Digital Archive....

'A Serious Warning That Consumers May Be Tightening Their Belts' Economist's View Dean Baker issues a warning: Consumer Confidence Index (the one that matters) Declines : The Conference Board's  index of consumer confidence  fell in March. What is noteworthy for those following the economy is that the current conditions index dropped by 3.5 points to 57.9. This component is the one that actually tracks current consumption reasonably closely... The recent drop in the current conditions index ... should be taken as a serious warning that consumers may be tightening their belts. That would not be a surprising response to the ending of the payroll tax cut, plus some amount of layoffs and cutbacks associated with the sequester. This is just one report among many, but it does suggest that the recovery optimists singing about having finally turned the corner may be wrong. [For evidence pointing in the othe...

Ten Years of Performance Measurement SSIR Opinion & Analysis By Matthew Forti This is part of a series of reflective posts by regular Stanford Social Innovation Review bloggers in honor of SSIR 's 10th anniversary. In my December 2012 entry recapping the year in performance measurement, I shared two studies that suggest nonprofits and funders continue to struggle with the kind of measurement that drives continuous improvement. But viewed over a longer time period, I'd argue that the social sector has made some pretty impressive gains in this area. So in honor of SSIR's anniversary, let's raise a glass to celebrate five improvements in performance measurement during the last 10 years: 1. From overhead to outcomes. Prevailing wisdom used to be that the best way to judge the efficiency of nonprofits was by looking at the proportion of their budgets that they spent on overhead. Today, websites such as GiveWell and Coaliti...

A long way to go Baobab IT HAS been a happier place since Joyce Banda took over as Malawi's president after the sudden death of Bingu wa Mutharika  almost a year ago. Ms Banda, previously the vice-president, has made sure she did not emulate her increasingly dictatorial predecessor, who reminded Malawians of the era before democracy arrived in 1994. She has cut down on presidential limousines and jets and has mended relations with aid-giving foreign governments such as Britain's, whose ambassador was kicked out after a leaked cable revealed a dim view of Mr Mutharika. "We can assemble without the police interfering and we can criticise the government again," says Dan Nyirenda, a journalist. The government is functioning better. Civil society is robust, says John Makina, who heads Oxfam Malawi. "Corruption is mainly people asking for a Fanta", he says: mostly small-scale by regional standards. Costly subsidies for fertiliser have kept ...

Doing Food Security Differently – Theme 3: Create exit points Open The Echo Chamber In the world of food security and agricultural development there is a tendency to see market integration as a panacea for problems of hunger ( see Theme 2, point 4 ). There is ample evidence that market integration creates opportunities for farmers by connecting them to the vast sums of money at play in the global food markets. But there is equally ample evidence pointing to the fact that markets are never just a solution – negotiating global markets from the position of a small producer presents significant challenges such as the management of commodity price instability (without meaningful market leverage).  The academic side, and much of the implementation side, of the food security world already recognizes this issue, driven by (repeated) studies/experiences of food insecurity and famine showing that markets are nearly always the most important driver of this stress on th...

Doing Food Security Differently – Theme 2: Embrace complexity Open The Echo Chamber If food insecurity is not about global food shortages, what is it?  Following the a vast body of literature and experience addressing food insecurity, it is the outcome of a complex interplay between: locally-accessible food production local livelihoods options that might provide sufficient, reliable income or sources of food local social relations (which mobilize and create social divisions by gender, class, age, etc.) which shape access to both livelihoods opportunities and available food within communities and even households structures of governance and markets in which that production takes place global markets for food and other commodities that can impinge on local pricing. Changes in the natural environment play into this mix in that they generally impinge upon locally-accessible production and on global markets. The experience of the Famine Early Warn...

Doing Food Security Differently – Theme 1: Get over production Open The Echo Chamber There is no global crisis of food production.  There is no neo-Malthusian reality that we are just now crashing into.  Every year, the Earth produces roughly twice the calories needed to feed every single human being.  This is why food insecurity and famine are such horrible tragedies, and indeed stains on humanity.  There is no unavoidable global shortage that creates famine and hunger. Nor, in fact, are we likely to be looking at a global food shortage any time soon.  There is no doubt that climate change will present challenges to our food system.  The combination of changing temperatures and precipitation regimes will challenge existing crops in many parts of the world, and benefit the crops in other parts of the world.  Further, the global markets for food have created substantially tighter interconnections between places than ever before...

Will CIDA's demise hurt the world's poor? Owen abroad There is an article by me and Lucas Robinson  in the Globe and Mail  today:  The risk is that development becomes a secondary goal in a department with bigger fish to fry. The opportunity is that by putting development at the heart of a more powerful department with a broader remit for foreign and trade policy, Canada will now be able to promote development-friendly policies across the wide range of issues which most affect poor countries. It is not CIDA but Canada as a nation that needs to do more. And I'm quoted in the Toronto Star : "It makes no sense, giving aid to the same countries you hit with high tariffs," says Owen Barder, a London-based official with the  Centre for Global Development , a think tank that focuses on international aid issues. It's a disconnect, Barder said, that could be addressed and resolved with foreign aid officials positioned closer to the centr...

Top Economists, Financial Experts and Bankers Say We Must Break Up the Giant Banks The Big Picture Bernanke: "Too Big To Fail Was A Major Source of The Crisis, and We Will Not Have Successfully Responded To The Crisis If We Do Not Address That Successfully"   Current Fed chairman Ben Bernanke said yesterday: "Too Big To Fail is not solved and gone," he said during a press conference. "It's still here." *** "I agree … 100 percent that it's a real problem," he said. *** "Too Big To Fail was a major source of the crisis," he added a little later, "and we will not have successfully responded to the crisis if we do not address that successfully." Bernanke joins the following top economists and financial experts who believe that the economy cannot recover unless the big, insolvent banks are broken up in an orderly fashion: Nobel prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz Nob...

De toverwoorden progressief en conservatief Vice Versa Minister Ploumen bestempelt haar criticasters als ouderwets. Het is volgens publicist en nestor van de derde wereldbeweging Hans Beerends niet de eerste keer dat juist mensen die een neoliberale politiek voeren zichzelf tooien met woorden als progressief en vooruitstrevend en criticasters die een politiek willen die meer gericht is op menswaardigheid wegzetten als ouderwets of traditioneel. Een historisch overzicht van het gebruik van de begrippen progressief en conservatief in het debat. In het huidige, in grote mate door de VVD gedicteerde ontwikkelingsbeleid, krijgt het Nederlands bedrijfsleven meer dan ooit een voorkeursbehandeling. Minister Ploumen van Buitenlandse Handel en Ontwikkelingssamenwerking, die daarmee naar ik aanneem enigszins knarsetandend akkoord is gegaan, tracht dit nieuwe beleid te verkopen als progressief. De tegenstanders van dit Nederlandse handelsbeleid krijgen het stempel conse...