Zoo Station

If you weren't living in a cave, you've probably heard of Jeff Sachs's new book, The End of Poverty. Generally speaking, it's a book with some interesting new ideas, though it is marred by way of a terrible introduction by Bono. If you can't be bothered with reading the book in full, Scientific American is carrying a piece by Sachs this month that captures the central ideas of the book pretty effectively. It also makes the distinction between poverty and extreme poverty, which I believe is central if Sachs (and Bono) is to win this argument. It might be possible to end extreme poverty (households living on less than $1 a day) using the interventions that Sachs suggests, but the only way to end poverty per se, IMHO, is to encourage sustainable economic growth. More importantly, the piece articulates well the role of geography, disease prevalence, urbanization etc in perpetuating the poverty trap most of sub-Saharan Africa is caught in.

Although economic growth has shown a remarkable capacity to lift vast numbers of people out of extreme poverty, progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Market forces and free trade are not enough. Many of the poorest regions are ensnared in a poverty trap: they lack the financial means to make the necessary investments in infrastructure, education, health care systems and other vital needs.

Economists have learned a great deal during the past few years about how countries develop and what roadblocks can stand in their way. A new kind of development economics needs to emerge, one that is better grounded in science--a "clinical economics" akin to modern medicine. Today's medical professionals understand that disease results from a vast array of interacting factors and conditions: pathogens, nutrition, environment, aging, individual and population genetics, lifestyle. They also know that one key to proper treatment is the ability to make an individualized diagnosis of the source of illness. Likewise, development economists need better diagnostic skills to recognize that economic pathologies have a wide variety of causes, including many outside the traditional ken of economic practice.

Africa did not experience a green revolution. Tropical Africa lacks the massive floodplains that facilitate the large-scale and low-cost irrigation found in Asia. Also, its rainfall is highly variable, and impoverished farmers have been unable to purchase fertilizer. The initial Green Revolution research featured crops, especially paddy rice and wheat, not widely grown in Africa (high-yield varieties suitable for it have been developed in recent years, but they have not yet been disseminated sufficiently). The continent's food production per person has actually been falling, and Africans' caloric intake is the lowest in the world; food insecurity is rampant. Its labor force has remained tethered to subsistence agriculture. Compounding its agricultural woes, Africa bears an overwhelming burden of tropical diseases. Because of climate and the endemic mosquito species, malaria is more intensively transmitted in Africa than anywhere else. And high transport costs isolate Africa economically. In East Africa, for example, the rainfall is greatest in the interior of the continent, so most people live there, far from ports and international trade routes.

Sachs also provides a counter to people (like me) who believe that the largest poverty reduction measures in human history have been the rapid economic development of India and China. He suggests that economic growth didn't come magically to India, but was part of a process, part of which was donor-funded.

Most of today's successfully developing countries, especially smaller ones, received at least some backing from external donors at crucial times. The critical scientific innovations that formed the underpinnings of the Green Revolution were bankrolled by the Rockefeller Foundation, and the spread of these technologies in India and elsewhere in Asia was funded by the U.S. and other donor governments and international development institutions.

Read the whole thing. If nothing else, it's refreshing to read a differential diagnosis and yes, it's a much quicker read than the book :))