The article is titled, ‘Will the ‘girl effect’ really help to combat poverty?’ The sub-heading reads: ‘Many development organisations see empowering girls – and enabling them to delay childbearing – as a powerful means to tackle poverty, but the evidence so far doesn’t bear this out.’

In this ADD world, where many people have time only for headlines, I wonder how many readers (or how many of the thousands who read a short link to the piece on Twitter) will see this and move on, sighing about another massive waste of money and time and wondering when the world will finally realise that aid doesn’t work.

Those who take the time to read the full article are less likely to go away with such thoughts. For it’s not really about empowering girls at all, but about one relatively minor aspect of empowering girls – delaying pregnancy. ‘Time will tell,’ the author, Ofra Koffman, writes with foreboding, ‘whether the “girl effect” will become one of those promising interventions that turn out to be more of a myth than a panacea.’ But her argument addresses only part of this question, and even this is based on flimsy evidence. For example, Ms Koffman uses the fact that adolescent fertility is not much higher in Rwanda than in the United States to show that the links between teenage pregnancy and economic development are weak. The obvious flaw in this case is that adolescent fertility in the US today tells us nothing about its effect on development because the US is a developed country. A comparison with youth fertility when the US was developing would have been more pertinent, but even then there may have been confounding factors two or three centuries ago that muddied the picture.

That disadvantaged women in the UK who delay pregnancy are no better off than their peers is a slightly stronger argument against policies to reduce adolescent fertility (although again the relevance of the UK to, say, Burkina Faso is debatable), but what the article entirely omits to mention is that such policies are very far from the central plank of efforts to empower women and girls. Sanitation, healthcare, microfinance and, most importantly, education have received at least as much attention and resources, but all these are absent from the Guardian piece.

Their omission is not surprising, for including them would fatally undermine the argument that women’s empowerment is a waste of time. Girls’ education, for example, has multiple positive impacts on their and their families’ lives, from health improvements for women and their children (see here, here and here for evidence from developing countries), to improvements in their own and their countries’ economic circumstances (see here and here). Girl Effect, the Nike-sponsored program that this article references, acknowledges that there are many ways to achieve its goal of strengthening women’s status. The writer implies that adolescent fertility is all such programs focus on, but the Girl Effect website highlights the importance of education, healthcare, and HIV prevention, and DFID (also referenced), the World Bank and other development agencies, as well as many of the developing-country governments that bear the ultimate responsibility for educating their people, are fully aware that the benefits of girls’ schooling go far beyond delayed pregnancy.

Now I may be overly harsh in criticising the author of this piece, who might not have written the title and the sub-head herself. But between them, she and the Guardian have done women and girls a disservice. Efforts to improve women’s lives have transformed developed societies – it would be a shame if such ill thought-through articles denied developing countries the same opportunity.

Last week I was asked to review a new book on gender and development. Since these things are usually turgid affairs, full of abstruse jargon (“registers of governmentality”, “idioms of sexualness” and “body reflexive practices” are just a few of the assaults on English perpetrated in this one) and nostalgia for the marxist utopias of yore, I was apprehensive. I envisaged long days of ploughing laboriously through paragraphs, trying heroically to decipher “essentially hetero-normative constructions”, “emergent rubrics”, and “positionalities”, and then having to pretend in my review that I’d both mastered this tangled tongue and maintained sufficient will to live to pass constructive comment on it.

But once you have hacked your way through the impenetrable forest of the introduction (which counts “decentring the traditionally unmarked male” and “normatively naturalizing potencies” among its most egregious language crimes), you emerge into a glade of sunny clarity. For Men and Development: Politicizing Masculinities is no ordinary gender book – reading it will give you a new perspective on the social problems of the developing world.

The idea that gender equality is important to development is not new – efforts to educate women and girls are among foreign aid’s few relatively uncontested success stories, and microfinance programs, the development fad du jour, also mostly target women. Men, however, have largely been overlooked by practitioners and policy-makers; reading Men and Development, you begin to see what catastrophic effects this has had.

The problem lies in the expectations society has of men. In West Africa, for example, men are expected to set up a home, marry at least one wife, and accumulate and provide for children and other dependents. Those who fail to perform these duties forfeit the respect of their elders, women and their peers; they cannot become “real men”.

When the breadwinner role becomes impossible to fulfil – as it did for millions of men across Africa during the economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s – men have other facets of masculinity on which to draw in order to recover their self-esteem. Some of these alternative masculinities are positive – think of the black South Africans who responded to economic emasculation by adopting the role of fighter against oppression and joining the liberation struggle.

But many traditional expressions of manliness are socially destructive. Physical violence is the most obvious of these. Economic insecurity, as one of the Men and Development authors Gary Barker notes in an earlier paper, can prompt men to turn to violence to reaffirm their power – many South African men have joined criminal gangs, for example, while domestic violence becomes more common as unemployment rises.

Alcohol and sex are other appurtenances of maleness whose allure increases when men are faced with threats to their masculinity. Sex is unproblematic by itself, but if manhood must be proven by sexual voracity or by demonstrating dominance through sexual violence, the effects on both men’s and women’s health can be severe. Linked to this is the man-as-risk-taker paradigm. Chimaraoke Izugbara and Jerry Okal’s chapter on Malawi shows how fear-mongering HIV prevention campaigns urging abstention from sex have often led to an increase in risky sexual behaviour (such as sex with multiple partners and without condoms), as men react to the challenge to their sexual potency – a marker of manliness in Malawi as elsewhere – by demonstrating their fearlessness (another important marker).

There is a danger when given a new hammer, of course, of treating everything you see as a nail – at the cinema last weekend I couldn’t help viewing The Artist as an extended meditation on masculinity, for instance – but Men and Development makes a convincing case for viewing social phenomena through a gender-tinted lens. In Africa alone, the spread of HIV, the Rwandan genocide, Sierra Leone’s seemingly pointless civil war, the rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria, and no doubt many other events and trends can at least in part be attributed to threatened masculinities; as men are disempowered economically, politically or socially, they resort to harmful expressions of maleness to restore their pride and reassert their power.

Masculinities are constructed and sustained at all levels of society, from the family to the state. To date, most work to engage men in confronting harmful gender norms has focused on individuals and communities on the ground. Workshops held by groups such as Promundo in Brazil and Sonke Gender Justice in South Africa, for example, have helped reduce domestic violence, dissuade boys and men from engaging in risky sexual practices, and encourage men to question the patriarchal assumptions in which their attitudes to women are rooted. These programs endeavour to provide participants with positive alternative masculinities – to value their role as carers for family members, or as active community members, or as advocates for social justice (including gender equality) – so that when they feel that one aspect of their manhood is menaced, they have constructive outlets to turn to in order to restore their equilibrium.

But the state has a responsibility, too. Legal and institutional changes can embed or trigger cultural shifts, but in many cases the latter exacerbate gender inequality by entrenching harmful masculinity norms. As Andrea Cornwall notes in Men and Development, for example, laws that oblige divorced men to pay alimony without also obliging them to provide child care cement the notion that men should be breadwinners above all else, and that women should take responsibility for caring. Microfinance programs’ targeting of women reinforces the idea of the reckless, irresponsible man who cannot be trusted to invest in his family. And the criminalisation of sex workers’ clients, itself based on a misleading perception that all such men are perverted or violent, perpetuates the stereotype of men as aggressors and women as helpless victims.

The UK’s recent threat to withhold aid from Ghana if the latter continues to trample on the rights of gay men stands out as a rare example of a government challenging a gender norm (accepting homosexuality requires an admission that not all men conform to the heterosexual stereotype). In the book’s closing chapter, Alan Greig argues that such measures must become widespread, and that institutions at national and international levels should be consistently held to account for how their actions legitimise male dominance and sustain gender inequality. As Men and Development eloquently shows, however, it is not just all levels of society that must be engaged, but all genders. Half of the developing world’s population has been neglected in gender policy; this book is a timely call for a rethink.

I used to spend a lot of time arguing about big issues: trade liberalisation; industrialisation; national sovereignty.  Not that I’d necessarily want to go back to those days, but the nearest thing I could think of to anything that approaches that level of disagreement today is the spat between Jeff Sach’s gang and Michael Clemens’ gang about whether the Millennium villages project is working.  And it’s not even an argument about development policy or practice, but about research methods: essentially, if the project should have used the hugely fashionable randomised evaluation methodology, and identified a control group at the start to be able to see the impact that interventions are having compared to that control group. 

Important stuff, but surely not the be-all and end-all of the potential questions raised by this project.  Who, for example, is asking about the relative importance of improvements within rural areas and movement out of rural areas for development in the long term?  Who is asking about the limits of this kind of aid-based intervention in the absence of institutional and market changes at the national or global level? 

Randomised evaluations can tell you if your development project is likely to achieve its specified objectives among the target group. This has been a huge step forward for aid – knowing what works is better than throwing money at the latest fad because everyone says it works until it doesn’t.  I am a fan. But this method can’t tell you if a development strategy, of which this particular project is a part, is likely to be transformational for the economy in the long term, or what the effects might be on inequality, or indeed whether inequality is something you should worry about at all. 

Not that no one is asking these questions, but they’re no longer the bread and butter of development thinking.  This is partly because of a conscious push against the big ideas that were so hotly debated ten years ago.  Bill Easterly’s plea for people to do less planning and more, as he puts it, ‘searching’ has contributed to a fear of setting out an agenda for big change.  The focus on evaluation as the key tool for policy making is the logical next step – focus on what works now, not on bigger and inevitably vaguer questions about where you want things to go in the long run. 

But the lack of big ideas worries me (and I’m not the only one) and not just because I love a good argument. Policy making and decisions about resource allocation by governments, donors or NGOs, are not just a technical business.  It’s not a question of finding out what works and then doing it.  ‘What works’ for one group might not be what works for another.  Something might ‘work’ but still not be the best use of resources given the overall objectives of a community or of a country as a whole.  Someone really should be asking hard questions about the bigger picture.

It’s particularly disappointing that development thinkers seem to have given up on these questions just as the rest of the world starts to really address them.  British politicians love to talk about capitalism at the moment, and the media is full of debates about how wealth is created (or destroyed) and how it should be shared out.  The financial crisis and recession have opened up the space for new ideas and new thinking, but the micro-oriented development field hasn’t made much of this opportunity.

Small stuff is important.  But we shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that the problems, or the solutions, of development are purely technical ones.  The big questions haven’t gone away just because we’ve stopped talking about them.

If people in the Middle East could democratically choose what country they lived in, would they choose the one they are in now?

Amidst all the talk of an Arab Spring, the fragility of the Arab state is often forgotten.

Whereas developed countries are almost always the product of an organic, internally driven process, in the Middle East’s case, the countries are mostly the product of a British-French agreement made in 1916 (Sykes-Picot) that paid little attention to local sociopolitical realities. As a result, few possess the historical roots, social cohesion, and legitimacy necessary to nurture the complex institutions that are a prerequisite for development and democracy. On the contrary, most suffer from both sectarian divisions and weak government—the causes of state fragility.

As Michael Hudson, Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University, explained in his classic study of the “legitimacy shortage” in Arab politics:

A legitimate political order . . . has to be [based on] some consensus about national identity, some agreement about the boundaries of the political community, and some collective understanding of national priorities. If the population within given political boundaries is so deeply divided within itself on ethnic or class [or, for that matter, religious or clan] lines, or if the demands of a larger supranational community are compelling to some [significant] portion of it, then it is extremely difficult to develop a legitimate order. [page 389-90]

Without authoritative political structures endowed with ‘rightness’ and efficacity, political life is certain to be violent and unpredictable. [page 4]

As I explained in my book on fragile states, these two structural problems—political identity fragmentation and weak national institutions—reinforce each other in a vicious cycle, severely undermining the legitimacy of the state and leading to political orders that are highly unstable and hard to reform.

Not all Arab countries suffer from these problems. Egypt, for instance, has deep historical roots and is therefore relatively cohesive. Morocco, Tunisia, and many of the small Gulf emirates (with the obvious exception of Bahrain) are also in pretty good shape by this standard.

The situation is most acute in places such as Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq—all of which potentially face years of instability. Iraq has the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. Syria has five main groups—Sunni Arabs, Alawis, Christians, Kurds, and Druze—many of which have their own divisions. Libya has 140 tribes and clans. And none of these states have a robust government apparatus that can competently implement laws and regulations in an equitable, independent manner—which would reduce the tension between groups. Whatever capacity they had was—or is being—decimated by regime change.

Lebanon and Jordan are not necessarily stable, but in better condition. Residents of the former already know the dangers of sectarianism from the country’s long civil war—and therefore will work harder than others to avoid a repeat.

The real wild card in the region is Saudi Arabia. Although it is not a product of colonialism, the country does have religious and tribal divisions and a government that may be seen by some as illegitimate.

The social divisions, weak institutionalization, and artificiality that plague all these states begs the question that I posed at the top: If people in the Middle East could democratically choose what country they lived in, would they choose the one they are in now?

The ballot box has already produced two changes to the map in recent years. The West Bank and Gaza split up because of an election. Sudan has been divided by a referendum.

If the Kurds were given the right to choose, they would secede from Iraq (as well as from Syria, Iran, and Turkey). The same might hold true for the people of South Yemen (independent until 1990), eastern Saudi Arabia, and so on. Groups that have strong identities, have historically felt disadvantaged by their minority positions, and live in a relatively coherent and homogenous area pose the greatest risks to the unity of the region’s states.

One creative effort a few years back to identify how the Middle East might change if the people could choose their own country produced the above map.

Obviously, most of the changes suggested are not going to happen. The process would yield much bloodshed, destabilize neighboring countries, and disrupt oil supplies. Most powers inside and outside the region oppose changes to borders for precisely these reasons.

In some cases, however, if the transition could be done relatively peacefully (think Czechoslovakia, not Yugoslavia), the peoples of both the seceding and seceded from areas might be better off. Libyans, for instance, might have an easier time building a robust state if they were working with two or even three different entities, each of which would be much more cohesive than the country is in its current form.

Although democracy must remain the ultimate goal, strategies to help fragile states emerging from long periods of imposed stability must be highly flexible if they are to succeed. Inclusiveness in politics, economics, and culture need to take priority, especially during difficult transition periods. Finding mechanisms to increase the robustness and impartiality of crucial government institutions are key if the state is to gain any credibility. Although people clamor for fast transitions, their long-term interests may be better served by extending the process over many years.

The Arab Spring will take a long time to play out—and the challenges the return of history has brought to light will not be easy to overcome.

But what explains the reason why some developing countries possess so few independent organizations while others have a multitude?

Take Pakistan for instance. Whereas in Bangladesh, the former East Pakistan, NGOs have played such a prominent role that they have supplanted the state in some crucial areas, in Pakistan they are far less influential. Despite having 180 million people, the latter has relatively few important NGOs, think tanks, and independent monitoring organizations (IMOs), as pointed out by former ambassador to Pakistan William B. Milam in his book Bangladesh and Pakistan. Despite a generally positive government attitude (at least towards domestic organizations) and much growth in recent years, the number of important institutions pales in contrast to Bangladesh’s total.

There are some excellent organizations (such as Kashf), but there is nothing quite like BRAC, Grameen Bank, and the other huge Bangladeshi NGOs. There is also far less scale and diversity than in India.

The situation is more or less the same when it comes to think tanks, IMOs, and other entities that might monitor, advise, or pressure the government. There are just four or five respectable think tanks, all of which are pretty small. IMOs are so uncommon that members of a working group on state building in Pakistan I chaired in October could not identify a single one.

The weakness of independent organizations even extends to the political arena, where two family-based political parties dominate, and the judiciary, which is often more beholden to local clans and powerbrokers than the law.

Pakistan’s underdeveloped civil society contributes to the country’s flawed political economy and partly explains its low level of human development. Politicians and officials feel little pressure to perform because there is no organized entity able to hold them accountable. The country’s poor are worse off than Bangladesh’s across a large number of indicators even though Pakistan’s income per capita is much higher.

None of this is a reflection on the generosity of Pakistanis, who generally do well on international comparisons of giving. According to the Pakistan Center for Philanthropy, charitable contributions make up nearly 1 percent of GDP, higher than India’s 0.6 percent and not far off from totals recorded in much richer countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom. The rate of giving in Bangladesh is closer to India’s than to Pakistan’s.

But, a relatively small share of this money is going to build institutions that contribute to state building and social development. The poor may be gaining adequate relief from destitution—the streets of Pakistan have far fewer beggars than India—in ways that did little to change the situations.

It is also not a reflection on the creativity of Pakistanis. There are some very innovative and successful civil society projects and NGOs in the country, but these are generally small in size and not well known beyond their immediate area of impact. They have contributed to Pakistan’s development, but not on the same scale as their larger brethren in other countries.

What then explains the weakness of the NGO sector in Pakistan?

One possibility might be the nature of Pakistani society. As Anatol Lieven describes in Pakistan: A Hard Country:

Society is strong above all in the form of the kinship networks which are by far the most important foci of most people’s loyalty. . . . the crucial question for Pakistan . . . is whether it is possible to create loyalties and ethics which transcend those of loyalty to kin.

Societies dominated by clans are more inclined to look to personal relationships for their needs and giving, seeing all impersonal institutions as being untrustworthy. Better to depend on someone you know than an organization run by people you do not know no matter how worthy the latter may seem.

Another possibility is the nature of the institutions that do spring up. As Akbar Zaidi explains in Economic and Political Weekly (subscription required):

Due to the lack of institutional development and institutional deepening, Pakistan’s macro and micro trajectory and development are highly dependent on the whims and fancies of the individual who happens to be in charge, whether at the national/country level, or as the head of a research centre or a public institution. . . .

Dynamic individuals may create innovative projects that have a real impact in a specific area, but unless they can develop a strong organization they are unlikely to ever be able to scale up to cover a large area.

The importance of individuals instead of organizations also contributes to the fragmentation of civil society, weakening its ability to bring about change. In Pakistan’s case, civil society tends to be focused on single issues (such as certain development issues or human rights goals) whereas the country really needs a comprehensive approach to development (that would, for instance, seek to promote both development and rights in an integrated fashion).

Zaidi continues:

For civil society in Pakistan . . . the pursuit of democratic ideals is not a necessary and defining condition. . . . Many of them are the state’s partners, acquiring mutual benefits of some kind or the other. . . Development groups . . . are often co-opted by institutions of the state to become the latter’s “advisors” winning lucrative contracts and getting the publicity they need to further their credentials.

Civil society that cannot exist independent of the state, that hold values that prevent it from challenging those in power (whether for ideological or practical reasons), or that cater to the needs of the elite (as may be the case for some women’s groups in Pakistan) will be limited in its ability to promote progressive change.

A third reason might be the army’s long-standing domination of the political system. During General Zia-ul-Haq’s military dictatorship (1977-1988), for instance, the state sought to eliminate or discredit NGOs that it saw as a threat, leaving Pakistan’s civil society in a state of disarray. Men in uniform have ruled the country directly for roughly half of its existence, and indirectly for much of the rest of the time.

A fourth possibility is the heterogeneity of the country. Pakistan has much greater ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity than Bangladesh, making it more difficult for NGOs that do well in one place to expand elsewhere. Needs (including those related to management and dealing with officials) vary between regions, and even within them. India is also very diverse, but it is in some important ways more cohesive than Pakistan, having more established norms of governance and a more integrated elite.

Whatever the cause (and I welcome reader input on the explanation), this is one area where donors should be playing an important role.

Investing much more in researching, documenting, and building up the capacity of the more successful NGOs (whether directly or through the establishment of a local organization to do so) such that they could increase their reach and scale holds much promise. The better these are at management, raising funds from non-state actors, and performing their various tasks, the more influential and independent they will become, and the more likely they will grow into nationwide organizations on the scale of BRAC or Grameen Bank.

Establishing new NGOs in a few critical areas should also be a priority.

For instance, a think tank focused on increasing economic growth (as suggested to me by Haroon Sharif of DFID) could help promote policies (through research, lobbying, media relations, etc.) to achieve this aim.

An IMO focused on gathering and analyzing information related to one aspect of government service (such as education) would shed much needed light on the performance of the state, providing Pakistanis with more tools to hold leaders accountable.

An organization focused on building institutions that cater to the poor, such as the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund, could make society more inclusive.

There are also many organizational models that have worked in India and Bangladesh that could be replicated in Pakistan.

Donors must, however, remember the necessity of nurturing the independence of these organizations if they genuinely want to help them grow. NGOs dependent on donors are unlikely to ever develop the capacity and relevance to make real impacts on their societies. The focus should be on building up organizations run by Pakistanis, fully funded by Pakistanis, and geared to meeting the needs of Pakistan.

* * *

NGOs are not a panacea. Despite the presence of strong civil society actors, corruption has reached alarming proportions in Bangladesh and India, and neither state has a government that is highly responsive to the needs of citizens, especially when they are poor. In Bangladesh’s case, an overdeveloped NGO sector may actually be contributing to the country’s abysmal governance by relieving the state of many of its responsibilities.

They are, however, a crucial element in a much larger system of elements that determine how development oriented a society and state will be. And they are pretty inexpensive to fund, especially given the limited alternative ways to influence the political economy and social development of a country like Pakistan.

Promoting NGOs that were strongly rooted in Pakistan society and eventually mostly self-funding and independent of both the state and foreign actors would ensure the maximum impact at the lowest cost. A lot could be accomplished with a relatively small sum of money, especially when compared to the total budgets allocated by Western governments to aiding Pakistan. $100 million, for instance, could help launch or strengthen a series of independent institutions. This is but one-fifteenth of USAID’s annual allocation for the country.

The biggest challenge may be managerial—some aid agencies are not entrepreneurial enough for these types of projects. But groups such as International Development Research Centre are.

Donors who want to help Pakistan and other fragile states would do well to make use of the NGO sector in a strategic way.

The above is based on my work chairing the working group on State Building in Pakistan during the 2011 Global Economic Symposium.

In recent years, the word ‘globalisation’ has become synonymous with a whole range of international ills.  Financial globalisation has been particularly maligned.  Once hailed as the solution to poverty and underdevelopment, it is now blamed for the unfettered flow of ‘hot’ capital around the world, the build-up of credit and asset bubbles and the creation of unsustainable global imbalances that have led to dangerous levels of volatility in the global economy.  But are either of these views fair?  Do we expect too much from globalisation, or do we credit it too little?

Let’s start with the positives.  Over the last century, globalisation – the faster and cheaper flow of goods, services, capital, people and ideas around the world – has helped to lift millions out of poverty.  It has enabled developing countries abundant in resources and manpower to generate remarkable rates of growth, while in the developed world it has brought down the cost of consumer goods, stimulated innovation in many sectors and created new markets for goods and services.  Globalisation has provided unprecedented opportunities for people to live and work abroad, and helped to spread acceptance of universal values such as democracy, freedom and human rights.

Yet in spite of these achievements, globalisation has manifestly failed to deliver security and prosperity for all.  Inequality may have fallen between countries over the last thirty years, but it has risen within them as an ever smaller elite have captured most of the gains associated with technological progress.  Global competition has spurred huge productivity increases in many industries, but has also put serious pressure on jobs and wages.  These problems were evident before the global financial crisis, but have been magnified and exacerbated by it.  In 2003, a Eurobarometer survey found that 60 per cent of Brits were in favour of globalisation, compared to 27 per cent who were opposed.  By 2010, just 30 per cent of UK respondents to a YouGov poll thought that globalisation was good for the British economy, against 34 per cent who thought it was bad (with the rest being indifferent or unsure).

Many see globalisation as an unstoppable force that cannot be managed or reversed, and worry about the dislocation and insecurity that comes with rapid integration of nation states into the global economy.  These fears are both understandable and legitimate.  However, if we look at the actual levels of interconnectedness between people and countries, it is clear that we have not yet reached Thomas Friedman’s ‘flat’ world in which the integration of markets, nation-states, and technologies is deep and inexorable. For example, just one per cent of letters sent by mail cross national borders, while less than two per cent of phone minutes involve international calls.  Just two per cent of all university students are individuals studying abroad. Even trade integration is less intense than might be assumed, with the proportion of goods and services exported across national borders having reached a high point of 29 per cent of global GDP in 2008 before falling to 23 per cent the following year.

While global economic forces are playing an increasingly direct role in the lives of individuals, this does not take away the fundamental agency of nations, governments and their people.  Globalisation is best viewed as a dynamic process rather than an end in and of itself, and one which can be shaped to deliver progressive aims of sustainable growth, rising prosperity and receding inequality for all.  But these outcomes are by no means guaranteed.  They require bold and sustained action by policymakers round the world, at a time when the temptation to retreat into protectionist policies is increasingly powerful.  They also mean focusing not just on how to boost exports and growth, but on how to protect those who are most vulnerable to the shocks caused by global economic change.

To think through the decisions and the tradeoffs involved in these challenges, IPPR has been conducting a major project on the future of globalisation, led by Peter Mandelson.  Today, we publish our final report, The Third Wave of Globalisation.  Over the past year, my colleague Will Straw and I have travelled with Lord Mandelson to Brazil, China, India and Germany, learning about how these countries are responding to globalisation from policymakers, business leaders and academics.  In the UK, we visited industrialists and business owners in Newcastle to talk about changing ways of doing business, and students in Hartlepool to hear how global economic change is affecting their lives aspirations.  The message from these conversations was clear:  globalisation has the potential to improve living standards around the world, but only if it is made to work much better than it has in recent years.

Our report sets out a number of recommendations for how this might be done, including international actions to prevent the renewed build-up of current account imbalances, the volatility of short-term capital flows and a race to the bottom on wages and corporation taxes, and domestic reforms to create more strategic industrial strategies, smarter skills policies, and welfare systems that protect people when they are most in need of assistance, such as when they lose their job.  Together, we hope that these serve to reaffirm the value of a well-managed global system in which greater integration is welcomed rather than feared.

Mexico, like many places around the world, has numerous immensely imaginative one-liners to characterize corruption. Here is a sample:

• “El que no transa, no avanza” (“Whoever doesn’t trick or cheat, gets nowhere”)
• “No roba, pero se le pega el dinero” (“He doesn’t steal, but money sticks to him”
• “Fulano de tal es honesto, pero honesto, honesto, honesto, ¿quién sabe?” (“So-and-so is honest; but honest, honest, honest, who knows?”
• “Político pobre, pobre político” (“A politician in poverty is a poor politician”)
• “No les pido que me den, sólo que me pongan donde hay” (“I am not asking for money, just to be appointed where I can get some”)
• “Vivir fuera del presupuesto es vivir en el error” (“To live outside the federal budget is to live in error”)
• “Amistad que no se refleja en la nómina no es amistad” (“A friendship that is not reflected in the payroll is no friendship at all”)
• “Con dinero baila el perro, si está amaestrado” (“Properly paid and trained, a dog will dance”)
• “No les cambies las ideas, cambiales los ingresos” (Don’t bother to change their ideas, just change their incomes”)

Source: Manana Forever?: Mexico and the Mexicans

Good news: Ban Ki-moon will save Antarctica!

Ban Ki-moon has just set out his plans for his second five year term. He is not unambitious:

“Today I want to share with you an action agenda for the coming five years,” he told the Assembly as he returned to the rostrum to brief Member States on his vision for his second term.

“A plan to make the most of the opportunities before us. A plan to help create a safer, more secure, more sustainable, more equitable future. A plan to build the future we want,” he said.

The “action agenda” presented today describes specific measures regarding each of the five imperatives, including an unprecedented campaign to wipe out five of the world’s major killers – malaria, polio, paediatric HIV infections, maternal and neonatal tetanus, and measles.

Mr. Ban also announced that the UN will work with Member States to make Antarctica a World Nature Preserve and that he will appoint a new special representative for youth.

Hm… a year ago, I published an article in which I noted that “Ban has oscillated between bouts of fatalism about the UN’s decline and curious bursts of overheated rhetoric about its importance.”  We seem to be in one the latter periods:

“Waves of change are surging around us,” he told the Assembly. “If we navigate wisely, we can create a more secure and sustainable future for all. The United Nations is the ship to navigate these waters…

“We are the venue for partnerships and action. Now is our moment. Now is the time to create the future we want,” he stated.

Interestingly, Ban didn’t use the words “South Sudan” once in his main speech (he nodded to it in a post-speech press conference) despite the evidence that the country may be falling apart on the UN’s watch.  But then he didn’t mention Syria either.  Still, he didn’t overlook the UN’s crisis management operations completely:

Our operations build bridges — literally and among communities.

Clever, huh?