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forum 54

Beyond the victim Paul Collier argues that fairness and compassion are no basis for development policy

poverty & the duty of assistance

TP M

4th quarter 2006

The world has good reason to be concerned about African economic development. From 1960 to 2000, when other developing regions were growing at unprecedented speed, Africa stagnated. Average per capita income rose by only around 0.1% a year. Africa’s divergence from other developing regions has been speeding up: by the 1990s it was diverging at an astonishing 5% per year. Africa is falling behind fast, and parts of it are crumbling. Concern is natural. We in the rest of the world can base our concern on different ethical arguments: which we choose matters for our style and direction of assistance, and what is more important, for the ways Africans will think about their diffi culties Our ethical position becomes mirrored in Africa, precisely because the West is so intellectually dominant. Inadvertently, we shape the mental space inhabited by African elites. Why should the citizens of developed countries be concerned about what happens

Paul Collier is professor of economics at the University of Oxford and senior adviser to Tony Blair’s Commission on Africa

in developing countries? The answer coming from the development institutions such as the World Bank, and from the NGOs, is poverty; however the criterion of poverty reduction is not a reasonable ethical position, but the result of political expediency. There are better ethical bases for international concern. Over the past decade the measure of progress in development has come to be the reduction of absolute poverty. The choice of absolute poverty was essentially a political solution to a range of political problems. One problem was that the popular image of the World Bank had been so damaged by public perceptions that the agency needed an objective to signal that it “cared”. A second problem was that there was a need for some specifi c and measurable objective to assess agency performance. By the 1990s the electorates who funded aid doubted that it was effective, and as a result aid fi nance was declining. Further, poverty reduction offered an objective that could be embraced by all development agencies, and so offered the prospect of coordination that had otherwise proved elusive. Beyond these, the problem was that the left, which was the only part of the political spectrum that favoured aid, was mainly concerned about inequality within societies while being deeply suspicious of the normal process of economic growth: a focus on “the poor” offered the possibility of compromise with this key lobby. The privileging of poverty reduction worked well in terms of the first three objectives: the image of the World Bank improved; agency performance became more oriented to the “result” of poverty reduction, and all agencies signed up to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), whose overarching objective was poverty reduction. Since the absolute number of those in poverty was still rising, the need for aid was evidently increasing, and aid flows indeed reversed their decline. Only the fourth problem remained elusive: the critics of a market-oriented development paradigm were still not enthusiastic about growth as the goal, wanting to bring social inequality to the fore as the central challenge of development. Agreements about the norm of absolute poverty are driven by this strange coalition. Any sense of a social contract between the government of a low-income country and its own citizens – a domestic social welfare function – is shelved. A social welfare function that attends only to the concerns of the poor is not a likely outcome of democracy. Both theory and the domestic spending priorities in the richer democracies point to the clear dominance of the median voter, and not to an exclusive focus on the poor. For good reason, most donor governments advocate democracy. A corollary is surely that a society should be left free to determine its own social welfare function, which is unlikely to boil down to the minimisation of poverty. Indeed, different democracies are likely to make different choices, as is evident from a comparison of the choices of Swedes and Americans. Donor governments are exhibiting policy incoherence in advocating democracy while trying to impose their own priorities. It is sometimes argued that in signing up for the MDGs all governments have in some way committed themselves to the acceptance of donor policy priorities regarding poverty reduction. Similarly, donor agencies sometimes suggest that their emphasis upon social participation in the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) reconciles the process of domestic choice with donor priorities. The reality is that recipient countries are ranged along a continuum of democratisation. Approaches that are legitimate in countries radically lack

ing in democracy are illegitimate in countries with functioning democracies. In the former, lacking a better alternative, donors may need to act on behalf of ordinary citizens, so that insisting on the MDGs and the participation of social groups in PRSP consultations is better than nothing. In the latter, it is a cynical abuse of donor power to suggest that signing up to the MDGs overrides the democratic choices of the society: signing up was something which no government of a small and poor country could in practice avoid since it was linked to the promise of aid. If poverty reduction is not a sound objective of international assistance, what is? I believe that the core objective should be the economic convergence of societies. In an integrating world, continued divergence is an unacceptable prospect, and indeed an alarming one. Within societies, it is not “the poor” who should be the exclusive object of our concern, but “ordinary people”. The development challenge is to ensure that ordinary people in all the countries of the world are members of societies that are converging on a common affluence. The first of four distinct ethical bases for assistance is a sense of guilt. The basis for guilt is sometimes the affront of colonialism and sometimes the even greater affront of slavery. A further potential basis for guilt might be the export to the elites of developing countries of the 1940s-50s of a first-world intellectual fashion for “socialism”. In each case guilt generates some sense of the need for restitution. In this case the redistribution is in some sense a right, which is remedying a wrong. There are some obvious practical problems with such a redistribution. Even if the problematic notion of inherited guilt is accepted, the guilt is not distributed evenly among rich countries, and the wrong is not distributed evenly among poor countries. If the guilt were distributed among those countries that participated in colonialism and slavery, most rich countries would be burden-free. In respect of slavery, Britain would be in the ambiguous position of having participated in the trade and then been instrumental in closing it down. If the damage of colonialism is seen as broadly proportionate to its duration, India would receive compensation per capita around forty times that of Ethiopia. Since its population is around twenty times larger than Ethiopia’s,

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forum 55

poverty&thedutyofassistance

TP M

4th quarter 2006