Afghanistan still has Corruption!!!

I posted this originally on my Afghanistan Project Team’s site (igid.deveer.org), but have put it here, too.  The background for the post is that my team and I wrote a paper that recommended increasing funding to USAID’s Alternative Development Program and Afghanistan’s National Solidarity Program initiative.  The goal is to give a majority of the Afghani population viable economic alternatives to the illicit opium industry and, over the long-term, decrease corruption.  Now read the rest of the post:

Despite having written our paper, a recent USAID report states that the Afghan government is still corrupt, despite years of effort in fighting corruption. Laura Freschi wrote in an Aid Watch blog post that asks some interesting questions about the USAID recommendations:

“Could USAID explain how concerted efforts are failing to defeat corruption as a whole when each individual project is successfully meeting its targets?”

 
“One of the six recommendations for future action in the report is to provide more resources and support for the High Office of Oversight (HOO), the anti-corruption agency which has until now has shown an “apparent unwillingness” to go after high-level corruption. The report notes that “often the officials and agencies that are supposed to be part of the solution to corruption are instead a critical part of the corruption syndrome.” How is the solution to aid money being stolen to give additional aid money to those who are stealing it?” [bold, my emphasis]

With respect to our project, both USAID and our team recommend: the coordination of donors and focusing anti-corruption efforts on issues Afghan citizens care about. We depart from the USAID report’s focus on governance issues and instead recommend increased funding for livelihood programs that reduce Afghan citizen’s dependence on the illicit opium economy. Freschi’s (bold) question still applies to our recommendation, how do we minimize the stealing from our program as we increase funding for it?

I would be interested to see discussion of corruption in the programs we recommend increasing funding for – Community Development Council program in the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development and the Alternative Development.

Sources:

• Post from Aid Watch – by Laura Freschi: “It’s going so badly, let’s do more of the same!” https://blogs.nyu.edu/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/1990
• USAID report on Corruption in Afghanistan: http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNADO248.pdf

Econometrics and Foreign Aid

I’m reading an article by Edward Anderson and Hugh Waddington entitled “Aid and the Millennium Development Goal Poverty Target” published in the Oxford Development Studies, Vol 35, Number 1, March 2007 [or go to the online version and pay $30 to read the article ...].

Needless to say, it’s been a long while since I did the sort of math that requires derivatives, solving for curve maxima, and looking at statistical analysis to determine coefficients.  That’s what this article is about, though.  At this point, you’re probably reconsidering the $30 investment.  The authors go through a pretty rigorous development of an estimated amount of foreign aid required to meet the United Nations (UN) Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the level of poverty in 1990 by 2015.  The poverty level is defined as the number of people living on an average $1/day.

Anderson and Waddington develop the assumptions and solutions, with all the caveats that come with using any data collected and published any where in the foreign aid world, to arrive at a number of about US$50 billion per year, or double the current amount.

Implicit in the calculations are that a country’s growth as measured by the gross domestic product (GDP) is the best way to measure the reduction in poverty.  What about alternative growth indicators that include other factors such as health, environmental degradation, and overall well-being?  We know that our current form of capitalism, with emphasis on not-so-free markets, is incapable of pushing us to environmentally sound, sustainable growth.  And what do we really mean by growth?

So my question is:  What does this analysis look like if we use the more holistic determinants of prosperity and well-being?  How much aid do we need to provide?  Does everyone need to earn $38,611 per capita (2007 US figure  from UNM, also here at BEA) income to feel unfulfilled, while at the same time depleting the earth of all its resources?

I think the answer is no, but coming to that conclusion needs some mathematical gymnastics and some rethinking about what sort of growth is important to us, to our offspring, and to our planet’s ability to sustain our definition of growth.  Sounds like a dissertation, if someone hasn’t already written it.