Stone the Mayor's House, That'll Help

While I'm doing my development studies course, issues I've wondered about before seem to become clearer. Confused and contradictory situtations that baffled me when travelling in Latin America start to slot into narratives of economic structure and class struggle; social indicators and policy choices.

But every now and again I'm reminded that, beyond the classroom and books, the real world is as incoherent as ever.

When I lived in Peru, I became sceptical about the routine of marches, strikes and roadblocks that occurred on an almost weekly basis. These often seemed to be futile, as protesters demanded things which were beyond the government's control, or which wouldn't have made any difference to their problems (such as the resignation of president Alejandro Toledo). The sight of a street blocked by a heap of rocks drew an exasperated sigh, as all it seemed to achieve was to prevent ordinary people from making it to work or school.

At worst, such disturbances were childish and destructive, such as when supporters of Antauro Humala tore up the paving stones in Arequipa's beautiful plaza de armas during the 'Andahuaylazo' in January 2006 (a 'rebellion' in the Andean town of Andahuaylas that achieved only the death of three provincial policeman).

Back in New Zealand, immersed in written history and politics, I castigate myself for becoming so blinkered and bourgeois. Latin American history has seen such unrelenting domination of political and economic power by small elites, and such exclusion of indigenous people and the rural poor, that oppositional politics seems an obvious response, perhaps the only way that marginalised groups have made any gains.

Then I read this article from La Republica, and it takes me back . In the frigid and chaotic Andean city of Juliaca, a group of concerned citizens decided to protest against the price rise of basic goods. Hundreds of people blocked streets with stones, and impeded the transit of the the few bicycles and taxis. Later, a few of them went down to the residence of the regional president and threw stones through his window. Then they did the same at the house of Juliaca's mayor, whom they accused of 'being in league with [Peruvian president] Alan Garcia'

The unavoidable question for me is: why? In the abstract, we can talk about poverty, frustration and exclusion. But how throwing stones through someone's window is ever going to help anything, let alone make food prices go down, is unclear. Sure, the national government continues to appear distant and uncaring, but not even they can do much about the international price of foodstuffs. As for being in league with the president, there are indeed constitutional requirements that regional authorities do not act directly in contradiction of national policies. But these authorities were democratically elected by the people of the region. Privileged local elites, maybe, though the mayor of Juliaca, David Mamaní Paricahua, is (I deduce from his name) of indigenous background

This routine is repeated so often, it's almost as if the blocking streets and throwing stones were themselves the real purpose, and the political cause just an excuse. Maybe it's reactionary, but sometimes you can't help thinking that development problems have their roots in some social and cultural malaise that renders debates about economic structure and social policy largely irrelevant. How to get beyond such a malaise, is something I confess to having little idea about.

Bringing It All Back Home

Despite, or perhaps because of this currently being my 'development studies diary', I should lay off the theoretical discussion and stats for a bit and bring it back to a bit more of a personal level.

This occurred to me in the light of an entertaining and provoking visiting lecture from Jeph Matthias, himself a former Development Studies student at Victoria. I came in a bit late, so didn't catch whether he was a biologist-turned doctor-turned development worker, or had made some other combination of those career movements. In any case, his current role is working in a remote town on the Nepal-Tibet frontier.

Jeph had some philosophical thoughts on development and a couple of nice metaphors about what it means and where we're going. He felt that human development has reached a stage where we are going to see qualitative change: "as boiling water changes state into steam, so we have to decide whether were going to be part of the remaining water bubbling away in the pot, or part of the new state" (ok, so it didn't sound nearly as zealous the way he said it -- Jeph followed all his comments with "maybe").

His another analogy was with a hive of bees -- there have always been insects that fly around by themselves, but at some stage bees decided to dedicate themselves to restricted roles within the greater whole of the hive (again, less totalitarian-sounding the way he described it). It wasn't clear if the bee metaphor best described the way global society would have to reorganize itself as the reality of resource shortages hit, or how highly interdependent late capitalism is organised now.

However, what most caught my attention was a little excerpt he gave us from his 'development studies diary', which he'd written about climbing in the Kaikouras and shooting goats -- making the point about the feral urges continuing to be what drives us, even as we move to supposedly more civilized states. Maybe my diary ought to be a little bit less dry and boring, I wondered.

Jeph showed a photo of his brother-in-law in a yak herder's tent high in the Himalayas and asked us how the two people were different. Discussion concluded that the yak herder had a great array of skills which equipped him to survive in that environment. Jeph's brother-in-law didn't have those abilities, but had use of lots of things (his MacPac gear; a GPS system) that he couldn't possibly have made himself, taking advantage of the massive interdependence of western civilisation (the hive?).

It reminded me of what I said in my first 'why do I care' post. As I said there, even in the not especially remote rural areas of Latin America, people were far more capable of handling the environment with the few tools they had available than I or most other backpackers. Yet we had privileged lives, with more freedom than they could dream of.

There's something disturbing about that -- about the helplessness of the westerner, as well as his privilege. Ever since labour specialisation really got going during the industrial revolution, people have drifted away from the state of being practical and self-sufficient enough to take care of ourselves. Although we live long and comfortable lives, there's an undercurrent of discomfort and angst about having lost -- or never acquired -- the capacity to exercise those practical skills

Reflecting on Jeph shooting his goat, a student in the class mentioned some studies of comparative happiness which found that across a wide range of cultures, the access to the sex, food, water, and shelter. Is development, indeed all human endeavour, just an extension of our biological drives?

I don't mean to really answer that, although I will mention in passing my scepticism towards the pat explanations offered by evolutionary psychology.

Better to talk about my own experiences. There might be children reading this blog, so I won't discuss the first of those biological drives. But it's true that it's hard to find an experience close to as profound as the quenching an intense thirst. Among my vivid memories is working all day in 36-degree heat on a carnival lot in New York and finally getting a chance to slot my $1 into the Coke machine (or was it Pepsi?) and feel the simultaneous explosions of cold, bubbles and sugar in my parched throat.

That same carnival tour (maybe the hardest I've ever worked) holds memories of other intense experiences related to fulfilling basic needs. A mammoth cheesburger of Alberta beef after setting up all day on the carnival lot in Edmonton. A precious few hours drifting into sleep, on a Greyhound bus following a long straight road through the Canadian night. Sleep in particular takes on the character of a sexual or religious experience when you're very short of it.

Yet there are different things that I remember most keenly; that have made life something to be thankful for. Natural landscapes: the first time crossing Burke's Pass into the tussocky vastness of the McKenzie country; the first awe-inspiring view of the Andes coming into land in Santiago; soft summer evening light over the lush islands of the Whangarei heads; the view from El Morro in Arica towards the distant snowy peaks of Coropuna and Solimana rising out of the blue haze

Cities as well: the first impressions of Paris, with the huge gold domes of Hotel des Invalides rising over the Seine. London's irresistible melancholy, the air heavy with two thousand years of history.

Or some combination of the two: can anyone have dreamed a more beautiful setting than La Antigua, Guatemala, with its ruined baroque churches overflowing with bougainvillea, its green volcanoes turning transluscent in the sunset, and its late wet-season night time flashes of lightning in the hills? A more timeless feeling than looking out from the orange-tree and fish-pond courtyards of La Alhambra in Grenada, Spain, to the Sierra Nevada and the Andalusian plain?

Those make nice pictures, but there are still other things that matter more. Achievements: for me, not the routine expected things like getting a degree or a job as a policy analyst, but occasional successes that somehow belong more in the real world -- a blog post or article appreciated by strangers; a tour to the Colca Canyon sold to a group of sceptical tourists; even something as insignificant as a goal that helps the team win the division 3 lunchtime indoor football match.

And of course, time spent with family and friends, shared experiences, especially if they're combined with some of the other life-enhancing things (food, wine, scenery, success, sport).

Finally, reminding myself of all these things, I hit upon the most and uniquely human experience of all: nostalgia.

Categories: development, Latin America

The Facts Strike Back for Chavez

There's nothing like a bit of cut and thrust with facts and figures to shake up your prejudices.

In a recent post I cited former economist to the Venezuelan national assembly, Francisco Rodriguez, as casting doubt on the achievements of the Hugo Chavez government, and even suggesting that his image of being oriented towards helping the poor is mostly a public relations coup.

However, I've since discovered a substantive riposte from Mark Weisbrot, economist at US progressive think tank Center for Economic and Policy Research. Weisbrot pulls apart the arguments of Rodriguez, showing how they make distinctly selective use of available data.

These are the specific claims from Rodriguez that Weisbrot disputes:

Inequality has increased under Chavez, with the Gini coefficient going from 0.44 in 200o to 0.48 in 2005

Weisbrot reveals this as cherry picking, with the two figures taken by Rodriguez from different data sources, and no good reason for these two years being chosen. In fact, when the available measures of inequality from various sources (UN Economic Commission for Latin America, the World Bank and Venezuela's National Statistics Institute) are seen over their full periods, there appears to be a decrease in inequality under Chavez. Weisbrot notes that by comparison the Gini index in the US has gone from 40.3 to 46.9 during 1980--2005, a large upward distribution of income.

Other countries have reduced poverty by two percentage points for every percentage point of GDP growth (as opposed to one point in Venezuela)

I did point out in my original post the Rodriguez hadn't named any of these countries. Weisbrot makes the point that if Venzuela had reduced poverty by two percent for every point of GDP growth, it would have completly eradicated poverty -- an implausible achievement in four years.

Chavez has not increased the proportion of government spending on health education and housing

Again, Rodriguez has been selective in his choice of indicators. Weisbrot questions why he only mentions central government spending when there have been large allocations from the National Development Fund run by PDVSA (the state oil company). And the social spending from central government has increased in absolute terms, from 8.2 percent of GDP in 1998 to 13.6 percent in 2006. Overall, social spending is now 20.9 percent of GDP, and in real per capita terms has increased by 314 percent in this period.

Certain indicators such as low birth weight, access to piped water, and number of dwellings with dirt floors have worsened under Chavez

More cherry picking. Showing the full range of social indicators, Weisbrot demonstrates that most have improved over the past few years, with a notable improvement in access to sanitation and a steady decline in infant mortality. Seen alongside the rest of the data, it's possible that the indictators cited by Rodriguez could be measurement anomalies.

There's no evidence that the Robinson literacy programme has had any effect

There's some discussion of the methodology used by Rodriguez to draw this conclusion. Weisbrot says he relies on a survey that wasn't designed to measure literacy. He concludes that there's not enough evidence either way.

Chavez's big spending and the rise in imports threatens to cause a balance of payments crisis

Weisbrot points out that while imports might be increasing, Venezuela still has a very significant balance of payments surplus of around 8% of GDP, which, if it were applied to the United States, would see a surplus f $1.1 trillion rather than their actual $739 billion deficit.

Weisbrot does accept a couple of the Rodriuguez criticisms as reasonable. For one, the exchange rate is over valued, subsidising imports and making non-oil exports too expensive. At 25 percent inflation is also too high, though Weisbrot notes that it was 40 percent when Chavez came to power, and 100 percent in 1996. Finally, there are shortages of basic foods, although Weisbrot sees no reason why Venezuela can't import plenty more, being a very long way from having a balance of payments crisis. He denies that Venezuela is in anything like the situation of previous Latin American governments (Alan Garcia's 80s regime et al) described in The Macroeconomics of Populism.

Weisbrot also argues that social progress would have been a lot better if it hadn't been for the economic crisis caused by the oil company's strike in 2003, at a time when it was controlled by the Venezuelan opposition. The statistical tables show this caused a blip in many indicators, including a temporary leap in poverty. Weisbrot concludes:

"While it is useful to discuss the imbalances in the Venezuelan economy and what might be done to correct them, there is little use in presenting such a grossly exaggerated picture of an economy as if it were on the brink of ruin, and pretending that Venezuela's poor have not benefited from the economy's most rapid economic expansion in decades, and from the government's large increases in social spending and programs."

Against the weight of evidence, it seems clear that Francisco Rodriguez has set out with a pre-formed conclusion about lack of progress under Chavez, and has set out to fit the evidence around that. The reasons may be ideological, or they may date from his personal frustrations in working with the Chavez government, disapproval of its methods, or a belief that the country is headed down the wrong track.

In any case, it's a reminder of how easy it is for basic facts and figures to be politicised. For me, with pre-existing scepticism towards Chavez based on his buffoonery, authoritarian tendencies, and clumsy attempts to interfere in other countries, it's all too easy to just accept claims like those of Rodriguez at face value.

Categories: development, Latin America

The Costs of War

Recently there's been a bit of attention given to Joseph Stiglitz's estimate that the war on Iraq has so far cost $3 trillion. New Zealand blogger No Right Turn has a short post considering the opportunity cost of that amount.

It's not necessarily a point to be made only in hindsight. I thought it was worth posting the text of a letter I wrote to the New Zealand Listener back in the early days of the war in 2003 (even before blogging), when it was possible to imagine a greatly more optimistic combination of cost and outcome:

In the leadup to the war on Iraq, while bad cops Bush and Rumsfeld itchily fingered their holsters, the good cops (Powell and Blair) tried to talk the rest of us round with dire warnings about the ‘clear and present danger’ posed by Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. The principal rationale for the unprecedented doctrine of the pre-emptive strike was based on vague but scary scenarios of such weapons exploding in the streets of Tel Aviv, New York or London.

Now, after the crushing military victory within 21 days, coverage alternates between chest-beating triumphalism and worries about how to address the chaos that has been engendered in Iraq. While the Americans have anounced they will unilaterally continue ‘weapons inspections’, this is presented as a mere afterthought. Who now remembers that the war was supposed to be about some kind of perverse form of self-defense?

Clearly, however, if Saddam did possess weapons of mass destruction, he did not have the capacity to deploy them in any meaningful way. In some of the debate around the war, it has been suggested that Saddam refrained from using chemical weapons against the advancing Coalition forces because that would have proved they were justified in invading in the first place. But if this crazed and brutal dictator cared enough about losing the moral high ground to refrain from using his WMD in last ditch defense, with nothing to lose, what makes us believe he would ever have used them aggressively, or even (probably traceably) supplied them to someone else?

Maybe this is churlish semantics, since Iraq has been liberated once and for all of a thuggish despot. Maybe that outweighs the possibly thousands of civilians killed or maimed, the unknown number of Iraqi conscript soldiers slaughtered, the irreparable damage to international law, the chaos, anarchy and looting. Quite plausibly, Iraq will be better off in the long term. And perhaps this was the real motivation all along. Bush, Blair and co. wanted to rid the world of a terrible scourge and better the lot of humanity. They just had to conjure up alternative, more self-interested arguments because they didn’t think everybody else would have the moral courage to accompany them in their venture.

But hang on a minute. If purging scourges of humanity and aiding oppressed peoples was their aim, shouldn’t they, in the spirit of good accountable government, have first conducted some decent cost-effectiveness studies? What would the $75-200 billion spent on the war on Iraq have achieved if used, say, to help address the AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa?

Lonely Planet Plagiarism

The guys over at Road Junky (see my bio) will be chortling over this. A writer for Lonely Planet called Thomas Kohnstam has admitted making up or plagiarising large chunks of the twelve books he has worked on. Worse still, he didn't even visit Colombia -- the subject of one of his publications, claiming that he 'didn't get paid enough' to go there . Kohnstam said:

"I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating - an intern in the Colombian Consulate.

"They don't pay enough for what they expect the authors to do."

Sure, so everything is about money these days, and freelance writers are exploited. But man, what has gone wrong with the world? For me and all the twentysomething wannabe Hemingways I met as a backpacker, scrounging around Latin America and jotting down things in a notebook was something we looked for excuses to keep doing as long as possible. The idea of actually getting paid to do so seemed like an impossible dream.

Anyone with a gig as writing for the Lonely Planet must surely have been a better writer, a more intrepid and knowledgeable traveller, and a more determined self-marketer than us, we assumed. What bitter irony to find that they were employing some clown who didn't even want the job.

To add insult to injury the article reports that: "Lonely Planet has conducted a review of all Mr Kohnstamm's guide books, but says it has failed to find any inaccuracies in them". One wonders whether the 'review' involved visiting the countries in question.

[and let's just try and ignore the extra little insult in the AAP article which twice refers to 'Columbia' -- I'm presuming here that they didn't publish a guide to a New York university].

Hugo Chavez -- Not Helping the Poor that Much?

Following on from the previous post about inequality, here's an interesting article in Foreign Policy by Francisco Rodriguez, chief economist to the Venezuelan National assembly from 2000-04. Rodriguez deconstructs the belief, prevalent among not only Hugo Chavez supporters but also his critics, that Chavez has redistributed resources to the poorest in Venezuelan society.
Certainly, there is a wide range of different opinions of Chavez and his government, which we might summarise as follows:

a) Chavez is a dictator who is buying support by redistributing the oil wealth. He will eventually make himself president for life, let all the terrorists camp out in his back yard and form some kind of nuclear alliance with Iran
b) Chavez is popular among many in Venezuela because he has used the oil price boom to establish promising though rather haphazard social programes for people who have always been marginalised. He's an annoying (though occasionally amusing) demagogue who has authoritarian tendencies and but has won his elections fair and square
c) Chavez is the reincarnation of Simon Bolivar and Che Guevara combined, a charismatic leader who is righting the wrongs of centuries and setting a model for 21st century socialism.

What supporters and opponents alike (I'm more or less category B) agree on is that Chavez has redistributed wealth and prioritised helping the poor. Yet this orthodoxy is precisely what is questioned by Francisco Rodriguez. Having worked closely with the Venezuelan adminstration, Rodriguez argues that the perception that Chavez has done a lot for the poor is mainly the product of good public relations campaigns.

Although poverty in Venezuela was reduced from 53 to 27 percent between 2003 and 2007, Rodriguez claims this is almost entirely due to rapid economic growth in the wake of the oil boom. The one percentage point reduction in poverty for every point of GDP growth is a poor return, says Rodriguez, compared with other (unnamed) developing countries which have managed two points of poverty reduction per point of GDP growth. In addition, he says:

The average share of the budget devoted to health, education, and housing under Chávez in his first eight years in office was 25.12 percent, essentially identical to the average share (25.08 percent) in the previous eight years. And it is lower today than it was in 1992, the last year in office of the "neoliberal" administration of Carlos Andrés Pérez -- the leader whom Chávez, then a lieutenant colonel in the Venezuelan army, tried to overthrow in a coup, purportedly on behalf of Venezuela's neglected poor majority.

The further statistics Rodriguez cites include:

-- the Gini coefficient (a way of measuring income inequality, the higher the worse) increased from 0.44 to 0.48 between 2000 and 2005
-- infant mortality has dropped, but at the same rate (3.3 percent per annum) as the previous nine years, and much less quickly than in Argentina, Chile and Mexico (5.2--5.5 percent per annum)
-- the percentage of underweight babies, percentage of people without access to running water, and percentage of people living in house with earthen floors all slightly increased between 1999--2006
-- the much vaunted Robinson literacy programme shows "little evidence [of having] had any statistically distinguishable effect on Venezuelan illiteracy"

The most notable policies of the Chavez administration, according to Rodriguez, have in fact been its nationalisations and expansion of state economic (rather than social) activities. These appear to be leading to a re-run of the 'macroeconomics of populism', a particularly Latin America affliction where expansionary government policies eventually lead to balance of payments problems, spiralling inflation, and a decline in real wages (Alan Garcia's 1985-90 mandate in Peru perhaps winning the prize for the most disastrous example of this cocktail).

His concluding paragraphs strike me as rather wise and, for those who've paid attention to any of my previous posts, run along similar lines to other conclusions I've favoured:

It would be foolhardy to claim that what Latin America must do to lift its population out of poverty is obvious. If there is a lesson to be learned from other countries' experiences, it is that successful development strategies are diverse and that what works in one place may not work elsewhere. Nonetheless, recent experiences in countries such as Brazil and Mexico, where programs skillfully designed to target the weakest groups in society have had a significant effect on their well-being, show that effective solutions are within the reach of pragmatic policymakers willing to implement them. It is the tenacity of these realists -- rather than the audacity of the idealists -- that holds the greatest promise for alleviating the plight of Latin America's poor.

Categories: development, Latin America

Thoughts for Food

Writing in Dissent Magazine, Thomas Pogge takes on the complex issue of international economic growth and inequality. His main aim is to take issue with the idea that 'first we've got to grow the cake before we share it out' and the assumption that the best way to reduce poverty is through all-out economic growth that will benefit all through trickle-down processes. Instead he suggests that more equitable economic growth may be of much greater benefit to the poorest, even if it's a little slower, at a very small opportunity cost to the richest.

Pogge's starting point is one of nifty dynamic graphs of international GDP per capita (at purchasing power parity) along the lines of those developed by and displayed on the
Gapminder website. This one was displayed in the March 2004 issue of the Economist as a piece of one-upmanship on market globalisation critics. Charted at country level, poorer countries have grown more slowly over the last twenty years than rich countries. However, when you account for each country's population (changing the size of the dots on the graph) , the slope of the trend is reversed, thanks to the success of China and India.

All very well, says Pogge. But this considers only one of the dimensions of inequality -- between countries. Also relevant is inequality within countries. Little can be inferred about the poverty-reducing effect of a country's growth in average wealth if all the extra income is going to the richest. For example, survey data indicates that the income of the bottom decile in the United States is not much more than that of the bottom decile in Hungary, and only half that of the bottom decile of Japan or Norway.

Pogge makes what I agree is the important point that the relative income share is also important to consider, because "many things money can buy are positional or competitive: political influence, for instance, and access to education and even health care depend not merely on how much money one has to spend but also on how much others are willing and able to spend on those same goods".

That is a point that can be disputed at an ideological level, and then we get into complicated debates about rewards and incentives. But even if we just stick to differences in absolute income levels, the situation is a lot more extreme when developing countries are considered. For example, the income of the poorest decile in Turkey is nearly three times that of Colombia's poorest (although the two countries have a similar GDP per capita at PPP), and the lowest decile in Colombia earns only 7.4% of the average national income. Even more strikingly, in Vietnam, which is only half as rich as Colombia, the poorest decile has an income more than twice as high as the poorest decile in Colombia.

Pogge goes on to consider China, the great poster child for development through maket globaisation. While he acknowledges that there have been large gains for Chinese, including the poorest, he wonders whether even greater reductions in poverty could have been possible with more equitable growth. Between 1990 and 2005, the national per capita Chinese income grew by 236 percent, but that of the bottom decile just 77 percent, while their relative share declined from 30 to 16 percent of the average. Had the relativities been retained, suggests Pogge, even at the expense of a couple of percentage points of growth per annum, the poorest 40 percent of Chinese would all be better off in absolute terms than they are today.

Finally, he considers inequality between human beings world wide. Here he suggests that China's success may have been at the expense of the global poor elsewhere. With only a limited amount of access possible to the still-protected markets of the rich and powerful nations, could China have crowded out the gains of other developing nations by winning the race to the bottom in terms of labor and environmental standards? It's a provocative thesis, but if valid, would be a caution against supposing that other nations can simply follow China's path.

Overall, comparing humans to other humans paints the most dramatic picture of all. Sticking to PPP terms, the poorest quintile of humanity controls just 0.4 percent of the world's wealth, while the richest 1 percent controls 31.6 percent. Doubling the wealth of the bottom two quintiles (40 percent) of the world's population would take just 1.5 percent of the wealth of the top 1 percent. Pogge concludes:

Most of the massive severe poverty persisting in the world today is avoidable through more equitable institutions that would entail minuscule opportunity costs for the affluent. It is for the sake of trivial economic gains that national and global elites are keeping billions of human beings in life-threatening poverty with all its attendant evils such as hunger and communicable diseases, child labor and prostitution, trafficking, and premature death. Considering this situation from a moral standpoint, we must now assess growth—both globally and within most countries—in terms of its effect on the economic position of the poor.

It's a good argument that helps cut through some of the ideological fog in all the contradictory statistics. But it still leaves the massive question of just how you do engineer economic growth with less inequality. If it requires 'more equitable institutions', what are these equitable institutions, and how should they work?

Modernisation, Shmodernisation

Excuse the potted summaries of my development studies lectures. They are part of my 'diary', which will contribute to a portion of my course work grade.

A couple of weeks into the lectures, we got to Modernization Theory, the starting point for any discussion of development theories. This comes from the period around the end of the Second World War, when there was a surge of interest in how the poor benighted masses of the world could improve their lives by becoming much more like us in the West.

On the one hand, getting the starving natives to the point of having a refrigerator and a car in the driveway would make them less susceptible to the Red Peril. On the other hand, if you were a communist, modernisation had to be part of the glorious dialectical march of history.

According to the standard view, modernisation happens along a number of different dimensions. To the uninitiated, a lot of this will look less like a theory than the set of assumptions we still go by most of the time.

Population -- high birth and death rates give way to a period of rapid population growth, then finally to a stabilising population with both birth and death rates low.

Economy -- subsistence agriculture with little specialisation and exchange through reciprocity eventually sees production removed from consumption, a high degree of specialisation, and exchange through money rather than reciprocity.

Society -- tribal societies where kinship networks dominate and social status is inherited give way to meritocractic societies based on the nuclear family and a secular, scientific education. Class becomes a key organising factor of society.

Politics -- tribal groups with local control and close association between political and religious leaders give way to the modern democractic state with mass participation in politics based on political parties, separation of church and state, and mass communication through the media.

Geography -- modernisation diffuses through space, with transport, trade and urban centres hastening the process of modernisaton and vice versa. The spread of modernisation can be measured by things like kms of roads, telephone connections, kids in school, and newspaper circulation (and nowadays mobile phones and internet connections).

Although we are about to learn about all the critiques of modernization theory and how it has been superceded by theories that are more sophisticated or diametrically opposed, much of it clearly still drives how we think about the world. For example, a lot of people might have had deep reservations about the likelihood of the neoconservative dream of turning Iraq into a 'modern, secular liberal democracy' and thereby 'transforming the Middle East'. More people still rejected the means by which it was to be achieved. But there was certainly a general sense that it was a desirable goal.

Joe Stiglitz and His Discontents

Friday evening we went to see Nobel prize winner, former Clinton adminstration and World Bank honcho and best selling author Jospeh Stiglitz 'chat' with NZ-domiciled economic journalist Rod Oram as part of Readers and Writers week at the Wellington International Festival.

In the course of the hour or so of discussion we got for the $25 entry fee, Stiglitz:

--reiterated that 'there needs to be a balance' between the responsibilities of markets and government. He cited his own work on information asymmetries as demonstrating why markets aren't always efficient, and pulled out what was no doubt a favoured quote that 'the reason why the invisible hand is invisible is that in many cases it isn't actually there' .

-- heaped special praise on the the Scandinavian countries as having effectively struck that balance and having succeeded through 'investing in their young people' and being prepared to pragmatically review and revise policies.

-- stressed that governments need to implement redistributive policies to compensate those who lose out under international trade and globalisation. He (to my moderate surprise) slightly favoured Obama to achieve this in the US, but said that 'the policy differences between the two [Democratic candidates] are much less than those with McCain'.

-- argued that central banks should not be restricted to narrow inflation-only targets, but should also have economic growth and employment as objectives. He suggested that former Federal Reserver chairman Alan Greenspan bore some of the blame for the current credit crisis, by encouraging people to take out variable-rate mortagages.

-- in response to the inevitable 'but is economic growth sustainable' audience question, agreed that better measures of economic wellbeing and progress than simple GDP need to be developed, factoring in environmental degradation, resource depletion and so forth (check out the work of Partha Dasgupta for what these might look like).

When asked about whether he preferred a cap-and-trade system or carbon tax, he said that the two were near enough to equivalent if emission credits are auctioned. Giving away the emissions allowances -- as is set to happen in New Zealand -- he thought would 'give scope for corruption'. Ideally, said Stigliz, there should be a fully international auction of emissons permits.

Stiglitz came across as the atchetype sensible progressive, spontaneuously applauded on occasions by the 1,500 or so right-on middle class Wellingtonians. With his friendly-bear demeanour and softly gruff tones, he reminded me of another maverick New England academic, philosopher Daniel Dennett. As was the case when I watched Dennett tear apart creationists in front of a group of atheist or agnostic philosophy students, I thought it might be more fun to see Stiglitz put his well-reasoned messages to a crowded town hall in rural Texas, or maybe Te Kuiti.

Development and Dependence

One of the recommended books to consult in our Development Studies course is a text of sorts called The Companion to Development Studies, edited by Vandan Desai and Robert Potter,

Heading straight for the bits on Latin America, I found confirmation that Eduardo Galeano's poetically fist-shaking The Open Veins of Latin America had its intellectual foundations in a body of work called dependency theory

As described in my review of Open Veins, Galeano describes an exploiting 'core', which dominates industrial production (and makes the decisions), and an exploited 'periphery', which provides raw materials and cheap labour. Core-periphery relations can exist between continents (eg, Europe--Latin America), between countries (eg, Brazil--Paraguay) and within countries (eg, Lima--Andean Peru)

Dependency theory originated with a group of Latin American economists who worked with the United Nations in the aftermath of World War 2 and came to present a peculiarly Latin American perspective on development. Dependency theory was notable in being the first body of thought on these issues that actually originated in the 'developing' world. It's easy to spot its origins in Marxism -- for many dependency theorists, the 'underdevelopment' of the third world periphery is a necessary correlation of the development of the rich countries. Exploitation is seen as inherent in the very nature of capitalism.

A brief glance through the short articles in Desai and Potter told me that dependency theory has been critiqued from several quarters. There have been technical criticisms from within Marxism, which made me glaze over a little even in the one-paragraph versions. There have also been arguments that dependency theory requires excessive ad hoc adjustment to fit the very diverse kinds of economic relations that exist at different places and times.

With a bit more reading, I'm likely to agree with the latter views. However, as I noted in the review, it doesn't need to be a grand theory, and you don't need to be a Marxist, to find Open Veins a compelling historical account of Latin America's economic and political history that strikes to the root of the continent's problems.

As also noted, the book ends in the mid-70s, amidst a dark wave of miltary dictatorships but before the numerous economic crises of the 80s and 90s. The controversies resulting from these events suggest that the debate about dependency theory is far from dead. As I read further, I expect to hear more about how, as colonialism has ended and local democracy has strengthened, the power relations of core and perpiphery have been perpetuated through mechanisms such as debt and trade rules. I might even try to contribute some such thoughts myself.

Categories: development, Latin America

History Marching On?

One of the advantages of two-hour lectures is that you get potted summaries of frighteningly dense academic texts, which you later recall as actually having read.

Tonight we were introduced to the work of two historians called M P Cowen and R W Shenton, who, in a work of apparently monumental difficulty, tease out the difference between what they call 'immanent' and 'intentional' development.

According to the authors, 'immanent development' is the organic, undirected, potentially chaotic process exemplified by the Industrial Revolution. It involves rapid technological change, massive urbanisation, and the overthrow of old values and institutions, destroying while it creates.

'Intentional development' is the intervention of governments and other institutions to control and direct development. It aims to slow down urbanisation through favouring rural development, and preserving some parts of existing customs and institutions. Most of what we think of as 'development projects', by government agencies and NGOs, would fall into this category.

It helps to learn that Cowen and Shenton are Marxists, disapproving of 'intentional development' as a reactionary impediment to the glorious march of history. Seen in this light, their characterisation of 'intentional development' sounds similar to the attitudes of magazine Spiked, whose contributors like Frank Furedi and Brendan O'Neill are cuttingly scornful of the concept of 'sustainable' development and lambast the 'eco-miserabilists' that are pessimistic about human progress.

Spiked writers are contemptuous of the patronising do-gooding of western agencies who set African villagers' sights on a donkey-powered well, rather than a modern reticulated water system. O'Neill has launched an attack on the practice of offsetting carbon emissions by discouraging third-world farmers from using energy-intensive technologies -- something he calls 'eco-enslavement'.

The description of intentional development also sounded to me like Alan Garcia's slogan of 'responsible change' with which he carved out his position in the 2006 Peruvian elections. But if you look closely, here the concept described by Cowen and Shenton is flipped on its head. In Garcia's case, the 'change' didn't refer to development, but to redistributive policies and more help for the poor. 'Responsible' referred to not trying to regulate and redistribute too much -- i.e. not doing anything radical that might frighten investors and financial markets.

This suggests that, since the late 1980s, the dynamic march of global capitalism has come to be seen as the orthodox state of affairs, and upholding it is in effect the conservative position.
The 'immanent', grassroots tendency in many countries is to seek stability and security, and to oppose or put conditions on the unsettling flux of capitalism. This is now seen as radical.

Garcia's actual behaviour in government has been rather different from promised, with less 'change' and rather more 'responsibility' to the business elites that the likes of La Republica columnist Humberto Campodónico claim are his taskmasters. He has declared certain major mining projects as 'in the national interest' and called those who oppose them 'old communists'.

Pondering these paradoxes led me to wonder whether there aren't two conflicting kinds of 'intentional development'. Sure, the NGOs are squirreling away, trying to promote productive rural communities, just as Cowen and Stenton say. But they're overshadowed by the alliance between business elites and government, which pushes more rapid economic transformation than would occur naturally.

There's a name for this -- corporatism. It's at the heart of what Noami Klein is critiquing (in a sometimes overblown, but broadly effective style) in her book The Shock Doctrine. The 'creative destruction' of unfettered capitalism might have originally been an 'immanent' process driven by new technologies and organic social changes. But as Klein and others have argued, in recent times it has often been imposed from the top down.

Why Do I Care?

One of the assignments in the Master of Development Studies programme is to keep a 'journal' of our own 'ideas on development theories and issues' You can imagine that I hardly greeted this task with too much trepidation, given that my amateur musings on trade, energy, poverty reduction, labour rights, economic growth, government policy etc have themselves formed a kind of intermittent journal over the last couple of years.

Indeed, it will be an excellent excuse to follow through with a number of ideas for posts that I had shelved or never started, as priorities such as work, other projects, and generally having a life have intruded.

The suggested starting point for our 'journals' is to bring it all back to our raison d'etre for being interested in development.

So here is my two cents' worth.

Those of us in the handful of 'first world' countries roughly defined by OECD membership are among the few materially luckiest people to have ever lived. About two hundred years ago, things started changing for our forebears in Northern Europe. Whether through the dynamism of the new industrial economies, rapacious exploitation of raw materials from recently 'discovered' colonies, or the unprecedentedly cheap energy delivered by fossil fuels, economic growth started to accelerate. This allowed the production and adoption of a range of new technologies that have literally transformed the world.

We've ended up with longer, healthier, more comfortable lives, and individual freedoms unthinkable even a couple of of generations ago.

Greater material wealth hardly brings utopia. There is some evidence that the contribution of wealth to happiness tops out at between $15,000--20,000 USD per capita. Humans seem to have an in-built status anxiety that means relative wealth differences create stress even when everyone is better off.

Nevertheless, you'd have to be quite perverse to wish yourself into a different place and time. Apart from a very, very few people who really want to live in mud huts, most people who completely reject the 'system' in which they were born and grew up, do so in bad faith. From a personal perspective, having the freedom to travel, and being able to afford effective laser eye surgery, are two things I remain eternally grateful for.

In my view, working out how the rest of the world can have the same opportunities is at least a very interesting puzzle. Ensuring that they do, has at least some moral weight.

There are other, more pragmatic reasons for supporting global development. Increasing prosperity is what writer Robert Wright calls a 'non-zero sum game'. People are just as naturally greedy and conniving when they're rich as when they're poor -- but when there are more riches to go around, there's less of an imperative to grab someone else's share. Greater prosperity gives people more time and space to learn to tame their more venal impulses. If we care about reducing the number of people getting shot or blown up, supporting sustainable material wellbeing is a necessary -- though probably not sufficient -- condition.

It also appears that there may be a tipping point of prosperity when societies begin to see the natural environment as something precious that needs to be cared for, rather than an adversary to be exploited. Again, material prosperity allows us to care about more than where the next meal is coming from.

That's the potted summary of my overall philosophy. My detailed views, and my obsessions and prejudices, mostly derive from my personal experiences living and travelling in Latin America.

Before I ever made it to the continent, I thought I knew something about its history and politics. It's hardly a surprise that my instintctive sympathies were firmly left-wing. I'd been inspired by seeing a film sympathetic to the Sandinista revolutionaries in Nicaragua, and stirred by stories of CIA conspiracies to undermine democratic progress at the behest of neocolonial corporations like United Fruit. On the other hand, reluctant readings of excerpts from the Economist had partially eroded any faith in romantically socialist alternatives.

I was aware that a common way of engaging in these countries -- and a good way to get to stay around -- was working in some kind of aid or development project. But the more I travelled, the more I wondered how I could offer 'assistance' to anyone. For a clumsy gringo with a bright backpack and not even much money, it seemed far more likely to be the other way around. The young guys manouvering dilapidated chicken buses around impossible mountain bends; the women handweaving elaborate and colourful textiles; the peasant farmers raising corn and chickens on difficult patches of land: all were far more capable than I of meeting life's practical challenges.

It's true that their were deep inequalities and horrible injustices on view. But I found that many of my preconceptions were undermined or turned on their head. Some of the charming, educated people that I met and were treated kindly by could probably be characterised as part of the 'oligarchy'. On the other hand, I felt it difficult to engage with the working people and campesinos, except occasionally after a bottle of aguardiente. The villains of some of my reading, the 'oppressive' police and military, were staffed by guys from the same working class, mestizo background as the workers and farmers. And I had to acknowledge that as a vulnerable lone traveller, it was sometimes a comfort to see them around.

I also began to see ways in which people's problems were in part due to simple things that they themselves could change.

Most people were eager to see tourism -- yet couldn't see that the tendency to harass, rip off and otherwise squeeze out every last penny from visitors was the quickest way to ensure they didn't stay around and spend more money. Worse was the tendency to behave the same way towards each other.

I was also surprised by the prevalence of nationalism. While it seems clear to an outsider that the ordinary people of Latin American countries have far more in common with each other than with their local elites, it was depressingly common to see people with unexamined hostility towards a neighbouring nation based on the territorial squabbles of a hundred years ago. Attitudes about race and ethnicity could charitably be described as unreconstructed.

After more time spent in Peru in particular, and study of its history, politics and culture, I started to better understand the underlying reasons for these things -- but continued to believe they could be different.

If I've ended up with any strong belief about development, it would be a kind of militant pragmatism. To take advantage of the potential of the modern economy, there are probably some sine qua nons relating to containing inflation and keeping a relatively stable currency. Beyond that, what works for a particular country will depend very much on that country's people, culture, history, and even physical geography.

I'm sceptical about the simplistic narratives that blame all Latin America's problems on outside exploitation. But I'm far more irritated by those neoliberals who would remake countries in the image of their textbook, based on highly ideologised theories, without any appreciation of the realities of individual societies, or even of their own countries' histories.

One thing I believe firmly is that the countries of Latin America -- and by extension other 'developing ' countries -- ought to be able to work out their own priorities and the mix of policies that will best meet the needs of their citizens.

At the same time, I would call into question any notion of some kind of Hegelian pathway to a 'state of development' that more or less resembles how we live. For all the difficulties of Latin America, there are many aspects of life there that are preferable to New Zealand.

Latin America retains many traditions, languages, skills and cultural memories that have been steamrolled over in many industrialised societies. People have much warmer and more regular contact with their families and neighbours, and those who have visited western countries are often horrified at the neglect sometimes suffered by elderly parents. Children may in my view be over-indulged, but Latin Americans would be rather shocked that what has most stirred New Zealanders to political action in the last couple of years has been defending the right to hit their kids.

Life is intense, exciting, passionate. Romance exists -- though gender politics are often fraught. Music and dancing are part of everyday life. Middle class people like my friends Hugo and Lizbeth have lives that are a little less comfortable and more chaotic than New Zealand suburbanites, but enjoy less commuting and better parties They get to eat a homecooked meal around the kitchen table at lunchtime.

It may sound like a pious cliche, but for me international development is about an exchange of experiences and perspectives, ideally for mutual benefit.

Categories: development, Latin America

The Andean Observer

It's taking a while, and involves more work than you might imagine, but I'm gradually putting together my website, the Andean Observer. The site has several purposes, reflected in its different sections:

1. To bring together my dilettante-ish collection of writings on Latin America, including travel stories, accounts of life in Peru, vaguely journalistic pieces of reporting and opinion, and retellings of the strange and spooky stories told by local people.

2. To be a showcase for the susbtantial collection of photos from Latin America, and also to use them as a basis for commenting on the strange and wonderful places, people and things that don't necessarily fit in the confines of a story or article.

3. In due course, to provide a section giving travel information and advice, in a similar, though perhaps slightly less irreverent, fashion as my 'guide to New Zealand'. This would include the kind of material I've been asked to provide on several occasions by people who've wanted some background before travelling to Latin America, which I've ended up squeezing into one or more lengthy emails.

4. To be a platform for new blogging, stories and photos when (let's rule out the 'if') I make it back to spend more time in Latin America.

Some people have commented to me that I can't really claim to be interested in 'Latin America' when Peru is far and away the dominant topic. That may be fair enough, but some of the stories and photos do (or will) touch on Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil and Guatemala, so I defend the description of the site as covering 'Peru and beyond'.

The site is still a terrible mess of bits and pieces -- there are dead links, fragments of text, photos missing or in the wrong place, unformatted screeds of text, and so forth. Most of the stories and articles aren't even up yet. It will be a while before I even get around to my intended task of sprucing up several of the more prominent stories to make them punchier and more interesting. It's also true that the site has a very, very basic design, and still retains aspects of the blogger.com template that was the original homepage (the site is hosted on my own server space, but the blog content is sent there through Blogger). I may try and make it a bit prettier at some stage, although that's not really my forté.

When the site close to being acceptably complete I will pester readers of this blog to check it out, and make a serious effort to attract wider attention through link exchanges and other methods. In the meantime, I'd welcome any constuctive comments on ways to make it more attractive and accessible -- for example, are the resizable thumbnails on the 'images' pages a good way of presenting these photos?

Also, far be it from me to solicit ad clicks, but if anyone were to visit the site and become interested enough in the products advertised in the Google AdSense spaces to follow those links, I would be credited with a few cents for each 'click-through', which would in turn go some tiny way towards making the whole effort sustainable.

The Academic Life

Well, I've finally gone and done it. Gone back to school, that is. From next week, I'll be formally enrolled in a Master of Development Studies at Victoria University here in Wellington.

Development studies is based in the department of geography, but is an 'interdiscplinary' programme, straying into economics, political science, environmental science, and others. This appeals to a dilettante like me. Professionally, it appears to be a pathway into all kinds of international do-goodery in the institutional or NGO sectors, as well as good background for further academic study or the kind of serious journalism that I'd love to do on a fulltime basis.

I understand from the teaching staff that students are expected to become especially interested in development issues in a particular region of the world. That's fine, since for me Latin America is a no-brainer. For those who are either interested or bored silly by the regular musings here on development issues in Latin America, it's hard to know yet whether there will be more or less blogging on these topics as the essays and assignments cut in.

In any case, I've done the natural thing for someone with an obsessive interest in Latin American issues -- pay large sums of money to carry on reading and writing about them.

No, wait...

The downside is that with the need to work a little less to fit in the study, finance may not permit the yearly visit to South America, meaning that I risk losing some of my personal connections with the place. The upside is that when I do make it back, there, I'll have sound academic reasons for staying around for a while.

On the Road, Irreverently

Road Junky is a web site aimed at travellers and adventurers -- wannabe and otherwise, which has the singular aim of not being the Lonely Planet.

It's a mixture of travel stories, best and worst lists, written and visual dispatches, and destination guides. The latter are described as 'irreverent', skipping all the long list of hostels and eateries from the Lonely Planet but touching on themes that are too sensitive for the latter publication -- such as romance and drugs.

The content ranges from somewhat sophomore to gonzo-like brilliance. Stumbling across it by chance, I liked some of the material, and took the liberty of sending them some of my own stories.

The reply suggested that I write a guide to New Zealand, which I've now gone ahead and done (one of the reasons for being a little quiet in blogland of late). It isn't as amusing and edgy as some of the stuff on there, but hopefully will pass muster.

I understand they're putting my 'guide' up within the next month. If possible, I may also eventually serialise some of it here.

Update: my 'guide to New Zealand' is now up on the home page at Road Junky.

Democracy Under All Circumstances?

A very interesting piece in the Economist reports the results of the Latinobarómetro survey, a five-yearly study by a Santiago-based nonprofit research group of Latin Americans' attitudes of to politics and economics.

I haven't had a chance to properly check out the Latinbarometro website itself and some of their links seem to be dead ends, so I'm relying on the Economist's summary. The 2007 survey involved face-to-face interviews with 20,212 people by local opinion-research companies in 18 countries. That doesn't seem very many, and I wonder whether the full diversity of views in, say, Brazil is really captured by a sample of a couple of thousand people.

Nevertheless, the beauty of this survey is that it is repeated regularly, so it shows changes in attitudes over time.

There's a fair spread of views on politics. The countries that most agree with the statement that 'democracy is preferable to any other type of government' are stable, moderate Costa Rica and Urugay. But also high up are Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. The Economist interprets this as reflecting the rise to power in these countries of openly leftist governments that have made a prominent issue of representing previously excluded groups.

In countries with orthodox market economies like Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Peru, the proportion of people favouring democracy is lower, and has actually declined in recent years.

The proportion of people who believe that 'in certain circumstances an authoritarian government can be preferable to a democratic one' is also higher in Peru and Chile (around 20 percent) than in many other countries.

Least likely of all to favour democracy and most amenable to authoritarian role are the Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, along with Paraguay. These are among the poorest and most corrupt countries in the region, and the survey results likely reflect despair at the weakness of the state in performing its basic functions. However, there are incresingly favourable attitudes towards democracy in Nicaragua, another country to recently elect an openly leftist leader (Sandinista throwback Daniel Ortega).

For anybody who has followed my previous comments about deep frustration in Peru with the pace of change and the fragility of democracy there, these are borne out by the survey findings
Since 1996, Peru has seen a big drop in people preferring democracy (63 to 47 percent), and an increase in those who support authoritarian rule (from 13 to 22 percent). Peruvians are also second-to-least likely to be satisfied with how democracy is working in their country (ahead of only Paraguay). Less than 20 percent were 'satisfied' or 'very satisfied', down from 30 percent in 1996.

That was in the dark days of the authoritarian rule of the now-despised Fujimori. Back then, a return to full democracy would have appeared to promise much. The current scepticism may well reflect just how little 'responsible change' the Peruvian electorate feels it has seen in the intervening years.

The Myth of Bloated Bureaucracy

A really interesting new web site is Entitleme. The site provides a calculator that allows you to compare the amount of tax you pay in New Zealand and Australia at various income levels, factoring in any rebates and tax credits.

Also interesting are the pie graphs in the bottom part of the page, which show how those tax dollars are spent by the government. Take a look at the sliver that takes up 4.3% of the New Zealand pie called 'core government services'. This is the name for all the ministries and departments that make up what used to be called 'the public service', and I believe also includes prisons.

More on them in a minute, but first, consider the size of the pie itself. The proportion of the country's gross domestic product taken up by government taxation and spending is a source of considerable angst for many neoliberal pundits. In New Zealand, it is between 35 and 40 percent, depending on who you believe. This is about the OECD average. Nevertheless, Business Roundtable think pieces and op-eds from hawkish economicsts go to considerable lengths to argue that it's too high. Some have suggested that there should be an agreed, or even legislated, limit on the government's share of GDP -- given wholesale acceptance of Milton Friedman's pronouncement that most of what the government does is a dead loss to productivity.

These pundits often salt their economic jargon with talk about 'bloated bureaucracy', and place a lot of emphasis on the increase in the number of public servants under the current government. They give the impression that the salaries of chaps in ties take up a significant chunk of taxpayers dollars. A common anecdote is about the increase in central Wellington office rents over the last couple of years, due to demand from the various ministries. Some even go so far as to blame the country's macroeconomic ills on the hordes of 'pdf pushers' spilling out of offices along Molesworth St and The Terrace, claiming that their high wages are creating inflation and pushing up interest rates.

It may therefore come as a surprise that, as a burden on the country's economy and taxpayers, the cost of the public service almost fails to register.

A look at the Entitleme pie confirms this. New Zealand's GDP is about $160 billion NZD. Let's go with the worst case scenario and take the government's share of that to be around 40 percent -- $64 billion. The amount spent on 'core government services' (bureaucracy) is therefore 4.3 percent of this number -- about $2.5 billion.

That still sounds like quite a lot. Surely if you slashed the bureaucracy a bit, it would ease the deadweight burden on the economy? Ok. Let's say we entirely eliminate every bureaucrat, every government job, every department, ministry, commission and quango. This would free up the same amount of money as if New Zealand's GDP grew by 3 percent, rather than 2 percent, for just one year.

Yes, just one extra good year of dairy prices and tourism would create enough extra money to compensate for the wages of all 40,000 pdf pushers who squirrel away generating paper, or whatever it is they do.

What say you, the hardworking productive taxpayer, decide not to be so generous, and insist on firing the lot of them. Wouldn't that bulk up the hip pocket? Well, if you divide that $2.5 billion among New Zealand's 2.1 million taxpayers, there would be enough for an average tax cut of about $20 a week. At current prices that would get you maybe two-and-a-half beers.

Of course, there would be nobody to keep a record of how much tax you had paid, let alone check whether it was the right amount or what it had been spent on. And if you were to write a letter demanding answers on any of these issues, be prepared for the $120 'processing fee' that, say, Electorate Communications Consultancy Services would charge you for a standard answer (I'm basing the amount on what it costs foreigners to apply for a New Zealand visa).

Moral of the story, if there is one? Go ahead and believe, based on evidence or simple prejudice, that there are too many government bureaucats, and that they are overpaid and unproductive. Bemoan the fact that they are raising prices for office space in a few Wellington streets that could better used by, um, firms of lawyers and accountants. But don't take seriously the idea that they are somehow sucking up large portions of the country's wealth.

South Island Summer

Here are some more photos from Christmas and New Year in Canterbury. The majority are thanks to my girlfriend Paola and my sister Cecilia (who has a flash camera with fancy lenses). At this time of the year, stringing together a coherent series of words just seems a bridge too far, but I have a new stack of blog posts lined up for the near future.

As always, click to enlarge.

Playing frisbee, Motunau beach, North Canterbury.


Dozens of roses, Christchurch botanic gardens.


Butterfly on mountain daisy, near Lake Coleridge, Canterbury high country.

Lake Coleridge, Canterbury high country (featuring my Mum and Dad).


Sunset over Motunau Beach, North Canterbury.

Dolphin's Smile

This is the only half-decent shot I managed to get of the Hector's dolphins in Akaroa harbour. There were at least four or five of them around the boat, dipping and skimming between the waves for about half an hour.

So why didn't I get a better picture?

Because, as soon as they appeared and looked interested, us tourists were eagerly scrambling off the boat to swim alongside the world's smallest and rarest dolphins.

Despite the rarity of their species, these little dolphins are not hard to find in waters around Banks Peninsula, and after what must must be seemingly endless boatloads of gawping visitors, are are still curious enough to take an interest and indlulge in a bit of frolicking.

The scenario is that a boatload of tourists, already wrapped up in their hired wetsuits, heads down the long, narrow Akaroa harbour looking for the dolphins. Once a pair or group of four are spotted, you have to wait to see whether the dolphins are interested in 'playing' It's against environmental ethics -- and the permit of the tour company -- to bother dolphins that are engaged in some other activity and that don't first approach the boat.

Fortunately, the first group of four that we encountered began to circle our vessel, darting back and forth in the classic signs of curiosity. Our dolphin guide explained that once off the boat we had to form a loose circle. The dolphins come close to check you out, using their echolocation to find out what you are. Group too close together, and to the dolphins you appear as a twenty-legged monster. Spread further apart, and they can recognise you as individual humans.

There was a freshening northeasterly in Akaroa harbour, and as we got closer to the heads the onshore wind was stirring up the sea. It was the first time I'd worn a wetsuit and it was slightly disconcerting. The buoyancy of the suit makes it easier to stay afloat, but throws you off balance when trying to swim. Your legs are pushed upward, making you feel like you're being tipped forward and downwards.

As we treaded water and tried to stay stable in the choppy waves, the handful of people on the boat were shouting out where the dolphins were as they zipped in and out of our group. "Right behind you!" "There! Just by your left shoulder!". Of course, with about ten people in the water, it was hard to know exactly whom the dolphin was 'right behind'. I was constantly swivelling around to catch a glimpse of a dolphin fin, slicing through the waves

I'm not confident with the mask and snorkel, and the waves were making it difficult to use them, so I had to stay above the water. Some of the others managed to get an underwater view. The closest the dolphins came to me was zipping by about three or four metres away. It was still a pretty unique and inspiring encounter with the natural world.

Categories: dolphins, Akaroa, New Zealand

The Health of Nations

A very interesting recent publication is the OECD's Health at a Glance, a summation of measurements and indicators of health status for the 30 OECD member countries.

There will be reliability and comparability issues with some of the statistics provided in the report. Generally, the high-level outcome data such as life expectancy should be accurate (although there are quibbles about things like the definition of a live birth). The detailed information such as pay rates of doctors and items of equipment should probably be taken more lightly. It's evident just by looking at these details for New Zealand that the OECD has in some cases obtained only partial information or used unreliable sources.

The publication provides demographic and economic data for context. As we know, and periodically get angsty about, New Zealand is 22nd out of 30 in GDP per capita. We're now outstripped by Spain, and just hovering above Greece. In many respects, the indicators in the report reflect this status, and place us alongside countries like the Czech Republic and Korea. New Zealand health expenditure per capita is the 10th lowest in the OECD.

Despite this, our overall life expectancy is the 11th highest in the OECD. For life expectancy at age 65, we're 11th for females and 5th for males.

This relatively good health does not appear to be due to healthy living or judicious behaviours. We're about in the middle for tobacco and alcohol consumption, but right near the bottom for several other measurements. We're 10th worst for children's dental health, 9th worst for suicide, 8th worst for deaths from road accidents, and 6th worst for obesity.

The areas we do best may surprise some people. While New Zealanders are used to moaning about our health system 'going downhill', it actually appears to do better than average.

In 30-day mortality after hospital admission for a heart attack, New Zealand is number 1. We don't do so well on the same indicator for stroke, where we are 20th. A couple of clinical people I've talked to have expressed skepticism about these results, suggesting that we may not do either as well or as badly as depicted. Australia mirrors us closely, coming 2nd for heart attack and 19th for stroke, so there may be mesurement or other issues confounding the data.

Elsewhere, our relative five-year survival rate for colorectal cancer is 4th (out of only 12 countries that can measure it) and 3rd out of 19 for cervical cancer. For breast cancer survival, New Zealand is at the OECD average, but has made the biggest improvement of any country since the last measurement period

Another of the things measured is 'perception of health status', which is the percentage of adults who report being in good health. Where do you think New Zealand would come here? Yes, we're Number 1*.

The amusing thing is that this range of dry statistics more or less reconstructs the popular stereotypes. There's evidence that the Kiwi 'she'll be right' attitude persists -- people are generally positive about their health despite not living officially very healthy lifestyles. They also like to grumble about a health system that, in its traditional role of responding to acute illness, does well by international standards.

It's interesting to look at how other countries do on the various indicators. As expected, the United States comes out near the top on some (overall expenditure and resources, some clinical outcomes) and very low down for others (obesity, road accidents, low infant birth weight, and overall life expectancy). Like New Zealand, it has positive perceptions of health status. It also has a low suicide rate and is one of five countries (along with New Zealand, Iceland, Turkey and Mexico) to have a fertility rate above two children per woman.

Another interesting case is Japan, which has the highest life expectancy of all but comes right at the bottom for perceptions of health, fertility, and suicide. People with a knowledge of Japan may have some comment on those statistics.

For some indicators, the English-speaking countries cluster together. The highest mortality rates for asthma are, in order, the UK, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and the US. I'm not sure that anyone fully understands why this is. For obesity, the UK, US, Australia and New Zealand are four of the bottom six. The other two are Mexico and Greece, which is somewhat surprising.

One thing that interested me was the data on smoking rates. The two more developed countries that have the highest rates of smoking are Greece and the Netherlands. These countries do have higher rates of lung cancer, but are in the middle on overall life expectancy. They are also two of the countries with the lowest suicide rates. Make of that what you will.

The pattern that appears most apparent, however, is that the 'fringe' OECD countries with a GDP per capita between $10,000 and $20,000 are grouped near the bottom on many of the indicators. Up to a certain point, wealth appears to matter to health status. Past about $25,000 per capita, however, it doesn't seem to make much difference.

* As explained in the report, there are comparability issues between NZ, the US, Australia and Canada, and the other countries, but even so New Zealand is top among this group.