Digital Archive....

Unintended consequences of food aid Chris Blattman Give cash or food? Both types of transfers increase the demand for normal goods, but only in-kind transfers also increase supply. Hence, in-kind transfers should lead to lower prices than cash transfers, which helps consumers at the expense of local producers. We test and confirm this prediction using a program in Mexico that randomly assigned villages to receive boxes of food (trucked into the village), equivalently-valued cash transfers, or no transfers. The pecuniary benefit to consumers of in-kind transfers, relative to cash transfers, equals 11% of the direct transfer. A new paper . Not surprising, but never quite proven. Or quantified.   Sent with Reeder  

Changing nature of aid Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk In the future we are likely to see a shift in development co-operation, which could be a welcome change for development policy The distribution of poor people in the world has changed . The increase in the national income in populous countries such as China, India and Brazil means that the majority of the world's poor people now live in middle-income countries. International development policy is still coming to terms with what that means. Particularly with whether or not we still need to bother with providing aid to countries like India . The argument is that if these countries have a large enough economy to graduate from the low-income development category and sustain nuclear programmes, then they do not need development assistance from countries like the UK, which face their own deficit issues. It would appear aid is a growing irrelevance in these countries. To para...

Zimbabwe introduces cash transfer scheme Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk Education assistance and child protection and cash transfers at core of national action plan for orphans and vulnerable children Zimbabwe has launched a $75m plan to protect orphans and vulnerable children over the next three years. The money will come from the Zimbabwean government and donors, including the UK, the European Commission and the UN children's agency, Unicef. Some $45m of the money for a child protection fund has been raised from donors, leaving a $30m shortfall that will need to be covered before full national coverage can be ensured. The scheme is part of a national action plan for orphans and vulnerable children that involves education assistance, child protection and cash transfers to the poorest families. Cash transfers have been tried with some success in Brazil, Mexico and South Africa. Zimbabwe is the latest country to adopt th...

To Spend Out, or Not To Spend Out? What Every Foundation Should Ask Itself SSIR Opinion & Analysis To spend out, or not to spend out, that is the question for foundations. Or, at least, that should be the question. While we at the Institute for Philanthropy are not advocates of one answer or the other, we believe it s beneficial for foundations to have this debate. Currently, there are very few foundations in the US and the UK that choose to spend down their endowments within a fixed time frame, as opposed to maintaining them in perpetuity. In the US, it is of course mandatory for foundations to pay out 5 percent of their endowments each year, and in the UK there has been much advocacy—so far resisted by the nation's lawmakers—for the introduction of a similar requirement. What this implies is that, in both jurisdictions, there is a keen sense that there should be an onus on foundations to make grants—that there should be an impetus towards socia...

Infographic: Kenya Mobile Subscribers, Penetration & Internet White African The research team at the iHub put together some stats on mobile numbers in Kenya. A special nod to Leo Mutuku for gathering it all from so many sources, and to Patrick Munyi for creating this cool visualization of it. Check out the iHub blog post to read the rest. Look for more infographics on the other East African countries soon. Sent with Reeder  

"Beware the Wrong Lessons from Poverty and Income Data" Economist's View Jeff Madrick: Beware the Wrong Lessons from Poverty and Income Data, by Jeff Madrick : ...The poverty data released by the Census Bureau last week may well be the straw that broke the camel's back — the camel being those deliberately blind people who can't seem to acknowledge that most Americans are doing poorly. Average Americans should not be the ones who have to shoulder the burden of balancing the budget, even if it needed balancing soon. The poverty rate is now as high as it was during the war on poverty of the 1960s — about 15 percent. The Census also revealed that median household income went nowhere under George W. Bush and is now down to its lowest level since 1997, essentially before the Clinton boom. Even more deplorable, the young in America have been hit hardest. Economists at Northeastern University have been showing for years how low wage...

Run your own race Seth's Blog The rear view mirror is one of the most effective motivational tools ever created. There's no doubt that many people speed up in the face of competition. We ask, "how'd the rest of the class do?" We listen for someone breathing down our necks. And we discover that competition sometimes brings out our best. There's a downside, though. Years ago, during my last long-distance swim (across Long Island Sound... cold water, jellyfish, the whole nine yards), the competitiveness was pretty thick. On the boat to the starting line, there were hundreds of swimmers, stretching, bragging, prancing and working themselves up. By the time we hit the water, everyone was swimming someone else's race. The start was an explosion of ego and adrenaline. Twenty minutes later, half the field was exhausted, with three hours left to go. If you're going to count on the competition to bring out your best work, you'v...

Three Famines: Starvation and Politics by Thomas Keneally – review Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk The shocking truth about the most avoidable of disasters Witnessing famine comes as a visceral shock – the slow and silent evisceration of society, family and the human body itself. The Russian sociologist Pitrim Sorokin, survivor of the famine of the early 1920s in his home country, wrote in Man and Society in Calamity (1946) of starvation reducing man to "a naked animal upon the naked earth". His experience was of a communist famine, in which professors starved alongside peasants. More common is famine that singles out the poor. The economist and philosopher Amartya Sen, who lived through the 1943 Bengal famine as a young member of a prominent family that fed the destitute, opened his seminal book Poverty and Famines (1981) with the observation that famine is the phenomenon of some people not having enough food to ea...