Economic Geographies

Police at the Gombe station, Kinshasa, DRC

Aid Watch had a good post a while back about why “failed state” is a failed concept, which sums to the recognition that current use of the phrase A) offers no coherent definition of state failure and B) offers no analytical insight into the political trajectories of states considered failed.  Unsurprisingly, this contributes to a lot of confused thought about the Congo, which often gets termed something like “the world’s largest failed state.”  The sloppiest reporting & analysis end up portraying the country as an economic free-for-all, with chaos envisioned as the inevitable consequence of the absence of Western standards of legitimate taxation & property rights, among other things.  (Texas in Africa recently did a great take-down of Jeffrey Gettleman on a variant of this mode of thought, with specific regard to the war in eastern Congo.)

This is a very two-dimensional way of looking at a place as fascinatingly complex as the DRC.  Case in point: the social norms that have developed around the endemic corruption of the Kinshasa traffic police.  Bribe-seeking is technically illegal & unregulated behavior, and can look rather chaotic to the first-time observer.  If you’re wealthy enough to be traveling by car in downtown Kin, you may rest assured that the roulage will be looking for any pretext to stop you and ask for payment of an imagined fine.  (In the situation leading up to the photo above, a friend had parked quite legally in a designated parking spot outside my apartment – after which we were surrounded by police & escorted to the station on claims that we were blocking the road.)  Interestingly, though, the key word here is pretext. I never saw any interaction between the police & drivers that did not involve some sort of legalistic claim to the driver’s money, even if both parties knew that the accusation was false.  By contrast, white foreigners probably look just as wealthy walking down the street as they do when in cars, but the same police officer who stopped us morning after morning whilst we were driving to work scrupulously ignored me when I walked past him on my way to lunch.  Imagined moving violations are presumably easier to justify than imagined walking violations, and the group norm specified that bribery in this particular location had to have a legal pretext.  (This is likely not representative of all corrupt Congolese police all the time – but it was always the case in my personal experiences with them.)

All of which is to say that it’s a blinding misconception to think that the opposite of a strong state is chaos.  Order (organic if not judicial) can be found everywhere, if you take the time to look.

IPA-Tamale recently moved to a new office, and in the course of packing up the Examining Underinvestment in Agriculture storeroom I found a flipbook used by the Ministry of Food & Agriculture to educate farmers about the benefits of using fertilizer on their maize fields.  MOFA has its share of politicized decision-making and elite capture, especially with regards to fertilizer distribution, but interestingly enough it still commissioned illustrations that were thoroughly representative of the lives of the average smallholder farmer.

Cover.  As you’ll see, the intended audience is one of male farmers, who grow maize as an accepted male crop – but their wives still play a significant if unacknowledged role.

Skipping to the middle of the book for a second, this illustration of the farmer in his field captures a lot about the intended audience.  Note the straw hat, simple sandals, manual distribution of fertilizer, and use of a repurposed condensed milk can to hold it.

Contrast this to the implicitly better-off fertilizer salesman, who shows up to deliver fertilizer in a baseball cap and closed-toe shoes.  (Jan Chipchase has a good post mentioning footwear as status markers.)  There’s not much romanticization of the economic prospects of smallholder farming here.

There’s some great detail as well in the section on how to avoid storing fertilizer improperly.  The protagonist obviously isn’t doing too badly, because he has a metal roof, but leaks are a persistent problem.  His young daughter, here seen splashing in the spilled fertilizer, is wearing appropriate earrings and waist beads.  (And yes, it’s quite normal that she’s wearing nothing else.)

What does it mean for farmers to recognize themselves in this officially sanctioned view of how to farm?

The other momentous event in my life of late has been receiving grad school admission decisions – and to my utter relief, I was accepted to both SAIS and MSFS, which were my top two choices.  Of course, now I have to choose between them!  So I put the question to you, dear readers: I’m interested in doing monitoring & evaluation for development organizations, or managing randomized controlled trials and other field research in development economics.  If you do similar work, or are familiar with both of these programs, what would you suggest?  Feel free to email me if you’d rather not post a comment.  Thanks!

NB: I should add that I do conceive of this as a terminal MA, for the moment.  I may change my mind and do a PhD later in life, but I’ve a number of reasons for not wishing to pursue that degree right now, which I can bore you with over email if you want to know.

NB the second: I’ve decided!  SAIS it is.  Thanks to everyone who commented here, sent emails, @replied to me, and generally offered advice!

That said, my last post doesn’t particularly convey the sense that I like my job, which I very much do.  There are all these small human moments that account for that, that liking, such as the following.

• Perhaps the most wondrous thing about field research is people’s grace in allowing strangers into their homes, their lives, to pose a series of questions whose purpose must surely seem cryptic to them.  (The surveyors do introduce themselves, and the purpose of the research, of course.  But I think it’s a far cry from those introductions to understanding the worlds of academic publishing, or [in the case of this study] insurance product design, that are the prime movers behind these surveys.)  And yet they do let them in.  They even let me in, when I am monitoring surveyors in the field, and I have been profoundly grateful for these chances to sit under respondents’ carefully thatched roofs and listen to snatches of their lives in my mediocre Dagbani.
• It has been a blast getting to know our surveyors.  The team leaders are just great – thoughtful, organized, and intelligent – and I’ve slowly moved past my initial monolithic impression of the larger survey team as “that group of 20 men (and one woman) who do a lightning strike on the office for their netbooks each morning” to individual interactions, individual personalities.  There’s L., who willingly took on additional work when his team leader fell ill, and D., who is perpetually flashing the friendliest smile at everyone, and J., who elevated himself considerably in my opinion when he finally stopped flirting in French and began speaking to me politely, and many others.  They have been a fantastic group of people to work with.
• And honestly, much of what’s enjoyable is a succession of small daily things.  The reckless glee of being on the back of a surveyor’s motorcycle, on our way to find a respondent, speeding between houses so closely spaced our legs brushed the mud walls on either side.  The temporary cooling of buying cold Pure Water sachets on the way to the office and drinking them as quickly as possible.  Chasing chickens and small beautiful children out of the open door of the Walewale office, somewhat halfheartedly, because they think it’s a game to come into the office and get chased, and I enjoy the break.  An unexpected frog hopping out of a backpack containing soil samples and into my hands, to be set free outside.  All of these, perfect pleasant diversions from a job that is at times overwhelmingly busy, but always worthwhile.

There is a very strong correlation between my returning to Africa and my completely neglecting this blog – which says less about African internet than about how busy I always find myself when I’m here!  I came into my current position with IPA at the beginning of a two-month household survey examining underinvestment in agriculture in northern Ghana, and since then our whole team has been working non-stop.  Our surveyors leave for the field between 7 and 8 am every day, so I’m usually at the office by 6.30 to make sure that everything’s prepared.  Then it’s a long day of tracking survey documents, sorting soil samples, assigning survey teams to new communities, preparing per diem payments, troubleshooting the netbooks & survey software used in the field, selecting respondents for field audits, taking calls from surveyors, and making frequent three-hour round trips up to our satellite office in Walewale, among any number of other things.  An early day might end at 7 pm, and a late one at 10 pm.  The sheer amount of work has forced me to grow more as a manager than I have in any other position I’ve yet had, which has been fantastic.  It simply doesn’t leave much space at the edges of my days for anything else.

Dean Karlan & Jonathan Zinman have quantified something most field researchers in the developing world probably sensed already – that respondents are often very sensitive to social perceptions around “undesirable” activities such as borrowing.  In South Africa, they found that roughly 47% of known borrowers at a microcredit bank told surveyors they had not borrowed, with women being more likely to lie than men, and especially more likely to lie to male surveyors than female.  (The surveyors had no connection with the bank, and thus no independent knowledge of the correct answer for a given respondent.)

This is the eternal question at the heart of field research – what do you do if self-reported data isn’t accurate, but it is all you have?  And how does one incentivize truth-telling?  An interesting corollary to this experiment would have been to tell a subset of respondents that the surveyors knew they belonged to the bank (without giving the surveyors any other personal information about respondents’ accounts), and measure how the mere mention of the lending institution changed respondents’ rate of truthful reporting.  How would this work in situations where there is legitimately no authority with credible information on respondents, like measuring landholding in situations where land tenure is totally informal?  Would this be too destructive to surveyor impartiality (and general research ethics) to be an option?  The more I delve into these complicated questions of survey design, the more I find them strangely fascinating.

A friend recently asked me for a list of interesting books on development, and I thought I’d share the results here.  I read almost randomly in the field when I was still trying to narrow my initial broad interest in development down into something of which a career could be made, and the books below generally struck me as the most interesting, accessible, and generally well-supported introductions to their respective subject areas that I came across.  (I haven’t read some of these in years, but in retrospect I think they’d all stand up decently to a reader with greater existing knowledge of development.)  In roughly descending order of intellectual impact upon me:

1. Development as Freedom, by Amartya Sen, is one of the best books I’ve read on the general concept of “development.”  It addresses a number of common critiques, and creates a strong philosophical framework to support the argument that “development” is still necessary.
2. Portfolios of the Poor is my favorite book of 2009 – an incredibly thoroughly-researched look into what poor people do with their money.  I don’t remember learning more from a single book, well, probably ever.
3. Understanding Poverty is a great introduction to a huge range of issues in development, from food security to education to microfinance.  It’s written by a group of leading development economists, often from a behavioral perspective, and the thought contained here is both wide-ranging and rigorous.
4. This is a bit quirky compared to the other recommendations, but I very much liked Expectations of Modernity, an ethnography of Zambian copper miners in the ’70s and ’80s.  The description probably sounds boring, but it’s actually a great critique of the idea that people from the developing world who act in “Western” styles are blindly mimicking the West, instead of consciously bringing elements of Western culture into their lives in ways that reflect their own social & economic interests.  It basically lays out a strong case for relativistic understandings of culture, which I find hugely important for any development worker, without framing it with that potentially off-putting phrase.
5. The Bottom Billion has held up better in retrospect than its two better-known contemporaries, The End of Poverty and The White Man’s Burden, at least in my recollection.  In a foreshadowing of my current interests, I liked its focus on research methodology in macroeconomics (i.e. where all that data underlying cross-country regressions comes from), and its quantitative look at the connections between war, governance and poverty.  (Edit: David Roodman points out his own and Easterly‘s critiques of Collier for data mining in Wars, Guns and Votes, and believes that they’re applicable to The Bottom Billion as well.  I’d suggest enjoying the intellectual curiosity of Collier’s research, but taking his statistical results with a grain of salt.)
6. I can’t offer too much on the subject of public health, but I did greatly enjoy The Wisdom of Whores, which is an engaging book about health systems responses to HIV from the ’80s onwards, told by an irreverent epidemiologist with whom I would very much like to have a drink one day.  It’s also a great critical look at where public health data comes from, how it’s used, and to some degree why governments and international organizations choose the health priorities that they do.
7. Making Globalization Work is something I recalled as insightful on the topics of global financial institutions, markets and trade at the time I read it.
8. I’ve been trying to find a good overview of the World Bank that I read for a geography class a few years ago, and while I’m not sure that I’ve identified it, The World Bank: From Reconstruction to Development to Equity looks like it covers similar subject matter. I found tracing the Bank’s historical evolution quite interesting, as it also captures the variety of Western thought on “development” that’s occurred over the past 50 years, and explains quite a lot as well about current bilateral and multilateral aid regimes.

Tell me, dear readers, what else would you recommend for the interested lay reader?

I promised Asif Dowla some time ago that I would blog about some of his work, and after digging myself out from a fair deal of work that accumulated whilst I was focusing on grad school applications, I finally read his interesting 2005 article on how Grameen Bank built social capital among its members. Dowla identifies three components of social capital – trust, norms, and social networks – and what primarily fascinated me from an institutional perspective was how the norms & networks of rural Bangladesh played into Grameen’s search to build vertical trust between bank & clients.  Women’s access to finance seems to be a less contentious issue in Bangladeshi microfinance today, given the country’s relatively high penetration of microfinancial services, but at the outset Grameen had to work carefully around purdah norms and women’s correspondingly limited social networks in order to convince potential clients that it was a serious partner.  As religious restrictions on gender and public space are less pronounced in most of Africa, I had previously thought of trust-building as more a matter of demonstrating reliability and transparency of services, as Portfolios of the Poor observes.  It’s interesting to see the creation of institutional trust explicitly embedded in a local context like this.  (On a related note, I was surprised to learn that Bangladesh has more microfinance borrowers than all of Africa and Latin America combined.  They’ve come a long way.)

Naturally, all of this put me in mind of Tim Harford’s hugely insightful article on the importance of institutional trust for economic growth.   Dowla has a good section on how building non-kin-group networks through group lending was an important effect of Grameen’s work in the Bangladeshi context, but he also hints at the limits of building a financial system on personal trust when he observes that joint liability within groups seemed to be enforced more by staff than by other group members.  This makes sense on the face of it, when one thinks about the conflicting incentives any group member might have to force another member to cover a missed loan payment.  On the one hand, predicating continued access to credit on full and timely group repayment is a powerful incentive to force payment, but on the other hand, clients might want to be given some leeway themselves if they miss a payment in the future – or might not want to act as hostile enforcers towards people they’ll continue to see around the neighborhood.  This is mere speculation, of course, but it does point to the advantages of shifting loan enforcement duties from a situation governed by personal trust to one governed by institutional trust.  I think it would be a good sign if Grameen’s groups had naturally drifted towards this arrangement.

Finally, my favorite phrase?  The poorest of the poor often have “a short radius of trust … because trust [must be] enforceable by the threat of retaliation.”

I have to say that I really enjoy academic literature reviews – so many insights in so little space!  An excellent recent find was Stefano DellaVigna’s “Psychology and Economics: Evidence from the Field,” which is more or less a short treatise on how to think about and test hypotheses in behavioral economics.  Whilst some of the points covered were essentially quantifications of easily observable phenomena (such as hyperbolic discounting), there were two that struck me in their phrasing and their implications for microfinance:

• Attention is a scarce resource. This makes intuitive sense, but I found it a pithy description of a fact that we too often neglect when trying to communicate with others.  Another good insight was that “consumer inattention to non-transparent [costs] is substantial.”  This to say that we tend to anchor our purchasing behavior on the costs that are most prominent, or even literally visible to us.  For instance, most US shoppers do fully understand that sales & excise taxes will be added on to the final cost of their grocery purchases – but researchers found that listing the (unchanged) tax visibly on an item’s price tag decreased consumer uptake of that item.
• Choice avoidance is real. I’ll just quote: “Marianne Bertrand et al. (forthcoming) examine the impact of a small or large menu set in the context of a field experiment on the mailing of 50,000 loan offers in South Africa. The authors randomize, among other things, the format of the table illustrating the use of the loan. The small-table format lists only one loan size as an example, while the big-table format presents four different loan sizes. The finding is consistent with the choice avoidance results. The take-up in the small-table format is .6 percentage points larger compared to a baseline of 8 percentage points, an effect size equivalent to a reduction of the (monthly) interest rate by 2.3 percentage points.”

Both of these points made me think about striking a balance in microfinance marketing.  On the one hand, it’s clearly preferable to phrase information in ways that are transparent (no invisible costs) and understandable to clients (so probably discussing interest as a fee rather than an annualized percentage).  On the other hand, however, it’s also important not to overwhelm potential clients with information – especially those for whom microfinance is a first, and likely intimidating, foray into the formal financial system.  So the responsible MFI must figure out – what aspects of their products are clients really paying attention to?  And how do you tell people about them in a way that’s transparent, but also compelling?

I think there’s an obscure parallel here to David Roodman’s recent post on microfinance as institution building – namely, that doing better sales, marketing, client outreach, whatever you’d like to call it is a step towards building commercially viable financial systems for the average residents of developing countries.  A large part of this is that product design is at the heart of marketing, and, as Portfolios of the Poor amply demonstrated, microlending could use a revolution or ten in the design of its products.  But I also partly feel like an attention to marketing – to why microfinance clients take or refuse the loans that they do – would indicate that the financial sector is starting to take the poor seriously as financial decision-makers, as valid and valued clients of a non-exclusionary financial system.  That’s what I’d really like to see.

Just came across a fascinating study by Jonathan Morduch & co-authors, who find that an increased presence of formal banks in a given economy pushes “commercially-oriented” (for-profit) microbanks towards serving a poorer segment of clients.   I find this simultaneously intuitive and counter-intuitive: intuitive that competition pushes banks to expand their target market, but rather surprising that the expansion of large banks (who are generally seen as bystanders in discussions of financial access for the poor) may increase access to financial services in the end.  Interestingly, the authors believe this to be one of the first studies of competition between microbanks & formal banks, pointing to a fantastic avenue for research as the microfinance sector continues to grow & formalize.

Also, my favorite phrase from this paper?  “Informationally challenged borrowers,” i.e. those who lack the appropriate documentation (ID, land titles, etc.) to obtain a formal bank loan.