixon is presenting Botswana as a country which grew extremely fast due to economic policy alone and without the benefit of high levels of aid.

But why does this chart compare aid Botswana received with its level of income rather than its rate of growth? There’s no explanation given for why growth rates are suddenly of no interest. I found this rather intriguing (among other things, of which more later), so I went off and created a chart of my own comparing aid and growth in Botswana up to 2000 (the last year I have data for).

Now, call me crazy, but to me it looks like Botswana grew extremely fast when it was receiving relatively high levels of aid in the 1970s, and grew relatively slower when it was receiving relatively low levels of aid in the late 1980s and the 1990s. Actually, that level of aid was not just relatively high, it was exceptionally high - between 1960 and 1975 Botswana received an annual average of 17% of GNI in aid, compared to 2% in Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole. During this time, Botswana was getting more aid than almost any other country in the world, and growing faster than most too.

What does this do for Erixon’s argument? It blows a hole in it, that’s what. He chose to compare aid to growth when it made aid look bad (his Africa chart) but when the same comparison makes aid look relatively good (the case of Botswana) he neatly switches to a completely different indicator which has the benefit of looking similar while actually meaning something completely different. He simply cherry-picks the indicators, the countries and the data ranges that support his argument and leaves out those that don’t.

Lastly, while we’re on the subject of dodgy graphs, Jonathan Dingle of Tradediversion.net criticises the chart used by Jeffrey Sachs in his counterpoint to Erixon, shown below.

As Jonathan says, “Obviously government health expenditure is correlated with a number of other features that are important determinants of infant morality, and this graphic provides little useful guidance to the policy issues in questions”. This is fair enough - an analyis comparing infant mortality to health expenditure as % of GNP would be more revealing.

Fortunately, this paper by Issa and Ouattara does just that. Here’s their summary:

Does health expenditure reduce infant mortality rates (IMRs)? We disaggregate health expenditure into private and public and divide the countries into two groups according to their level of development (income). The results obtained from employing OLS and panel data techniques on 160 countries show strong negative relation between health expenditure and IMRs. However, we find that this effect is channelled through public expenditure at low development levels and through private expenditure at high development stages. Our results are robust across different estimation methodologies. We also find strong negative relationship between IMRs and per capita income and female education. The effect of the environment variable is statistically weak.

Fredrik Erixon, who we’ve met before, has an article on the BBC News website spinning his old line about aid being a throroughly bad thing. His article includes this graph:

It’s the same as the one in this publication, which I criticised on the grounds that
(a) a fall in income caused by an outside factor causes Aid/GNI% to rise, giving the impression that aid caused or completely failed to arrest a drop in income;
(b) the graph counts all aid equally, which is misleading since it’s perfectly reasonable for some aid to be negatively correlated with growth, since for humanitarian reasons aid might go up in the bad times only to fall when a country is growing strongly again, and
(c) it seems to invoke a two-variable universe in which only aid determines growth and there is no such thing as a civil war, commodity price collapse or debt crisis, all of which severely affected African countries in the period covered. In fact, there is robust evidence suggesting that, though average incomes in Africa stagnated or fell between 1980 and 2000, they would have fallen even further in the absence of aid. As I said in my original blog post, “nobody pretends that aid is the only significant determinant of growth rates, except, it seems, when they are trying to prove that it is no good at all”.

Now I’ve realised there’s yet another reason to treat this graph with a very large pinch of salt. It stops in the year 2000, which is odd, since we’ve got three or four years of good data on aid and incomes to use since then.

Though maybe it’s not that odd when you consider that both aid and growth in Africa have risen signifcantly in recent years. Aid as a proportion of GNI is hitting around 6% in Sub-Saharan Africa for the first time since the mid 1990s*, and per capita growth in 2004 was about 2.4%. So by the standards of Erixon’s graph-based argument, aid and growth are recently quite strongly correlated! Of course trying to analyse the aid-growth relationship on that basis is a bit of a nonsense, but it’s nice to see that such arguments fail even on their own terms.

*I realise Erixon puts the figure for aid/GNI% in Africa at around 15%, but that seems to be flat-out wrong: this OECD data (in .xls format) puts the figure for Africa at about 4.3%.

It seems that tens of thousands of people were abandoned to face Hurricane Katrina when they could not evacuate themselves out of New Orleans, and - unbelievably - they have also been abandoned in the aftermath.

This report from Fox News

NEW ORLEANS � The city rescued Isaac Clark and his family and left them in bedlam: surrounded by thousands of increasingly angry, uprooted people, with no food or water and nobody to protect them.

A man died the night before, his body left in Thursday’s hot sun on a grassy median in front of the city’s convention center. Residents smashed into hotels for meat while others cooked it on a parking lot barbecue. People broke into tears from thirst, frustration and fear.

“They came and took us in buses. And left us right here,” said Clark, 68. “We are out here living like pure animals. We don’t have water. We don’t have food. We don’t have help.” They’ve been waiting for two days.

The convention center � usually the scene of massive business gatherings and product shows � became a stalled-out transit center for those caught by Hurricane Katrina (search) and a nightmare for those deprived of life’s daily needs.

Reporters and photographers saw at least four dead. Others in the crowd said several babies had died. People desperately called for help, chasing after reporters, sometimes pleading and sometimes threatening. The crowd briefly chanted “Help us, help us” before the words faded away.

Over nearly two hours at the center, there was no help from government officials and no sign of any. Three large SUVs with flashing lights on the dashboard zoomed through the crowd, forcing people to the side. None stopped.

A police car drove through with an announcement on its megaphone: “Buses are coming over the bridge now.” No buses came in the next hour � though a state police armored car drove through without stopping, eight officers on top with flak jackets and assault weapons staring impassively at the crowd.

“Why aren’t they helping us? We are the forgotten,” said Rachel Carey, 23, a clerk at Charity Hospital (search), tending to her 4-year-old daughter.

By early afternoon, Mayor Ray Nagin (search) issued a statement about the center: “This is a desperate SOS. We are out of resources at the convention center.” He pleaded for buses and later officials said they would try to march those trapped at the center over a nearby bridge and out of city.

Police Chief Eddie Compass said he sent in 88 officers to quell the situation at the building, but they were quickly driven back by an angry mob.

“We have individuals who are getting raped, we have individuals who are getting beaten,” Compass said. “Tourists are walking in that direction and they are getting preyed upon.”

Carey was going the other direction. Furious, scared and disgusted with the lack of help, she gave up waiting and started walking with a dozen relatives and friends, lugging plastic bags stuffed with their belongings. Young children stayed close to their mother’s legs. One woman cried quietly.

Inside the center, many tried to sleep atop musty carpets sopping wet from rain, as if when they woke up this would be over. Bathrooms overflowed. Families huddled together.

Among the crowds were tourists holding onto their luggage. A Florida sheriff’s detective, Bill Waldron, was caught in the storm while here for a murder trial, but most people in the building were the city’s poor.

“A lot of people weren’t able to evacuate,” said John Murray, 52. “It’s like they’re punishing us for not being able to evacuate.”

Rage, frustration and paranoia ran through the crowd. One man warned that there was gas leaking inside the center and everyone would be killed. Empty beer bottles littered the curbs. A block away, young men smashed the windows of a truck while others took refuge in a white Rolls-Royce.

A military helicopter tried to land at the convention center several times to drop off food and water. But the rushing crowd forced the choppers to back off. Troopers then tossed the supplies to the crowd from 10 feet off the ground and flew away.

Overwhelmingly, anger turned on government officials.

“All I want to say to Mayor Ray Nagin is thank you for helping us,” Yolanda McZeal, 43, said calmly, sarcastically and bitterly. “Governor Blanco, thank you for helping us. President Bush, thank you for helping us.”

For a few minutes, the crowd chanted, “No more Nagin.”

For Carey, the young mother walking away from the center, the disaster was divine retribution for the city’s legendary corruption and crime. “The city is corrupt … God is punishing New Orleans for all the [expletive] they’re doing, killing each other.”

But she had even less warmth for the police, whom, she said, she barely saw.

“The thugs and the criminals are the heroes. They’re the ones that were saving us,” she said. Stolen speedboats took her from her flooded neighborhood; stolen moving trucks brought her to the convention center. “The police were nowhere.”

While many in the crowd spoke of their love for the city, Carey was having none of that.

“I have to pick up and start somewhere else,” she said. Would she consider coming back? “Hell no.”