Dani Rodrik's weblog

Explaining my absence

OK, many of you have asked but I knew that I had to put in an explanation for my continued absence here when my mother in Turkey complained that she missed the "postcards" from me on the blog. 

I am alive and well.  But here are two reasons why this space will not be updated frequently over the coming months:

1. I am writing a book (on globalization, what else?), and I find the blog really competes with it for my energies and ideas.  I hope there will be a reason for people to want to read the book even if they have been devout followers of this blog.
2. All kind of spammers have taken over the comments section of this blog, and I don't know (or have the time) to clean it up.

In the meantime, my monthly series with Project Syndicate continues, so you can always turn there for my periodic column-sized bursts.

Capitalism 3.0 -- the reviews are in

Well at least a couple of them.  I gave a talk with this name at LSE the other day, which was extremely well attended.  I am not happy with the title at all, which as I joked, makes me sound like a Tom Friedman wannabe.  But it does capture a couple of key ideas I was trying to get across: the malleable nature of capitalism, and the need to deploy some institutional imagination to figure out how to close the yawning gap that has opened up between the global reach of markets and the (mostly) national nature of their governance.

Two of the attendees have written long accounts and critiques of the talk, and they can be found here and here.  Interestingly, both are written from perspectives that differ sharply from mine: the first is a libertarian and the second a globalization enthusiast's.  But both give me enough credit to try to do justice to my ideas, for which I am grateful. 

Both reviews say that the LSE audience lapped my lecture up. Well, it would be nice to hear from the silent majority too...

UPDATE: The video and slides from the lecture are here.

The long view on the global economy

My latest Project Syndicate piece argues that the world economy has handled the financial shock rather well so far, but that the real test for globalization is yet to come. 

History teaches that global economic order is difficult to establish and maintain in the absence of a dominant economic power. The interwar period, which suffered from a similar crisis of leadership, produced not only a collapse of globalization, but a devastating armed conflict on a global scale.

So the stakes in righting the world economy could not be higher. Mismanage the process, and the consequences could be unimaginable.
Unfortunately, many of the solutions on offer are either too timid or demand too much of a global leadership that is in short supply.

The conundrum of global reform is that the proposals that go far enough, such as establishing a global financial regulator, are wildly unrealistic, while those that are realistic, such as reform of the IMF, fall far short of what is needed.

What we need is a vision of globalization that is fully cognizant of its limits. We can start with a simple principle: We should strive not for maximum openness in trade and finance, but for levels of openness that leave ample room for the pursuit of domestic social and economic objectives in rich and poor countries alike. In effect, the best way to save globalization is to not push it too far.

The column offers some hints about what I have in mind, but those who are curious about the details will have to show up at LSE on Tuesday.

The Madrassa myth

by Asim Khwaja, guest blogger

The post-9/11 emphasis on Pakistan continues to portray madrassas (religious schools) as a focal point – their rising prevalence the subject of great concern. What is surprising is that this “myth” persists despite evidence to the contrary – that madrassas are in fact not the real revolution in the Pakistani educational landscape but rather it is affordable private non-religious “mom-and-pop” schools that now dot the (rural) landscape.

In a series of papers in the past few years using publicly verifiable data sources and established statistical techniques my colleagues and I have documented this private sector revolution and the relative absence of a madrassa revolution.[1]

Yet reputable outlets like the New York Times continue to emphasize the supposed centrality of Pakistani Madrassas. In a compelling but factually misleading piece on May 3^rd entitled “Pakistan’s Islamic Schools Fill Void, but Fuel Militancy” a veteran reporter rehearses a well-known narrative in which government schools are failing and the madrassas are proliferating, providing the only viable source of education for the poor. Private schools, while mentioned, are discounted as “out of reach of most middle-class Pakistanis”. While government schools, much like the public sector in most developing countries, face substantial challenges, the last two claims are simply not correct – they were not in the years around 2001 (as documented by our previous work), and are still not correct.

Using the latest publicly available educational census data, Madrassas in 2005-06 still only accounted for 1.3 percent of enrolled children (In Pakistan’s four provinces), versus 34 percent in non-religious private schools and the remainder in public schools. The graph below shows that while there is indeed some increase in madrassas over time, the far more striking growth is for non-religious private schools.

Moreover these non-religious private schools are increasingly catering to the middle and poor class. With monthly fees less than a days' unskilled wage rate, they are affordable and attract students from even the poorest households. Madrassas are therefore simply not the schools of last resort. For the average Pakistani child, even among the poor living in rural areas and in urban slums, the most likely alternative to a decrepit public school is not a madrassa but a private school, or no schooling at all. Moreover, despite the low fees and low wages (a fifth of public sector teacher wages) and less qualified (local women) teachers, they offer substantially higher quality education than public schools (likely by better incentivizing and selecting their teachers).

In the particular district - Khanewal - highlighted in the New York Times column as a region of particular concern, the school numbers reflect a similar breakdown - 9% madrassa, 24% private schools, and 66% government schools. Moreover, 95% of private schools in this district are coeducational. Interestingly, this trend is true even in the Pashtun-dominated Northwest Frontier Province. In fact, in the Swat valley, which has occupied much media coverage recently due to the Taliban prevalence there, there were 360 such private schools in 2005 compared to 165 madrassas (National Education Census, 2005).

In yet another attempt to clarify the Madrassa myth, my coauthors and I recently wrote a piece on Foreign Policy (http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4958) that also highlights the policy concerns that stem from not getting the facts straight. The NYT article was widely recounted by members of the U.S. House of Representatives with suitable outrage during the House Foreign Affair’s Committee hearing on legislation providing a new aid package for Pakistan. Not surprisingly, the proposed  legislation focuses U.S. government attention on reforming madrassas, eliminating those with ties to terrorism and working with the Pakistani government to reform its sprawling pubic school system riven with teacher absenteeism, ghost schools, out of date pedagogy and a deeply problematic curriculum. Yet there is no mention of the mushrooming private sector and the lessons to be learnt from it.

While one may conjecture that the madrassa myth persists since it is politically expedient and offers a simple explanation of recent events in Pakistan, the fact is that the the reality of the Pakistani educational landscape is quite different. Educational reforms that remain focused on madrassas are unlikely to affect the vast majority of Pakistanis and form the basis of “winning the hearts and minds” or of improving the lot of Pakistanis. With Pakistan’s population becoming ever-more dominated by youths, and the need to produce human capital capable of driving a future Pakistani economy, the stakes on getting such basic facts understood and accepted in policy and popular circles could not be higher.

---

[1] Religious School Enrollment in Pakistan: A Look at the Data (with T. Andrabi, Pomona, J.Das, DECRG World Bank and T. Zajonc, Harvard). Comparative Education Review, Vol, 50, No. 3, August 2006 and A Dime a Day: The Possibilities and Limits of Private Schooling in Pakistan (with T. Andrabi, Pomona, J.Das, DECRG World Bank).  Comparative Education Review, vol. 52, no. 3, August 2008. Also see the LEAPS project website that details more of our research on the Pakistani educational sector at www.leapsproject.org.

How many growth diagnostics are there out there?

I have updated the page with links to Growth Diagnostics exercises that I know of.  There is also a volume of Latin American GD case studies that should be coming out from the Inter-American Development Bank next month or so. 

I am sure that there are others that I am missing, so if you know of any studies that are not included in my list, do send me a line and I will add a link.

The kinder, gentler IMF on African fiscal policy

Andy Berg writes to tell me about a new IMF policy note on fiscal policy responses to the current crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa and the big news is that the IMF now thinks there is a role for increasing fiscal deficits even in some of the word's poorest countries.  As Andy puts it,

About 2/3 of the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa now have low-to-moderate risk of debt distress, the way we calculate it. There may be some scope for some fiscal stimulus in many of these countries. Part of the case for not adjusting too sharply is that scaling down investment projects can be quite disruptive; to do it well puts a lot of demands on fiscal institutions. We note the contrast with "scaling up" of public investments, which is institutionally much more demanding.

In countries with fiscal space, the IMF recommends ramping up spending on Infrastructure and social safety nets (and not cuts in taxes, which the paper says would be inequitable).  

The IMF hasn't totally given up on fiscal prudence of course.  The paper warns that in resource-based economies, where the shock is concentrated in one or two sectors, the fiscal stimulus is unlikely to put capital and labor back to work since inter-sectoral mobility will be limited.  It also asks that any fiscal stimulus be reversible to prevent debt problems down the line. 

Makes a lot of sense to me. 

Tony Soprano and Robert Nozick

A long-standing debate between libertarians and others concerns the extent to which a state is needed to enforce cooperative rules. Many libertarians argue that informal, self-sustaining agreements can achieve desirable outcomes even without the state acting as a third-party enforcer. See here for a particularly interesting version of this argument and various counter-arguments.

Bo Rothstein's fascinating paper on efficient institutions concludes with a great story from the TV series "The Sopranos," which speaks directly to this issue and is worth quoting at length.

In a state of rage, the mob leader himself, Tony Soprano, with a gun in his hand goes after a low level gang member that has betrayed him and kills him. Usually, he would of course have used an underling for an operation like this, but this time ... he is so overtaken by emotions that he forgets the golden rule that mafia bosses should never do any of the dirty work themselves. As it happens, he is seen by an “ordinary citizen” chasing after the victim. This eyewitness goes to the police, not knowing that it is the local mafia leader that he has seen. The “ordinary Joe” tells the police that he is just sick and tired of all the violence in his neighbourhood and that he as a law-abiding citizen wants to help the police to clean up the neighbourhood. When the police commissars show him a bunch of photos of known criminals, he directly identifies the perpetrator - still not knowing who the person he identifies is. After he has left the police station, the police commissars are in a state of joy since they now seem to have what they need to put Tony Soprano behind bars.

In the next scene, the eye-witness is sitting comfortably in what seems to be a middle-class home listening to classical music. A woman his age, probably his wife, is sitting close to him reading the newspaper. Suddenly she starts screaming and then shouts at him to read an article in the paper. The article makes it clear to this honest and law-abiding citizen that the person he has identified at the police station as the perpetrator is the well-known local mafia leader Tony Soprano. The law-abiding citizen then throws himself at the phone, calls the police commissar who’s direct number he has, and in a terrified voice says that he did not see anything and that he will not become a witness.

The interesting thing is the book our law-abiding citizen was reading before his wife showed him the newspaper article. An observant spectator has about one second to see that it is the philosopher Robert Nozick’s modern classic Anarchy, State and Utopia - an icon for all ultraliberal, anti-government and free-market proponents ever since it was published (Nozick 1974).

The message from the people behind the Sopranos show seems clear: In a “stateless” Robert Nozick type of society, where everything should be arranged by individual, freely entered contracts, markets will deteriorate into organized crime. The conclusion is again, that there can be a market for anything as long as there is not a market for everything. Or in other words, if everything is for sale, markets will not come close to what should count as social efficiency.

Who knew that the writers of the show were academics manque?

By the way, Rothstein's Quality of Government Institute maintains an extensive data base on institutional indicators across countries and over time.  It should be an important resource for people working on these topics.

UPDATE: Thank to Mike2 for posting a link to this YouTube video, which makes the point rather nicely.

How the financial crisis has killed the governance reform agenda

There was a time when economists believed that institutional reform--improving governance--was a key ingredient in improving living standards in the developing world.  "Good governance" is surely a good thing in its own right.  But a lot of recent academic and policy research has focused of late on its instrumental value for growth. 

The argument is simple and appealing. Rich countries are those characterized by democracy, rule of law, political competition, and low levels of corruption.  So poor countries have to emulate them in all these respects if they want to get rich too.

Oddly, some of the most vociferous advocates of this view have apparently given up on it in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Not consciously, perhaps.  But a repudiation is implicit in the arguments that they now make about the central role of governance failures in the current crisis in the U.S.   

Exhibit no. 1 is Simon Johnson, who as part of the famous AJR (Acemoglu-Johnson-Robinson) triumvirate, has done as much as anyone to cement the view that better institutions cause higher incomes.  In this view, the reason that the U.S. is richer than, say, Russia, is that the former is run by a democratic, accountable political authority that is not in the pockets of narrow interests.  The AJR story presumes that institutional quality is a very slow-moving attribute, with events lodged deep in history still exerting strong effects today.  Yet in his recent Atlantic piece, Johnson argues that U.S. economic policies have been captured by a (financial) oligarchy, in much the same way that business elites corrupt policy-making in much poorer countries such as Russia.  The U.S., it turns out, is not that different. 

Exhibit no.2 is Dani Kaufmann, who led the World Bank's work on governance and has done probably more than any other living soul to bring governance issues to the top of the policy agenda in the developing world.  In a recent lecture, he takes pretty much the same line as Johnson, arguing that the financial crisis in the U.S. was the by-product of capture and corruption: "If anybody thought that the governance and corruption challenge was a monopoly of the developing world ... that notion has been disposed of completely."  (I owe the reference to the Dani Kaufmann lecture to this very interesting paper by Bo Rothstein, a political scientist.) 

Now I am a fan of Simon's and Dani's work, and I count them both among my friends. They may well be right about their diagnosis of the origins of the crisis.  But an implication of their recent arguments is that we need to significantly downplay the role of improved governance as a causal mechanism for economic growth. 

After all, no-one can deny that the United States, for all its financial follies, is a rich country.  It turns out that it is possible to be corrupt in a fundamental way and still be rich.   

My own view is that there was never a strong theoretical or empirical argument for relying on governance reform, as conventionally understood, as an engine of higher growth.  The case for governance reform is that it is a good thing to do in and of itself.  But don't confuse it for a growth strategy.

Phew!

It turns out that the man who brought down the world economy studied not finance or economics--but political science!

Now my colleagues and I can go out in public again...

(HT: Andrew Leonard)

How to square the U.S.-China circle

Three is a nice long article in the New York Times by David Leonhardt, in which we learn, among other things, that Tim Geithner is actually an old China hand.  Which should come in handy as he tries to right the bilateral imbalance between the two countries that has clearly become unsustainable.

Most writing on this subject, the Leonhardt piece included, concludes that the Chinese end of the solution lies in stimulating consumption demand in China, and reducing that country's ridiculously high saving rate.  But the discussion typically ignores an important issue: the secret of China's growth is that it has made a rapid transition into producing tradables (mainly manufactures).  If the correction in China's trade balance comes at the expense of slowing down this process of structural change, it will also result in a reduction in the economy's longer-term growth rate.  This would be a bad bargain for China, and it is an important reason why the Chinese authorities have resisted a significant appreciation of their currency (which, in the absence of other compensating policies, would have the effect of reducing the profitability of investment in tradables).

So if growth in China relies on continued structural change in the direction of tradables, but the international context no longer allows a large external surplus, must the world have to choose between global macro stability and Chinese growth? Is there any way out of the conundrum?

Actually, there is, but we need to think a bit out of the box.  The economics of the situation is actually pretty simple.  If China wants a larger supply of tradables than the market equilibrium produces, it can achieve this by directly subsidizing the domestic production of tradables (through tax incentives or rebates or reduction in the cost of inputs), while letting the real exchange rate appreciate to equilibrate the external balance. Direct subsidies don't tax the domestic consumption of tradables the way that currency undervaluation does.  Presto! We have both the structural change China needs, and the external balance the world economy requires. 

Put differently, if China gives up the exchange rate as an instrument of industrial policy, it will need a substitute.  Explicit industrial policies are the obvious substitute.  Across the board spending by China on infrastructure and other things doesn't quite achieve the required goal, unless the spending is targeted on projects that disproportionately reduce the costs of producing tradables. 

There are of course small details to worry about, such as the WTO's Agreement on Subsidies.  But we do need to think creatively about squaring the circle in question, and I cannot come up with any other alternative.  

If you want to read more about this, here's a paper that explains the argument in greater detail.