Papua New Guinea: LNG to double economy, now for good governance

Written by on October 1, 2011
Screen Shot 2011-10-01 at 11.59.15 AM

The first 50 days of Papua New Guinea’s O’Neill-Namah government have seen reforms take off, including decisive action being taken to tackle corruption, public enterprises being cleaned up, and an 800 million kina (US$362 million) supplementary budget passed focusing on free education and infrastructure. The next nine months provide an opportunity to put the economic foundations in place for better management of the mineral boom. According to the latest numbers from Treasury, the economy is growing fast, including non-mineral [...] Read more »

Crowdsourcing: Fix my road

Written by on July 18, 2011
Screen shot 2011-07-18 at 8.24.09 PM

Imperfect information on the delivery of basic services make its difficult for policy-makers to manage principal-agent problems in the delivery chain and for recipients to hold their governments accountable. Crowdsourced information can help to fix feedback loops and new technologies and apps are making this feasible. I wanted to test out one of the most talked about platforms–Ushahidi. So before a recent trip to PNG I set up the FixMyRoad website using Crowdmap–a web-based version [...] Read more »

Tim Harford: Trial, error and the God complex

Written by on July 18, 2011
Adapt-by-Tim-Harford

Tim Harford’s new book Adapt is essential reading for anyone interested in how to improve development aid. In this TEDTalk, Tim worries about the prevalence of the ‘God complex’ among politicians, doctors and economists in a world where problems and their solutions are multifaceted and complex. Tim is a big fan of adaptation through variation and selection, trial and error, to find solutions to complex problems. His thesis is that in order to get closer [...] Read more »

The life you can save?

Written by on July 18, 2011
the_life_you_can_save.large-732235-199x300

Saving lives is an important reason for giving development aid. In this excellent debate, Bill Easterly and Peter Singer discuss what people in rich countries can do to save lives. Peter argues that we have a moral responsibility to give more aid. Bill adds that we also have a moral responsibility to make sure that the NGOs and aid agencies that act on our behalf actually save lives. Read more »

Aid innovations

Written by on July 12, 2011
Screen shot 2011-07-12 at 8.59.12 PM

It’s a myth that aid is static, there are some exciting changes taking place. What are the new innovations that are improving aid effectiveness in the 21st century aid? As you read this blog post, keep at the back of your mind the determinants of aid effectiveness. (For more on this see a new discussion paper by Stephen Howes.) We can improve the quality of recipients by selecting on the basis of performance and results, and (trying) to improve [...] Read more »

Australia’s Aid Review

Written by on July 12, 2011
Screen shot 2011-07-12 at 8.05.05 PM

As a former treasury economist I’m always delighted when reviews put numbers around their recommendations. It is good for transparency and brings greater clarity. There’s a lot in Australia’s new Aid Review report to think about and the panel have made a compelling case on how to spend an increasing aid budget aid wisely. This blog takes a look at some of the numbers in their plan. How much extra aid? The Aid Review forecasts that the aid [...] Read more »

Evaluating the impact of TA

Written by on March 4, 2011
Screen shot 2011-07-12 at 8.24.36 PM

Rigorous impact evaluations of technical assistance seem to be few and far between, but this one is worth reading. Many public programs and operations by multilateral organisations include technical assistance to the direct beneficiaries of the program in addition to pure financing. However, there is no substantial body of studies that calculates the additional impact; in the sense of exclusively attributable to, of technical assistance on the outcome of interest of the program. We propose [...] Read more »

Developing capacity?

Written by on March 4, 2011
Screen shot 2011-07-12 at 8.27.19 PM

Here is a key finding of a 2006 evaluation of ‘DFID-Funded Technical Co-operation for Economic Management in  Sub-Saharan Africa.’ Did the provision of the outputs lead to results? Was any impact achieved either transactional or transformational? A consistent picture emerges across the case study examples. DFID’s TC support has contributed in many cases towards the development of improved systems and procedures (e.g. for budgeting, financial management, monitoring and evaluation, audit, payroll management) that if fully [...] Read more »

Does technical assistance work?

Written by on March 4, 2011
400000000000000089348_s4

I’m attending a meeting today to discuss AusAID’s new Framework for regulating pay to advisers–one solution to the perennial problem of high cost technical assistance. What is the evidence on the effectiveness of TA? Here is a summary of some of the key points from Does Foreign Aid Really Work? According to OECD DAC, technical cooperation accounted fro over 36% of bilateral aid from DAC donors in 2004, and was more if TC in infrastructure [...] Read more »

Welcome to the social network

Written by on February 28, 2011
The_Social_Network_6

‘Facebook helps you connect and share with people in your life’–a understated mission for a global phenomenon, and what does it mean for the developing world? If you haven’t seen ‘The Social Network’ already, I  highly recommend it. The directing is inspired, with the story told through flashbacks from two deposition hearings. The characters are compelling–Mark Zuckerberg and Edaurdo Severin create Facebook in the Fall of 2003; Sean Parker, the creator of Napster, brings Facebook [...] Read more »

Next Page »