- The Foreign and Commonwealth Office is 0.4% of total UK government spending. In an age of globalisation, how is it possible to invest so little in your primary vehicle for dealing with other governmental and intergovernmental actors?
- 85% of basic services in Southern Sudan are provided by NGOs (source: anonymous donor). Not only is it difficult to know where to point the finger on this one, it’s difficult to know whose finger would be doing the pointing. Certainly not mine.
- Remittances to Haiti were 19% of GDP in 2002 but rose to 50% of GDP in 2008. Take a barely-there legal economy, factor in the financial crisis, and things don’t look great for the reconstruction. I’m sure the US will take things in hand though.
- Congo (Kinshasa) would be screwed if people were allowed to live where they wanted, so it’s a good thing freedom of movement isn’t a human right. Haiti was pretty ropey even before the earthquake, but it’s looking pretty good for Iraq.
Posts Tagged: haiti
25
Jan 10
Facts both Astonishing and Disturbing
22
Jan 10
Marshall, unplanned
As thunder follows lightning, so calls for a “Marshall Plan” follow major disasters. It’s the symptom of a global economic discourse still in thrall to the promise of the immediate post-WW2 period, when we’d seen off Great Evil and were pretty confident that economics as a scientific enterprise that could guarantee results.
It turned out that there were a few more evils to come and that economics was embarrassingly low on scientific rigour; fast forward to economic collapse models, but the Marshall Plan remains inviolate. The Marshall Plan worked! and so calls for a Marshall Plan are, at root, calls for something that works.
Unfortunately this is the equivalent of porn for policy makers – long on skin but short on content, something that everybody can hang their own particular fantasies on. Calls for a Marshall Plan for [insert country name here] tends to come in three flavours:
a. Deliberately vague rhetoric.
b. Historically illiterate rhetoric.
c. Hilariously transparent rhetoric to ensure that funding will be channeled through the speaker’s own bureaucracy and/or replicate the speaker’s own institutional structures.
I tend to give credence to De Long and Eichengreen’s view that the Marshall Plan is best seen as a shot in the arm to recovery processes that were already underway in postwar Europe, rather than the genesis of that recovery. In this light, the idea of a Marshall Plan for Haiti makes no sense, because the various institutions aren’t in place to actually recover.