ICT: Promises, Opportunities and Dangers for the Rural Future is for the Rural Futures conference in Plymouth, UK in March. The paper briefly reviews the evidence regarding the rapid rollout of rural ICT access worldwide, and the powerful tools that access can unleash. At the same time, it suggests the limits to the ICT revolution in rural areas especially in poor countries, and points to the limited evidence that ICT will reverse forces of agglomeration favouring the concentration of people and productivity in urban areas. It concludes by suggesting the marginal role for ICT-based policymaking in regional development strategies.
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 There an Anti-corruption Agenda in Utilities? is forthcoming in Utilities Policy. In a networked utility setting (few, predominantly monopoly providers), it is very hard to measure the extent of grand corruption using perceptions or surveys. It is even harder to measure the extent of damage done specifically by corruption, petty or grand. As a result, it will be hard to develop ‘actionable indicators’ of, or to develop empirically tested responses to, corruption in utilities. How much does this matter? Corruption is the result of a failure of governance (poor sector structure, weak management and so on). We can measure the impact of poor governance at the level of the utility looking at measures such as transmission and distribution losses or the construction of inoperable power plants. And we have a number of tools to improve utility governance (including sector structure reform and SOE corporate governance mechanisms). It is not clear that, at the sectoral or company level, there is a significant anti-corruption agenda not encompassed by this broader agenda of improved governance. To that extent, the ‘new’ anticorruption agenda provides renewed justification for the ‘old’ focus on institutions at the level of utilities management, but does not require a radically different approach.
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What Do We Know About Economic Growth, Redux is an unpublished short paper. It revisits the cross-country growth literature six years after What Do We Know About Economic Growth Or, Why Don’t we Know Very Much? Since then, even more evidence has piled up that growth is a complex, context-dependent process difficult to explain using linear growth models. We do know that the best way to be rich today is to have been rich yesterday, however. That result has led some researchers to revisit Nineteenth Century explanations including God and superior breeding as the ultimate determinants of wealth. But the ‘truly ultimate’ answer may as well turn out to be geography.
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Baywatch: Bigger than Aid? is an unpublished short paper. It ponders the economic impact of the television program Baywatch —an everyday tale of lifesaving folk– on people in the developing world. It concludes that, without considerably greater academic attention to the subject, we may never know the coefficient of Baywatch episodes on per capita income growth.
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Ending Global Poverty Through Tax Breaks to Bill Gates is an unpublished short paper. Many developing countries have enacted or are considering subsidies and tax breaks for the ICT industry. This paper argues that the economic justification for such favoritism is very weak. It is based in part on material from Overselling the Web. A version was published in The Globalist.
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Infrastructure Governance and Corruption: Where Next? was issued as a working paper in August, 2007. Governance is central to development outcomes in infrastructure, not least because corruption (a symptom of failed governance) can have significantly negative impact on returns to infrastructure investment. This conclusion holds whether infrastructure is in private or public hands. This paper looks at what has been learned about the role of governance in infrastructure, provides some recent examples of reform efforts and project approaches, and suggests an agenda for greater engagement – primarily at the sector level – to improve governance and reduce the development impact of corruption. The discussion covers market structure, regulation, state-owned enterprise reform, planning and budgeting, and project design. The paper was the subject of an Economic Times op-ed.
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ICTs Enterprise and Development is a draft chapter for ICT4D edited by Tim Unwin. It was written with Mike Best. There is no doubting that ICTs have had a significant development impact. Micro- and macroeconomic approaches alike suggest that the rollout of ICTs has improved livelihoods and increased the productivity of businesses. At the same time, the ICT industry itself has been a significant source of profitable investment and employment. This is not to suggest that ICTs are a silver bullet for underdevelopment, however. Successful utilization of communications technologies –and perhaps in particular the Internet—takes a broader economic environment that is conducive to their exploitation. Similarly, ICT industries and ICT-enabled businesses need an investment climate that includes an educated workforce with appropriate technical skills, access to entrepreneurial finance and business talent, reliable infrastructure, a robust but reasonable regulatory environment, and so on. Information and Communications Technologies have a role to play in the development process, but they are one player in a large ensemble cast.
I wrote an earlier collaborative paper on the impact of ICTs on development with Richard Heeks. The Economics of ICTs and Global Inequality: Convergence or Divergence for Developing Countries? was published as an IDPM Working Paper. If debate on ICTs and development has drawn from any discipline, it has tended to be sociology. This paper attempts to broaden the debate by drawing on economic evidence to ask: will ICTs support economic convergence or divergence between developing and industrialised countries? In an overall sense, technology is fundamental to development. However, ICTs – while having an uncertain impact on growth – are currently a force for global economic divergence rather than convergence. They diffuse more slowly in developing countries than industrialised countries, and they bring fewer benefits and greater costs to developing countries than industrialised countries. This does not present an argument against adoption of ICTs by developing countries. Rather, it presents an argument for focus on particular applications and investment priorities.
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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.
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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.
