Matt Morris | virtual economics

The market for development experts

Written by Matt Morris on January 31, 2011

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Unable to sleep last night, I logged onto the Aid Review website and started to browse through the 50 or so submissions. Many of them made references to technical assistance, so I ran a Google search – ‘technical assistance site:aidreview.gov.au/publications’ – and discovered a long list of results, including: Significantly reduce use of technical assistance provided by Western consultants – use local rather than external advisors and institutions. (World Vision) Reduce the proportion of aid money [...] Read more »

The future of aid beckons

Written by Matt Morris on January 29, 2011

The long delivery chain of aid programs and a lack of feedback can lead to little accountability. How can technology and active stakeholders help to fix the feedback loop? The long chain of delivery The starting point for this article is the long delivery chain for aid programs. Imagine a set of relationships that link aid funders in one country (taxpayers), to aid managers/intermediaries (aid agencies), to recipient governments/multilateral agencies/managing contractors (aid implementers), to poor [...] Read more »

‘Aid works, but not as it should’

Written by Matt Morris on January 17, 2011

Speaker Owen Barder from The Dial on Vimeo. A terrific talk by Owen Barder – here’s a quick summary what he said. We ought to be able to fix lack of predictability, yet it costs between 15 and 20 per of the value of aid. And tying of aid costs as much as 30 per cent of the value of aid. The proliferation of aid – projects and donors – since the 1970s is staggering. [...] Read more »

Development policy essentials

Written by Matt Morris on January 12, 2011

With so many development policy ideas on the web, it can be difficult to keep up with the latest news. Hopping from one site to another takes time and it’s easy to forget to check in. How can you simplify the information flow? Don’t worry, if you haven’t already, simply set up an RSS feed to your computer. Owen Barder’s blog contains details on how to do this and it’s easy to get started. I [...] Read more »

Stern comments on climate change

Written by Matt Morris on September 1, 2010

With so much debate about carbon taxes and emissions trading schemes, it’s easy to get lost in the detail of dealing with climate change. How can we avert a climate crisis? I arrived at the Crawford School this morning and was invited to a roundtable on climate change led by no less than Nick Stern, head of the Stern Review on The Economics of Climate Change and author of A Blueprint for a Safer Planet. [...] Read more »

Achieve MDGs: make health global

Written by Matt Morris on August 31, 2010

An exciting conference is taking place this week in Melbourne, Australia. Representatives from the UN and NGOs from around the World are meeting to take stock of progress in improving health outcomes: reducing the number of women who die in child birth, reducing the number of children who die before the age of five, and reversing the spread of diseases such as AIDS and tuberculosis. With only five years to go before the deadline for [...] Read more »

Mineral booms: blessing or curse?

Written by Matt Morris on August 31, 2010

A growing number of developing countries – including Ghana, Tanzania and PNG – are looking forward to sizeable revenues from their non-renewable resource sectors. Will this be a blessing or a curse? What can policy-makers do? Economists have long debated this issue. Andrew Gelb’s book – Oil Windfalls: Blessing or Curse? – reviewed six countries that experienced oil windfalls during the 1970s and found that many of the potential benefits were dissipated and some countries [...] Read more »

Cash on Delivery: a new approach to aid

Written by Matt Morris on June 10, 2010

Donors have been known waste money on classrooms with no teachers, so why not pay for progress on number of children completing primary school? That’s the idea behind Cash On Delivery: a new approach to aid, a new book by Nancy Birdsall and William D. Savedoff. And it’s an idea whose time has come. The book is well worth a read. Here’s a quick summary COD aid taken from the book to whet your appetite. Key features [...] Read more »

Better information, better aid

Written by Matt Morris on June 4, 2010

Andrew Mitchell’s announcement of a full UK aid transparency guarantee and a new independent watchdog is welcome news. (Audio of speech here.) In this blog, we have argued that recipients need to be able to give better feedback to aid agencies on whether goods and services actually reach the end of the track. Andrew Mitchell’s announcement today addresses another of the information failures – the opacity of aid spending decisions. We often discuss aid in [...] Read more »

How can donors use the crowd to monitor projects?

Written by Matt Morris on April 30, 2010

The recent million t-shirts debate has shown the power of crowd-sourcing for appraising projects. Do you have ideas on how to improve project implementation? This photo for an AusAID project to distribute 500,000 textbooks in Papua New Guinea got me thinking. How do we know if the books reach the 3,400 or so schools and the pupils? The containers arrived on two ships, one unloading its precious cargo in Lae and the other in Port [...] Read more »