Kenya

In low-income countries, road traffic accidents account for 3.7 percent of deaths, twice as high as deaths due to malaria.  Anyone who has traveled in Kenya won’t be surprised to hear that 20 percent of recorded crashes involve matatus, the private buses that careen around the city.  Billy Jack and James Habyarimana have a fascinating impact evaluation where they randomly put posters in matatus encouraging passengers to “heckle and chide” the driver if he is driving too fast or recklessly.  The idea is that the posters solve a collective action problem:  most passengers don’t like being driven dangerously, but individually they’re reluctant to speak up.  Their preliminary results are impressive:  the frequency of road traffic accidents in a 12-month period was one quarter in the treatment group compared with the control group (those without posters).

I gave the Jerome A.Chazen lecture at Columbia Business School the other day. The gist of my talk was that:

• Despite relatively rapid economic growth, private investment in Africa is still relatively low
• The proximate reasons are poor infrastructure, weak skills and a host of policy and institutional impediments (such as business regulations and trade restrictions.
• Underlying each of these proximate reasons is some government failure. Transport infrastructure, for instance, is constrained by poor regulation that generates monopoly profits for trucking companies but keeps Africa’s transport prices the highest in the world; poor skills derive from nearly dysfunctional tertiary education systems; and many of the regulations are difficult to remove for political reasons. The few private-sector success stories in Africa (Kenya horticulture, Lesotho garments, Rwanda tourism) all got around these government failures; they have not spread economy-wide.
• The key to enhanced private sector growth in Africa, therefore, is government leadership that removes the underlying obstacles to infrastructure, skills development and entrepreneurship.

There was a lively discussion after the lecture, although I got the impression that most of the audience was broadly sympathetic to my approach. I wonder if the same is true of readers of this blog.

Sub-Saharan Africa received almost $12 billion in remittances in 2007, and that was only the official number. With "informal" flows added the total amount can easily be double that number. Nigeria, Kenya, Sudan, Senegal, Uganda and South Africa received the highest volume of remittances, while in smaller countries such as Lesotho remittances represent up to a quarter of GDP.

Remittance costs are significantly higher for Africa compared to other regions; costs can go up to almost 25% of the amount remitted. Remittances between African countries (from South Africa, for example) are especially expensive. Reducing these costs will mean substantial extra transfers, and this will be a focus of the World Bank’s medium term agenda on the African financial sector. The immediate concern is, however, stability of flows: the recent international credit crisis will lead to a slowdown in remittances. Remittances have generally been counter-cyclical in the past, as they tend to increase when the receiving country experiences adverse events.

But a recession in sending countries could hurt the capacity of migrants to send money home. It is still too early to determine if the latter factor will dominate and cause a decline in the total amount remitted, although there are some disturbing signs. High-frequency data on remittances for African countries are scarce, but available data show that remittances from the US seem to have slowed down in recent months; remittances from other sending countries, however, have not yet been affected.

Since some readers of this blog are senders of remittances, and others recipients, it would be helpful to hear how you see remittances changing  in the current situation.