Global Development: Views from the Center

Hello Nancy, Doesn't the very idea that "perceived governance quality" responds to "large-scale public sector reforms" make the assumption that one is related to the other? If so, why? We have only partial proof that a linkage even exists. If growth is the economic standard -- as it is from my seat in Hong Kong -- we know two-digit wonders can be contrived without much reform at all.

Yet the World Bank and the IMF continue to prescribe the same medicine repeatedly. It's their version of Pascal's Wager: If we disbelieve the miracle of public sector reform, and it happens, we have everything to lose. If it doesn't happen we'll just go back to the drawing board and concoct another reform model. It is a facile argument.

Humility is key. The general perception in Bangladesh is that governance is not improving. But growth is, now close to 5 % per capita and year. Signs of the opposite relationship, that growth brings better governance, are not easy to see yet. But if we (to some extent, at least) believe in that causality in the long run, growth should remain a central goal. If we also realise that the recipe for the right growth-promoting institutional reforms in all countries wasn’t as clear as we thought, we should encourage more research, more small domestic initiatives and push big programmes less. Easy, right?

To quote from the above: ”…The language is circumspect but the message is clear: the Bank (like other creditors and donors) doesn't know how to help countries help themselves… After all, Indonesia's Suharto, who ranks at the top of the Transparency International corruption league, also takes the gold medal for reducing poverty during his 30 year regime.”

I think the time has come for some worldliness. The objectives of the World Bank, like the sentiments of 'Make Poverty History', are admirable but the methods are those of charity, and charity alone cannot bring (in the case of Africa) 850 million people out of poverty. Critically most of these are still wedded to the once-reliable assets of their past - wives, children and livestock. Polygamy and the bride price ensured that there were enough children still alive at puberty for society's survival in a disease-ridden continent, and using shifting slash-and-burn cultivation enabled those societies to feed themselves on a tectonically stable continent with well-leached soils.

With this culture still in place, a modicum of sanitation and medicine has meant that the population is doubling every thirty-odd years and by now over 40% live in an urban environment, where subsistence farming cannot feed them; it has to be either commercial farming – agrobusiness - or food imports. Yet, to this day, fixed property (and the all-important market-place in it) is not seen as an asset in most of Africa. For example there are only eight 'agences immobilieres' in the DR Congo where I live; there are perhaps ten thousand in the United Kingdom, although both have similar populations. Why is the bourgeois condition OK for developed countries and not for Africa? Why cannot the development assistance industry start proselytising for universal private land ownership and the creation of a market place in it ?