Todd J. Moss

The Trouble with the MDGs: Confronting Expectations of Aid and Development Success

Growing concern that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will not be achieved by 2015 should not obscure the bigger picture that development progress has been occurring at unprecedented levels over the past thirty or more years. At the same time, the MDGs may perhaps create an unnecessary pessimism toward aid by labeling many development successes as failures. The first MDG of halving the number of people living in poverty will probably be met globally, but for most developing countries to achieve this at the national level, the growth rates required are at the bounds of historical precedent. Additionally, there appears to be only a weak relationship between aid and rapid economic growth. A similar problem holds for many of the other education and health goals. For many countries, the rates of progress required to meet the MDGs by 2015 are extremely high compared to historical experience and there is only a tenuous relationship between expenditure and outcomes. Nevertheless, estimates that an additional

An Aid-Institutions Paradox? A Review Essay on Aid Dependency and State Building in Sub-Saharan Africa

50 billion in aid per year is necessary to meet the MDGs are frequently misinterpreted to suggest that it is also sufficient. Most of the goals are unlikely to be reached, but this will probably not be due primarily to shortfalls in aid. This is in part because development is a long-term and complex process dependent on relieving more than a supply-side constraint on resources. Aid remains vital and contributes to development progress, but even considerable increases in aid are unlikely to buy these particular goals. Goal setting is also useful, but continuing to suggest that the MDGs can be met may undermine future constituencies for aid (in donors) and reform (in recipients). The MDGs might be better viewed not as realistic targets but as reminders of the stark contrast between the world we want and the world we have, and a call to redouble our search for interventions to close the gap.

Oil to Cash: Fighting the Resource Curse through Cash Transfers

A number of proposals today support a substantial increase in foreign aid levels to sub-Saharan Africa even though this region already receives a historically unprecedented volume of aid. This essay reviews the evidence regarding the potentially negative effects of aid dependence on state institutions, a topic which has received relatively little attention. We note several pathways through which political institutions might be adversely affected and devote particular attention to fiscal and state revenue issues. In addition to reviewing the economic literature on the aid-revenue relationship, this essay brings in the long-standing political science literature on state-building to consider the potential impact of aid dependence on the relationship between state and citizen. We conclude that states which can raise a substantial proportion of their revenues from the international community are less accountable to their citizens and under less pressure to maintain popular legitimacy. They are therefore less likely to have the incentives to cultivate and invest in effective public institutions. As a result, substantial increases in aid inflows over a sustained period could have a harmful effect on institutional development in sub-Saharan Africa.

Saving Ghana from its Oil: The Case for Direct Cash Distribution

Many of the world’s poorest and most fragile states are joining the ranks of oil and gas producers. These countries face critical policy questions about managing and spending new revenue in a way that is beneficial to their people. At the same time, a growing number of developing countries have initiated cash transfers as a response to poverty, and these programs are showing some impressive results. In this paper, Todd Moss proposes putting these two trends together: countries seeking to manage new resource wealth should consider distributing income directly to citizens as cash transfers. Beyond serving as a powerful and proven policy intervention, cash transfers may also mitigate the corrosive effect natural resources revenue often has on governance.

Is Africa's Skepticism of Foreign Capital Justified? Evidence from East African Firm Survey Data

Ghana can be considered a relative success story in Africa. We cite six variables—peace and stability, democracy and governance, control of corruption, macroeconomic management, poverty reduction, and signs of an emerging social contract—to suggest the country’s admirable political and economic progress. The expected arrival of sizeable oil revenues beginning in 2011–13, however, threatens to undermine that progress. In fact, numerous studies have linked natural resources to negative outcomes such as conflict, authoritarianism, high corruption, economic instability, increased poverty, and the destruction of the social contract. The oil curse thus threatens the very outcomes that we consider signs of Ghana’s success. This paper draws lessons from the experiences of Norway, Botswana, Alaska, Chad, and Nigeria to consider Ghana’s policy options. One common characteristic of the successful models appears to be their ability to encourage an influential constituency with an interest in responsible resource management and the means to hold government accountable. The Alaska model in particular, which was designed explicitly to manufacture citizen oversight and contain oil-induced patronage, seems relevant to Ghana’s current predicament. We propose a modified version of Alaska’s dividend program. Direct cash distribution of oil revenues to citizens is a potentially powerful approach to protect and accelerate Ghana’s political and economic gains, and a way to strengthen the country’s social contract. We show why Ghana is an ideal country to take advantage of this option, and why the timing is fortuitous. We conclude by confronting some of the common objections to this approach and suggest that new technology such as biometric ID cards or private mobile phone networks could be utilized to implement the scheme.

Compassionate conservatives or conservative compassionates? US political parties and bilateral foreign assistance to Africa

The world has increasingly recognized that private capital has a vital role to play in economic development. African countries have moved to liberalize the investment environment, yet have not received much FDI. At least part of this poor performance is because of lingering skepticism toward foreign investment, owing to historical, ideological, and political reasons. This wariness has manifested in many ways, including a range of business environment factors that impede greater foreign flows. Although much of the ideological resistance has faded, a number of specific challenges to the purported benefits of FDI have been successful in preventing more active liberalization and in moving to deal with indirect barriers. New data from firm surveys in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda suggest that there are important positive effects from FDI for both the host economies and the workers in foreign-owned firms. Based on our three-country sample, foreign firms are more productive, bring management skills, invest more heavily in infrastructure and in the training and health of their workers, and are more connected to global markets. At the same time, foreign firms do not appear to succeed by grabbing market share and crowding out local industry. These results suggest that many of the common objections to foreign investment are exaggerated or false. Africa, by not attracting more FDI, is therefore failing to fully benefit from the potential of foreign capital to contribute to economic development and integration with the global economy. Length: 30 pages

The ghost of 0.7 per cent: origins and relevance of the international aid target

Conventional wisdom about US foreign policy towards Africa contains two popular assumptions. First, Democrats are widely considered the party most inclined to care about Africa and the most willing to spend resources on assistance to the continent. Second, the end of the Cold War was widely thought to have led to a gradual disengagement of the US from Africa and reduced American attention toward the continent. This article analyses data on US foreign assistance flows from 1961 – 2000 and finds that neither of these assumptions is true. Rather, we find that the configuration of party control over Congress and the Presidency matters significantly, with aid to Africa substantially reduced when the two branches are in opposition.

Why Doesn't Africa Get More Equity Investment? Frontier Stock Markets, Firm Size and Asset Allocations of Global Emerging Market Funds

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine the historical origins of the international goal for rich countries to devote 0.7 per cent of gross national income (GNI) to aid, in order to assess its present relevance. Design/methodology/approach - The paper reviews all the original documents, interviews decision makers of that era, and uses their same essential method to estimate a new goal with todays data. Findings - First, the target was calculated using a model which, applied to todays data, yields ludicrous results. Second, no government ever agreed in a UN forum to actually reach 0.7 per cent – though many pledged to move toward it. Third, ODA/GNI Research limitations/implications - Any further work on aid targets must be based on a country-by-country assessment of realistic funding opportunities. Practical implications - The 0.7 per cent goal has no modern academic basis, has failed as a lobbying tool, and should be abandoned. Originality/value - Anyone who studies or works on the ways that rich countries can assist the development process must confront the 0.7 per cent goal sooner or later. The paper shows for the first time that it arose from an economic model with no modern credibility, and that – contrary to conventional wisdom – none of the UN documents contains a promise to meet the goal.

The Global War on Terror and U.S. Development Assistance: USAID Allocation by Country, 1998-2005

This paper addresses the question of investment in sub-Saharan African listed securities by examining characteristics of the continent’s 15 equity markets, the rise and fall of African regional funds, and the asset allocation trends for global emerging market (GEM) funds. The data shows that South Africa is now a leading destination of capital, but that few managers invest elsewhere on the continent. However, we find that African markets are not treated differently than other markets and present evidence that small market size and low levels of liquidity are a binding deterrent for foreign institutional investors. Thus, orthodox market variables rather than market failure appear to explain Africa’s low absolute levels of inward equity flows. The paper then turns to new data from firm surveys to explore why African firms remain small. The implications of our findings are threefold: (a) efforts to encourage greater private investment in these markets should concentrate on domestic audiences and specialized regional funds, (b) the depth and success of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange can perhaps be better utilized to benefit other parts of the continent, and (c) any long-term strategy should concentrate on the underlying barriers to firm entry and growth.

Will Debt Relief Make a Difference? Impact and Expectations of the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative

The launch of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) soon after September 11, 2001 has been predicted to fundamentally alter U.S. foreign aid programs. In particular, there is a common expectation that development assistance will be used to support strategic allies in the GWOT, perhaps at the expense of anti-poverty programs. In this paper we assess changes in country allocation by USAID over 1998-2001 versus 2002-05. In addition to standard aid allocation variables, we add several proxies for the GWOT, including the presence of foreign terrorist groups, sharing a border with a state sponsor of terrorism, troop contribution in Iraq, and relative share of Muslim population. We find that any major changes in aid allocation related to the GWOT appear to be affecting only a handful of critical countries, namely, Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan, and the Palestinian Territories. The extra resources to these countries also seem to be coming from overall increases in the bilateral aid envelope, combined with declines in aid to Israel, Egypt, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. We do not find that any of our GWOT proxies (or their interactions) are significantly correlated with changes in country allocation of aid flows to the rest of the world, including to sub-Saharan African countries. Concerns that there is a large and systematic diversion of U.S. foreign aid from fighting poverty to fighting the GWOT do not so far appear to have been realized.