Category Archives: Not Europe

Africa (and Aid): Not Dead Yet

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Dambisa Moyo  is one of Time’s 100 most influential people alongside the women of The View and ahead of Vladimir Putin (influential last year.  This year, meh).  She continues to attract attention and stir acrimonious debate.  But one thing her critics and supporters agree about is that Africa is in a mess.   

I’ve just finished a book (free online, for a bit) that paints a more positive picture.  It is true that the region’s performance in terms of GDP per capita has been pretty dismal –many countries are as poor as economies in Medieval Europe.  But that’s a pretty narrow measure of success or failure.  If you look at measures of health, or education, or civil and political rights, Africa has seen real progress.  Even as parts of the continent are mired in civil war and famine, the average African born today is far more likely to survive childhood, to go to school and to have some modicum of civil and political rights than their parents or grandparents.  Progress in the quality of life has continued at a historically unprecedented pace in large parts of the continent. 

The book discusses how economic stagnation and broader development have coexisted even over the long term –a subject for a later post.  Regardless, these measures of broader success suggest that it is premature to write off the region as a failure –and perhaps even to declare the death of aid.

Health Care Reform: A Bull in China’s Apothecary Shop?

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As the healthcare debate continues raging in the US, universally covered Europeans look on smugly from the sidelines.  (Well, not all Europeans.    Tim Worstall argues that high US health spending is the successful application of the will of the market.) 

Meanwhile, President Obama has been telling his staff to read Atul Gawande on the weak relationship between spending and the quality of health provision across the US.  Gawande argues that high costs are driven by unnecessary treatment rather than better care. 

There’s a similar story to tell across the Pacific.  In the 1970s, China had a cooperative medical system that provided coverage to 90 percent of the rural population.  A series of reforms since then have introduced fee for service and health insurance schemes.  These reforms have increased costs, but it is hard to see much impact on improved levels of health.  Per capita health spending increased seven-fold in rural areas over the period 1990-2002, but rates of progress in health outcomes have dramatically slowed. 

That’s in part because the quality of care provided can be pretty grim, not least because of the incentives of the fee for service model.  Over-prescription of drugs is a particularly big problem.  In 1999, a study of eight village clinics in Chongquing and Gansu provinces found less than 0.06% of prescriptions handed out were deemed reasonable by the doctors in the survey team.  

China isn’t the United States, of course.  But it does provide stark evidence that health care reform can have a dramatic impact on the efficiency of provision –for good or ill.

Senegal: Islam, democracy, sexy

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Not Iran this time!

I’ve been in Senegal the last couple of weeks. And, you know? Senegal is (1) 90% Muslim, and (2) a vibrant democracy.

The opposition won the last couple of elections. The press is free — sometimes obnoxiously so. Human rights violations are relatively rare. (Nonexistent, really, by African standards.) Senegal has never had a military dictatorship, a civil war, or a coup. Okay, the first couple of Presidents ruled for twenty years each, but they seem to be past that — the current President won a free and fair election. He’s also term limited, and everyone is already looking forward to a gloriously democratic free-for-all in a couple of years when he steps down.

I don’t want to overstate here. Senegal has all the usual African problems. It’s desperately poor. About a third of the population is still illiterate. There’s spectacular corruption. The President is clearly grooming his son for the succession; this involves putting Junior in the path of some rather large business opportunities. And while Senegal is a democracy, I might hesitate to call it a fully functional liberal democracy. Media that criticize the President too sharply may get hassled or shut down, government money is poured out like water to win elections, and many Ministers and members of Parliament are pretty openly for sale.

On the other-other hand, the opposition won the midterm elections last year, sweeping the President’s party out of almost every local government. To his obvious irritation and dismay. You don’t see that happening in Turkmenistan or Belarus.

So why doesn’t Senegal get any respect? Continue reading →

Random thoughts on returning from French Africa

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If you’re a human being who speaks French, you’re more likely to be African than European. La Francophonie’s demographic center of gravity is now somewhere around Bamako, Mali.

If you’re a human being who is literate in French — say, at a high school graduate level — you’re probably European. But not for much longer. Demographic growth plus the slow-but-steady rise of literacy rates in most of Africa means that by the next decade, most literate Francophones will be African too.
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I’d rather be wrong, so wrong

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about Iran.

via Andrew Sullivan — who, for his work this past week, shall be forgiven much — comes Daniel Larison, fretting about regime collapse and separatist movements in Iran. Those strike me as deeply improbable. Iran is not a failed or even a particularly weak state; if the current incumbents are forced out of power, others will step in. And most of Iran’s minorities are, if not exactly content, uninterested in separatism.

Note that unlike most of its neighbors — Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey — Iran has never had a serious separatist threat. The largest minority, the Azeris, is very well integrated by regional standards; they fought and died in the Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War at the same rate as ethnic Persians, and Supreme leader Khameini is half Azeri. The Bush administration spent several years fishing in the waters of ethnic separatism, without much effect that anyone has been able to see.

But I think it’s going to be moot, because I don’t think Iran’s regime is going down.

Continue reading →

Iran: Double down

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Yesterday the Supreme Leader of Iran doubled down, declaring his support for President Ahmedinejad and telling the protestors it would be their own damn fault if anything happened. Today saw riots and more bloodshed.

Well: three days ago I said President Ahmedinejad would not lose. Today I’ll go a step further and add a couple more predictions.

1) The men with guns will stay loyal. This gets complicated, because there are a lot of different men with guns. There are the Teheran cops; the basiji, who are street thugs employed by the government; the Revolutionary Guards; the army.

But at the end of the day, only those last two matter. If the basiji break and run and the cops switch sides, but the army and the Guards stay obedient, the government still wins. It wins ugly, but it wins.

Note that Ahmedinejad is a veteran of the Republican Guards, while Khameini is the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. Note further that both have broad popular support — maybe not majority, but broad. Millions of Iranians think that Ahmadinejad is the white knight of the people, while millions more (not necessarily the same people, mind) think that Khameini has a special relationship with God. Note finally that while Ahmadinejad may be obnoxious, he’s nobody’s fool. The Supreme Leader’s speech would not have happened if either man was nervous about the armed forces.

2) There won’t be a civil war. (Or at least, there won’t be because of these protests.) A lot of people may get hurt and killed, and some protestors may take up weapons. But it won’t lead to anything but bloodshed and repression. You can’t have a civil war when one side has all the guns.

– I’m going out on a limb to say what won’t happen. But I’m not brave enough to even guess at what will happen. Who the hell knows? Iran is a very opaque country. In my last post I used various popular protests in other countries for comparison. But there really isn’t a good comparandum for this. The closest would be the protests of late-period Communism: East Germany, Romania, Tienanmen Square. But in East Germany, conflict was avoided because the Politburo deposed Honecker; here it’s as if the Politburo had confirmed him in office, while at least a third of the country still believed fervently in Communism. (That’s a thing to keep in mind in Iran: both sides have a big chunk of the general population firmly behind them.) In Romania, Ceausescu had drifted far out of touch with the nation, and his regime was violently loathed by almost everyone; neither of those things is true of Iran.

The closest comparison seems to be China. But even that’s not very close. The Tienanmen protestors lacked leadership and were relatively mild compared to the Iranians. And while they had plenty of support in Beijing, they didn’t have much in the rest of the country. So while the suppression of Tienanmen was brutal, it was also over quickly; once the government cracked down, it was all over in a couple of days. That might not be the case in Iran.

But, really, who the hell knows. I guess we’ll see.

Why Ahmadinejad will win

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We’ve seen a number of regimes fall because of popular protests: Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, yadda yadda. We’ve also seen several that have not fallen: Burma, Armenia, Greece. Which one does Iran more resemble? Or, to put it another way, what are the common factors?

Here’s a first attempt at classification. Political scientists and (especially) people who know more about Iran are encouraged to chime in.

Factors that make a regime vulnerable

In ascending order:

1) The regime is widely hated. Surprisingly, this seems not to be a highly correlated variable. Some of the survivor regimes were almost universally loathed by their people (Burma) while some governments that still enjoyed some popular support managed to collapse anyway (Ukraine).

Relevance to Iran: Low. Many people dislike the current government, but not many actually hate it.
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