Thank you for helping us to reach our first milestone – more than 1000 visitors to Virtual Economics. It’s been an exciting few months – setting up the blog, meeting new people and sharing ideas. We’ve been blown away by the response and the interest from around the World – with visitors from everywhere from Vanuatu to Ethiopia, to Washington and London. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for visiting our blog, [...] Read more »
Is the crowd wiser than the economist?
Tim Harford has a terrific post on the FT this week on a perennial problem for economists – knowing what is happening now. Data lags mean that it can take months to find out what has happened to the economy. Something that can be embarrassing for economists. In another post on Virtual Economics, we looked at the quarterly data on GDP, but these numbers only came out months later. (At the time, most of us [...] Read more »
Private aid
The 2010 Index of Global Philanthropy and Remittances looks at the data on private giving to developing countries. Philanthropy to the developing world remained steady in 2008 and remittances continued to grow—despite the global recession and dire forecasts—providing a much needed lifeline to poor people throughout the world. And they were more resilient to the downturn than private capital flows to developing countries, which fell dramatically in 2008. Despite this, private flows still accounted for three-quarters of the [...] Read more »
Now the good news: TEDGlobal 2010
TEDGlobal 2010 takes place in the UK this week and ‘will explore the undercurrent of good news just below the surface of today’s troubling headlines — new ideas, new science, new technology, new social and political thinking, new art and a new understanding of who we are.’ All of the speakers will be excellent and here are three to look out for: Tim Jackson, an economist, studies the links between lifestyle, societal values and the environment [...] Read more »
A post-bureaucratic world awaits
Dear friends and colleagues, I am moving on from DFID to do research on aid and development policy at the Australian National University. If you are interested in sharing ideas on development and following our research, we’ll be posting news on the Virtual Economics website and you can also check twitter for regular updates. I was with DFID for seven years. During that time I had the chance to work with some terrific people and [...] Read more »
How can beneficiaries monitor aid projects?
Monitoring it happen There is a growing movement among NGOs to use technology to involve communities in the monitoring of projects, so that people can hold donors and governments accountable for the delivery of services. Owen Barder highlights a promising approach by Daraja in Tanzania which is going to use SMS messaging to provide feedback about which water points are working. GlobalGiving is using Ushahidi and working with Map Kibera. They’ve been training volunteers to collect stories [...] Read more »
New UK development minister
Andrew Mitchell MP has been appointed as the UK’s Secretary of State for International Development. The Secretary of State said: “I’m delighted to be appointed to spearhead the new government’s campaign to tackle global poverty. “Tackling deprivation around the world is a moral imperative and firmly in Britain’s national interest. I’m proud of the commitments that our new government has made on international development. Our bargain with taxpayers is this: in return for contributing your [...] Read more »
What works in development
Bill Easterly and Jessica Cohen discuss whether we can know what works and why, and have a great discussion on randomised control trials. On January 21, the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings hosted a discussion on these fundamental global development questions with the book’s editors. Their discussion focused on the benefits and challenges of both a smaller grassroots development approach and a traditional big-picture development approach, with the goal of achieving a consensus [...] Read more »
Debating the Robin Hood Tax – who pays?
A debate has raged during the last week over a ‘tiny tax on bankers to tackle poverty.’ Surely who could object to such a thing? Well, economists have been quick to point out that the tax isn’t really a tax on bankers, nor is it tiny. Oh, and it might not help the poor as much as advocates claim. Tim Harford and Owen Barder both point out that while the tax rate may be tiny [...] Read more »
