This is a review of Avner Offer’s The Challenge of Affluence: Self Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain Since 1950. It appeared in the Business History Review vol. 81 no. 2. The book is well worth a read.
Charles Kenny
Books, Papers and Articles
Charles Kenny writes about global development — what’s working, what isn’t, and how the world can do better. An economist who spent fifteen years at the World Bank, he is now a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC.
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Is Anywhere Stuck in a Malthusian Trap? is an unpublished short paper. The key features of the Malthusian model are that (i) income determines population growth, with rising wages increasing survival rates and (ii) there is a vital factor of production (land) which is fixed, implying decreased returns to scale for all other factors. The equilibrium state in such a model is a population living on subsistence incomes. The analysis in this paper suggests that (i) the link between income and population growth is (almost) everywhere broken and (ii) there is little evidence of declining returns to scale because of constraints imposed by land carrying capacity at the macro level anywhere. Population dynamics are being driven by non-income factors in a manner that is reducing population growth rates everywhere. At the same time, output is increasing everywhere, in a manner inconsistent with significantly declining returns to scale based on land being a vital factor of production.
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Construction, Corruption and Developing Countries was published as a working paper in June, 2007. The construction industry accounts for about one-third of gross capital formation. Governments have major roles as clients, regulators, and owners of construction companies. The industry is consistently ranked as one of the most corrupt: large payments to gain or alter contracts and circumvent regulations are common. The impact of corruption goes beyond bribe payments to poor quality construction of infrastructure with low economic returns alongside low funding for maintenance-and this is where the major impact of corruption is felt. Regulation of the sector is necessary, but simplicity, transparency, enforcement, and a focus on the outcomes of poor construction are likely to have a larger impact than voluminous but poorly enforced regulation of the construction process. Where government is the client, attempts to counter corruption need to begin at the level of planning and budgeting. Output-based and community-driven approaches show some promise as tools to reduce corruption. At the same time they will need to be complimented by a range of other interventions including publication of procurement documents, independent and community oversight, physical audit, and public-private anticorruption partnerships.
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Internet Governance on a Dollar a Day is forthcoming in Information Polity. Globally, around one billion people live on a dollar a day. About 44 percent –nearly half– of the World’s population lives on less than two dollars a day. This paper examines the importance of "Internet governance" to such people. Arguments over generic top-level domain names might seem of somewhat esoteric interest to the subsistence farmer. Indeed, if Internet governance is defined in the narrow sense of the management of TLDs (Top Level Domains) and root zone files, it is surely of little importance to poor people. However, given the nature both of technology and of poor people’s demands for information and communication, a broader definition of Internet governance does spill over into issues of importance to all, including the world’s poorest. Furthermore, thinking in terms of "information governance" may make more sense in an increasingly converged sector, and issues of information governance are of undoubted importance to poor people. In turn, this suggests priorities for governments attempting to improve the lives of the poor through increasing information flows.
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Young People and ICTs in Developing Countries is forthcoming in Information Technology for Development. The paper is co-authored with Naomi Halewood. Young people are often ‘first adopters’ of new technologies, and this appears to be the case with ICTs. Evidence from the developing world suggests that young people have widespread access to broadcast technologies and the telephone, but more limited access to the Internet. And even amongst young people, Internet use lags considerably behind Internet access. ICTs, and in particular the Internet, provide opportunities for employment, but it should be noted that there are limits to the economic impact of the Internet in developing countries. Broadcast technologies can be particularly useful tool in both formal and continuing education, the Internet may have a significant role in vocational and further education. There are potential social costs of ICT use amongst young people, but these can be mitigated. Youth-specific policy recommendations focus on the greater use of ICTs in education and content control.
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Putting Life Back into Miracles is an unpublished short paper. If you type "Middle East Miracle" into Google, you get a paltry 151 hits, compared to 29,000 for "East Asian Miracle." And yet despite a grim economic performance, between 1962 and 2002 life expectancy in the Middle East and North Africa increased from around 48 years to 69 years –the strongest growth in any region’s health in history. It might, then, be worth questioning the assumption that economic growth is the only development grail we need quest after, and examining a wider range of miracles (and tragedies) might help uncover a range of different causal factors for success in a broader development effort.
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Toward Universal Telephone Access Market progress and progress beyond the market was published in Telecommunications Policy vol. 31. It was written with Rym Keremane. The last 10 years have seen an explosion in access to telephone services worldwide based on rapid technology advance in increasingly competitive markets. The mobile phone has driven expansion in subscribers and access, especially in the developing world. This paper estimates global mobile footprint coverage based on 2002 data and calculates that as much as 77 percent of the world’s population may live in an area covered by a mobile signal. Nonetheless, many people remain without access to telephony. The paper estimates the maximum likely cost in terms of cross subsidy within the industry and outside financing for achieving universal access using competitively awarded subsidies to private providers in a reformed market. This upper-end cost is estimated at $5.7 billion, with costs that could not be supplied by a reasonable tax on existing providers (and so required from outside the sector) estimated at $1.8 billion.
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Is Africa a Failure? is an unpublished short paper. The usual way to refer to the performance of African countries over the forty or so years since independence is as a ‘crisis,’ or even a ‘rot.’ In these versions of Africa’s recent history, there is but one thing to argue over –who is to blame. This does, however, raise the question, ‘at what has Africa failed?’ The answer for parts of the continent is clear –but these cases do not make up the majority (or even a sizeable minority) of the region. In many important respects –not least health– Africa’s post-colonial record remains one of considerable success.
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The OECS and Regional Telecommunications Reform, co-authered with Donnie DeFreitas and Robert Schware, was published in info, Vol. 3, No.3. The Impact of Reform on Telecommunications Prices and Services in the Countries of the OECS, co-authored with Robert Schware and Eliud Williams, is forthcoming in the Journal of Information Technology for Development. Five member countries of the Organization of East Caribbean States (OECS) — St Lucia, Dominica, Grenada, St Vincent and the Grenadines, and St Kitts and Nevis — are undergoing a unique experiment in telecommunications liberalization. The reform has two interesting features. First, the reform effort was dramatically enhanced because of a legal ruling in one of the member countries that monopoly telecommunications provision is unconstitutional; and, second, the islands hope that a large part of the functions of a telecommunications regulator will be carried out at the regional rather than the national level. Reforms began to show results when the current monopoly service provider slashing the prices of international calls. Prices have fallen considerably further after the introduction of a regulated price cap.
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A Note on the Ethical Implications of the Stern Review is an unpublished short paper. The Stern Review adopts two interesting elements in its calculation of the costs and benefits of climate change mitigation. First is a ‘global welfarist’ approach that values the utility of the World’s people (now and into the future) equally, and sets global utility maximization as the correct goal for policy. Second is an assumption of a declining marginal utility to income. Consistent application of the ‘global welfarist’ approach and the declining marginal utility of income together would demand an urgent process of global income redistribution. Over the long term, this might see the richest ten percent of the World’s population facing an average redistributive tax rate in the region of 82 percent. A version will be published in the Journal of Environment and Development.
Charles Kenny 