Let's Talk Development

Introducing a cultural trade index

A few years ago, when Craigslist was just “The List,” a friend circulated an ad posted on Craigslist Vancouver. It went like this:

We are a small & casual restaurant in downtown Vancouver. We are looking for solo musicians to play in our restaurant to promote their work and sell their CD. This is not a daily job, but only for special events, which will eventually turn into a nightly event if we get positive response. More jazz, rock, & smooth-type music around the world and mixed cultural music. Are you interested in promoting your work? Please reply back ASAP.

And one of the responses received was:
I am a musician with a big house looking for a restauranteur to promote their restaurant and come to my house to make dinner for my friends and me. This is not a daily job, but only for special events, which will eventually turn into a nightly event if we get positive response. More fine dining & exotic meals and mixed ethnic fusion cuisine. Are you interested in promoting your restaurant? Please reply back ASAP.

It’s perhaps unfair to conclude that the restauranteur didn’t mean well. But what does this exchange suggest? How are the arts normally valued, consciously or unconsciously, in our social order?

I usually don’t wake up to hate mail in my inbox. What prompted this deluge is a recent paper that evaluates the impact of a training program for informal health care providers (providers without any formal medical training) in the state of West Bengal, India (paper summary). Training improved the ability of informal providers to correctly manage the kind of conditions they may see in their clinics, but it did not decrease their overuse of unnecessary medicines or antibiotics.

When you think of Bhutan, you typically think of the tall mountains of the Himalayas, or you think of this nation adding the ‘Gross National Happiness’, or GNH indicator onto the global development agenda. Well, from now on, you can also think of Bhutan as the first country in the world to have one of their agencies approved to apply “alternative procurement arrangements” or APAs. This may sound trivial in comparison to 7,500 meter high peaks or collective happiness in the Dragon Kingdom. But for the way we do procurement at the World Bank, it’s a real breakthrough and an important step towards becoming a better Bank.

Income inequality has been a hotly debated topic in Egypt since the 2011 revolution. However, researchers remain divided over the “true” level of inequality in this country. A blog posted on Vox in August argued that inequality in Egypt was underestimated and could be better represented by using house price data to estimate the top end of the income distribution. This blog is a response to that article and seeks to clarify issues relevant to the measurement of inequality in Egypt and elsewhere.

In pursuing meaningful sustainable development, and investing in conservation and redressing the environmental damage caused by decades of neglect, we need to better explore and understand the role of international cooperation and why human values and ethics are central to this debate.

International cooperation. A key ingredient for generating a sustainable development path will have to be a significant strengthening of the current mechanisms of international cooperation, which have turned out to be insufficient to meet the global challenges that we face. The process of globalization is unfolding in the absence of equivalent international institutions to support it and harness its potential for good.

The primary motivation for predicting data in economics, health sciences, and other disciplines has been to deal with various forms of missing data problems. However, one could also make a case for adopting prediction methods to obtain more cost-efficient estimates of welfare indicators when it is expensive to observe the outcome of interest (in comparison with its predictors). For example, consider the estimation of poverty and malnutrition rates. The conventional estimators in this case require household- and individual-level data on expenditures and health outcomes. Collecting this data is generally costly. It is not uncommon that in developing countries, where poverty and poor health outcomes are most pressing, statistical agencies do not have the budget that is needed to collect these data frequently. As a result, official estimates of poverty and malnutrition are often outdated: For example, across the 26 low-income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa over the period between 1993 and 2012, the national poverty rate and prevalence of stunting for children under five are on average reported only once every five years and once every ten years in the World Development Indicators.

This question is particularly relevant in the context of traditional public agricultural extension services. Expensive and burdened by high rates of under-staffing and low levels of accountability, privatization of extension services may be a way to improve cost-effectiveness. However, private services may lack incentives to tailor their services to the poorest, making them an unsatisfactory substitute for a public system of extension. This issue is particularly salient in sub-Saharan Africa, where markets for agricultural services are typically lean.

This is the third of three blog posts on recent trends in national inequality.

In earlier blogposts on recent trends in inequality, we had referred to measurement issues that make this exercise challenging. In this blogpost we discuss two such issues: the underlying welfare measure (income or consumption) used to quantify the extent of inequality within a country, and the fact that estimates of inequality based on data from household surveys are likely to underreport incomes of the richest households. There are a number of other measurement challenges, such as those related to survey comparability, which are discussed in Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2016 – for a focus on Africa, also see Poverty in a Rising Africa, published earlier in 2016.

In 2014, Australian startup founder Evan Thornley gave a talk at a technology startup conference about why he likes to hire women. So far, so good. However, things quickly deteriorated when he explained that part of the reason was that women were “still often relatively cheap compared to what we would’ve had to pay someone less good of a different gender”, illustrated by a slide that read “Women. Like men, only cheaper”.

While the ensuing media outcry quickly forced Thornley to backtrack on his comments, the reality his slide so eloquently put into words is not so easily revised. Even in Silicon Valley, considered one of the most forward-thinking industries in the world, women continue to be paid less than their male counterparts.

When the Plantagenet kings ruled England (1154-1485), their primary means of securing wealth, prestige, and power was through territorial conquest. Fighting endless wars in France and dispatching armies as far as Jerusalem, the crown often had to finance foreign adventures through taxation -- sometimes crushing taxation – of subjects. The illegitimacy of such taxation only intensified the recurrent threat of domestic revolt. And through their demands for more accountable and inclusive governance, the English nobility succeeded, albeit with much blood shed over a span of centuries, to establish institutions and public policies conducive to economic development.

Introducing a cultural trade index

Of quacks and crooks: The conundrum of informal health care in India

Strengthening the rules of the game: Bhutan’s alternative procurement experience

Top Incomes, inequality and the Egyptian case

International cooperation, ethics and climate change

Is predicted data a viable alternative to real data?

How to make services work for the poor?

Measuring inequality isn’t easy or straightforward - Here’s why

Persistent gender gaps and short-term solutions

England’s warrior kings, extractive institutions, and tax policy

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