An interesting weak signal from Beijing:

Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer by revenue, plans to increase the use of robots in its factories 100-fold to 1m within three years, according to Terry Gou, chairman and chief executive. The move underlines the drastic changes China-based manufacturers are forced to make as the country’s unlimited supply of cheap labour is running out [...]

Foxconn, which makes iPhones and iPads for Apple and other electronic gadgets for more than a dozen branded vendors, has said before that it will increase automated production. But Mr Gou outlined the scale of the changes for the first time in a speech on Friday at a party organised for workers at its largest plant in Shenzhen.

According to people in the audience, the chief executive said the group currently uses just 10,000 robots, but that number would increase to 300,000 next year and to 1m in three years. The numbers are likely to cause jitters among local governments in China as several provinces have set high hopes on the group, China’s biggest employer, to create jobs for their young people.

If this is an indication of things to come, then it answers one of the questions I wondered about in my 2020 Development Futures report in January this year, in which I speculated on whether we’d see the phenomenon of jobless growth arriving in the emerging economies:

In some developed economies (and especially the US), research suggests that job opportunities are increasingly being polarised into high and low skill jobs, while middle class jobs are disappearing due to “automation of routine work and, to a smaller extent, the international integration of labour markets through trade and, more recently, offshoring”. Meanwhile, data also show that while more women are entering the global labour force, the ‘gender gap’ on income and quality of work is widening between women and men. These trends raise a number of critical uncertainties for employment and development to 2020.

If automation of routine work genuinely is a more significant factor in developed economy job polarization than international trade or offshoring, then the implication is that developing economies may increasingly also fall prey to job polarisation as new technologies emerge and become competitive with human labour between now and 2020. Chinese manufacturing and Indian service industry jobs could increasingly be replaced by technology, for example, and find their existing rates of inequality exacerbated still  further.

As Colum Lynch notes,  Ban Ki-moon has been showered with “glowing plaudits” since he won a second term as UN Secretary-General last week. In a short memo to Ban published yesterday, Bruce Jones and I offer our own (slightly qualified) praise:

Dear Secretary-General,

Congratulations. You have not only won a second five-year term at the United Nations, but you also won with a minimum of fuss. In a month in which the Security Council has been rocked by disputes over Syria, all fifteen members backed you. Last week, the General Assembly gave you unanimous support.

You’ve had a lot of critics since you took office in 2007. They’ve called you a poor manager and an uninspiring public figure. Some will doubtless grumble that your success this month reflected your capacity to avoid controversies with all the major powers. But politics is politics and a win is a win. You have also taken a courageous and consistent stance in favor of the Arab Spring, belying your reputation for caution.

OK, that’s not exactly “whoop whoop, go Ban, yippe-aye-yea!” But as Bruce and I go on to point out, Ban has no time to rest on his laurels:

The top three immediate concerns are Libya, the wider Middle East and Sudan. If you fumble on any one of these, you’ll risk being written off as a lame-duck Secretary-General rather fast:

• Libya: the anti-Gaddafi coalition has asked you to plan for post-conflict recovery, and this is already underway. There’s a high chance that you’ll end up having to manage a very messy post-conflict situation, and while nobody wants to turn Libya into another Kosovo a fairly hefty peacekeeping force could be required to restore order. There are good models out there – think of the way the U.N. responded in southern Lebanon in summer 2006, mobilizing a serious force within a week. At a minimum, the U.N. may have to deploy a sizeable civilian political mission to oversee a transition to democracy as it did in Afghanistan. The U.N. is short of good Arabists and deep expertise on Libya. You’ll need to invest personally in ensuring that the U.N. deploys a credible mission.

• The wider Middle East: beyond Libya, there’s potentially huge demand for the U.N.’s services in mediation, electoral assistance and constitutional reforms across the wider Middle East. Six months from now there could be U.N. assistance missions in Yemen and Syria as well as Libya. But again the lack of qualified U.N. personnel is a problem. In most Arab countries, U.N. development officials worked hand-in-glove with the pre-revolutionary regimes. The sheer speed with which events are unfolding in the region is also difficult for the U.N. bureaucracy to keep up with (although it’s hardly unique in that). You need to think about restructuring the organization’s presence across the Middle East and North Africa, possibly under some sort of regional presence or a super-envoy mandated with ensuring that the U.N. can respond fast to requests for assistance.

• Sudan: at the start of the year, the U.N. oversaw a successful independence referendum in South Sudan, which will achieve statehood in July. But violence on the border between North and South Sudan has intensified, the North has launched a separate and vicious campaign against rebels in the Nuba Mountains and South Sudan’s infrastructure is in an appalling state. You can take a good chunk of the credit for the successful referendum. But you must now take responsibility for ensuring that the new South Sudanese state gets effective governance assistance and that U.N. troops are sufficiently well-armed to deter further violent flare-ups. It’s pretty hard to explain why the international community is spending almost $1,000,000,000 maintaining troops in Sudan if they can’t respond to even small flare-ups, let alone forestall another major round of violence. Sudan is also a test case for your proposed reforms on civilian staffing – seeing those implemented will require you to personally back your chosen SRSG in taking a creative, flexible approach. You can and should challenge the member states to support you on this.

Ban has lots of other issues to tackle over the next three years (climate change, the MDGs, food scarcity, you name it) but he needs to get a grip on these immediate crises if he is to have the credibility to tackle other problems.

Francis Fukuyama has got a lot of attention for his new book The Origins of Political Order.  He’s still so closely associated with having announced the “end of history” in the early 1990s (a complex idea that’s more often  cited than understood) people are struck that he’s decided to go back to the beginning, tracing the evolution of political order in different societies from prehistory to the French Revolution.  As I argue in a new review for The National, “this is a remarkably old-fashioned project”:

In tracing the highways and byways of human development, Fukuyama appears far more interested in probing the classics of political philosophy and sociology than current development theory. The majority of books in the bibliography date from before 2000, and the argument includes detailed discussions of Thomas Hobbes, Karl Marx, Max Weber and Friedrich von Hayek. With some authors, this might be dismissed as a tokenistic tour through “Great Books of Political Theory”. But Fukuyama embraces such non-household names as “the great English jurist Sir Edward Coke”. As has been said of another Coke, this is the real thing.

But there are obvious differences between this book and its intellectual forebears:

Marx apparently failed to grasp huge differences between ancient Indian and Chinese societies, lumping them together under the headline of “Oriental despotism”. Weber failed to see just how far ancient Chinese society advanced.

As his dismissals of Marx and Weber suggest, Fukuyama does not treat the histories of the great Asian empires as an adjunct to “the rise of the West”. He notes at the outset that he will downplay Greece and Rome. Socrates and Aristotle make only cameo appearances. By contrast, Fukuyama treats Confucianism and Hindu thought in considerable detail.

Does this mean that Fukuyama, once associated with the Project for a New American Century, is giving up on the West? Not so. As I argue in the review, his strategy is to cast more light on non-Western societies and ideas so to emphasize the enduring strength of Western political models:

India, Fukuyama posits fairly early on, has yet to escape from the norms of its pre-colonial politics. Caste groups and kin ties were so crucial to its development – and continue to play a significant role today – that the country remains difficult to unite.

If that’s bad news for Delhi, what about Beijing? Fukuyama argues on the very last page of The Origins of Political Order that today’s Chinese system bears the hallmarks of its imperial predecessors, with power concentrated in the centre and too little accountability.

“An authoritarian system can periodically run rings around a liberal democratic one under good leadership,” he argues, clearly thinking of today’s Sino-American competition, but at the same time it will always be in peril of slipping into political decay. In spite of Fukuyama’s attention to the histories of today’s Asian powers, his message is clear: if you want to get ahead in today’s global competition, it’s still best to refer to the ideas that shaped the West.

So this is good reading not only in its own right (and it’s a stimulating work of history and ideas) but also intellectual material for those who in the West who still believe that, as Barack Obama said in London, “the time for our leadership is now”…

Everybody say...aaah!

Horrific new data released by the latest census in India and analysed on the Guardian’s development blog shows that things are getting worse for girls.  The ratio of girls to boys at birth has fallen from 927 girls per 1000 boys in 2001, to 914 girls per 1000 boys today.  In the worst district, the ratio is 774 girls to 1000 boys.  Usually you’d expect about 950 girls per 1000 boys. That adds up to 15 million girls not born in India in the last 10 years.

Wealth and urbanisation aren’t changing this – Mumbai’s figures are worse than the national average.  They might even be making it worse, since medical progress, through the easy availabilty of ultrasound, makes it easier to identify girls and safer abortions reduce the risk of getting rid of them.

This is a tragedy, an abuse of just about all the rights I can think of, and a pretty horrific illustration of how new technology can sometimes serve outmoded and repressive ideologies rather than contribute to their overthrow, as the technological optimists would have it. 

But it’s also, possibly, storing up big economic problems for the future – for all of us.  Research in China, where the ratio is even worse, at about 819 girls per 1000 boys, finds an interesting link between the one-child policy, the preference for boys, and high savings rates.  It goes like this: there are more boys than girls.  When the boys grow up, they are competing over the limited number of girls in the marriage market, and so their parents give them a helping hand by saving up for a nice flat, a nice car (yep, this stuff really does work, like it or not). The authors show that Chinese savings rates shot up in around 2002, when the generation where boys really outnumbered girls reached the age when they started to think about marriage, and that savings rates are higher in areas where the gender ratio is most skewed.  They argue that this effect explains about half of China’s high savings rate.

Now, as I’m sure all the well-informed readers of this blog will know, the high rate of savings in China was one of the factors causing the global imbalances which were one of the contributors to the financial crisis. 

So there you have it.  Women’s rights are good for financial stability.  Perhaps a cause that the likely first woman head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, would like to take up?

I’m flattered that David Miliband has quoted me in speech on Europe he gave in Poland.  The former Foreign Secretary believes that “America’s attention today is on the home front” while China is cautious about asserting itself on foreign policy issues.

So Europe faces a choice. Breathe a sigh of relief that the world is not being carved up by others, and become what Richard Gowan has called a “strategic suburbia: a collection of small, quiet and obsessively inward-looking communities suspicious of the outside world” ; or recognise that nature abhors a vacuum, and move forward into it?

It’s always nice to be cited, and Miliband’s speech is a serious and well-argued plea for “a vision of Europe in the world based on clear ideals, hard heads, and real delivery.”  But I have to quibble with his argument that the EU should be trying to fill a global vacuum created by American exhaustion and Chinese caution.

In the piece Miliband cites, published by E!Sharp last month, my case is that EU”s economic woes and its desire for investment from China, India and other emerging powers create the conditions for a “Scramble for Europe”.  This would involve the BRICs buying influence in the EU, making it harder and harder for European leaders to develop and defend independent foreign policy positions:

Unless the major emerging economies suffer significant setbacks in the years ahead – by no means impossible – they should have little difficulty dividing and ruling in Europe. It’s possible to imagine a scenario ten years from now in which the UK regularly stands up for India’s interests in the EU while France and Germany speak for China. That won’t be a problem if Sino-Indian relations are stable – but if the two Asian giants are in a state economic or strategic tension, their friends in the EU might also find themselves at odds.

This hardly means that French or British troops will rush off to fight on different sides in a Himalayan war. Yet, as Russia has shown through its energy diplomacy over the last decade, it’s not difficult for outside powers to manipulate individual European governments, making it well-nigh impossible to define coherent EU positions. In 2020, the greatest potentates in Brussels may be the Chinese, Brazilian ambassadors – alongside their U.S. and Russian counterparts – lobbying against each others’ interests.

If European governments coordinate their economic and foreign policies more effectively, they may be able to play the rising powers off against each, balancing India’s influence against China’s or Brazil’s. But EU policy-makers should not imagine that they can somehow rake in cash from Asia and Latin America yet insulate themselves from competition between the emerging powers and the U.S. for global influence.

Strategic irrelevance is not an option. Europe’s ability to shape the outside world may be shrinking, but that doesn’t mean that outsiders will refrain from shaping European politics to suit their needs.

So, whereas David Miliband sees the EU filling a vacuum in global affairs left by the U.S. and China, my concern is that China and other powers will rush in and fill the political-economic vacuum that the EU itself could so easily become…

I’ve been struck by a lot of thought provoking stuff in the Economist over the last couple weeks on China suggesting greater global risks in the near future due to three things (health warning – I am not a China expert):

1. China’s reserves (aka 50% of the global imbalances)

These continue to grow: China now has $3 trillion which enough to buy the debt of struggling debt-laden, Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain AND have enough left over to buy Microsoft, Google, IBM and Apple AND all the real estate in Manhattan and Washington AND the 50 most valuable sports teams or alternatively China could buy all the gold in the world plus all US military equipment and have a $1trillion to spare.

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ECFR and the Asia Centre have a new edition of China Analysis just out which is on the question of whether China has become too bold in its dealings with the rest of the world – and focuses, rather intriguingly, on some of the apparently quite charged debates that Chinese policymakers are having among themselves on this theme.

Some of the key themes to emerge, they say, are:

• Alarm about a trend towards triumphalism and confrontational behaviour in dealing with both the USA and Asian states over the past year, and the belief in some quarters that “2010 was unequivocally a year of losses for China,” during which its relationships with everyone – except the Europeans and North Korea – deteriorated 
   
• Concern that Chinese insensitivity might encourage other countries to form balancing coalitions against China – noting, for example, astute US exploitation of Beijing’s recent disputes with neighbours, for example over the South China Sea
   
• A sense that Chinese foreign policy has become internally divisive because nobody is driving it – not even the foreign ministry
   
• An unprecedented degree of confidence in the inevitability of China’s rise, despite its foreign policy problems; a feeling that China’s future on the world stage will be determined by its own choices, rather than by anyone else

Download the pdf here.

My post earlier today about whether or not rising powers like Brazil, India and China might help mount a UN peace operation in post-Gaddafi Libya has drawn some interesting, if robustly negative, responses.  “Pragmatic Desi”, an Indian expert who had dismissed my idea out-of-hand, argued that I overestimate the readiness of the BRICs: “India (& even China) still consider themselves to be consumers of geo-political stability, not providers of it.”  David Bosco of FP concurs:

I very much doubt that BRIC countries do feel the obligation [to push for peace in Libya] that [Gowan] describes; after all, the Security Council calls on people to do all sorts of things all the time without asking or expecting Council members to provide resources to ensure that they happen (though I do agree that Council members should feel a much greater sense of obligation to give meaning to the body’s entreaties). More broadly, my sense is that the BRICs view the entire response to Libya (including Resolution 1970, which they supported) as Western-driven and are not particularly invested in a particular outcome.

But let’s say the BRICS were willing to provide military observers to police a political transition. Would the West feel comfortable handing off what was essentially a war for human rights to countries that have a very different take on that concept?

David has consistently argued - since at least 25 February - that the emerging powers have decided to take a ”you bomb if you want to, we’ll just watch” sort of approach to the Libyan crisis.  After the BRICs abstained on Security Council Resolution 1973 – the basis for bombing – he offered this explanation for their ambivalence:

First, they didn’t care all that much and they didn’t want to use up diplomatic capital resisting strong Western pressure for intervention. Second, and more deviously, they may have liked the idea of the West spending time and resources in Libya. They knew the West wouldn’t intervene absent a Council resolution and so they abstained in order to induce an intervention they calculated would drain resources and open up the West to the very kind of criticism they’re now happily dishing out.

I suspect there’s more than a grain of truth in this analysis. But if so, I’d suggest that politicians and planners in Delhi and Beijing in particular are failing to grasp the full meaning of events in the Middle East for them. Back in early March I made the following argument in a piece for Abu Dhabi’s The National:

China and India are both significant customers for Libyan oil and gas, and roughly 30,000 Chinese citizens and 20,000 Indians lived in Libya before the troubles began. Last month, New Delhi ordered warships to the Mediterranean to rescue its nationals, while Beijing organised similar evacuations.

Historians may come to see the Libyan crisis as a pivotal moment in China and India’s rise as global powers. There has recently been copious commentary about the new Asian economic superpowers’ investments in Africa and the Middle East – and criticism of their ties to unstable leaders such as Sudan’s Omar al Bashir and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. They have rarely paid a political price for these risky relationships.

Yet Libya’s implosion has shown how India and China’s expanding economic presence makes them vulnerable to the fall-out from far-away events. Ten years ago, a conflict in the southern Mediterranean would have been dismissed as something for the US and Europeans to resolve. But as the fighting in Libya threatens economic recovery elsewhere, it quickly became a global problem. The Asian powers’ reliance on Middle Eastern oil meant that they had to be involved in stemming the crisis.

David may be right that China and India (not to mention Brazil and Russia) are failing to address the Libyan crises on these terms. But even if this may keep them out of trouble for the time being, it may be a strategic mistake in the longer term. By failing to get involved in crisis resolution at this stage, the BRICS are arguably missing the chance to gain a stronger strategic foothold in the Middle East. My guess is that, if China and India had rushed forward to help out over Libya, cash-strapped Western powers would have welcomed their support.  Are the BRICS wasting a good crisis?

The earthquake and tsunami in Japan have important implications for energy policy – partly, of course for nuclear, but also for oil, gas and coal too. Three initial observations:

First, the immediate nuclear issues. The media hasn’t exactly played a blinder at walking the public through a quick course in reactor design 101, so bravo to Nature for pulling together this excellent primer. Here’s the layout of the BWR design installed at Fukushima, and a succint description of what went wrong and how:

…without emergency cooling, the temperature at the core of both reactors began to rise. As it did, what water that remained began to boil off, increasing the pressure inside the pellet-shape pod.

When temperatures reached around a thousand degrees Celsius, the zirconium alloy holding the fuel pellets probably began to melt or split apart. As it did, it reacted with the steam and created hydrogen gas, which is highly volatile. Operators may or may not have known what was happening when they decided to release some of the pressure from Unit 1 on Saturday. The hydrogen apparently caused a massive explosion which blew the roof off of the fuel hall, though the reactor’s outer containment vessel appears to have remained in tact (see diagram).

If, as it appears, the zirconium came apart, then some of the uranium and plutonium pellets in the fuel rods may have also melted and sunk to the bottom of the pressure vessel. In that case, the cores of units 1 and 3 are now a volatile test tube filled with radioactive fuel, melted zirconium and water.

The real danger is the melted fuel. If enough melted fuel gathers at the bottom of the reactor, it could burn through the concrete containment vessel. In a worse case scenario, the fuel could again gather to form a critical mass outside the fuel assembly. The loose fuel would restart the power-producing reactions, but in a completely uncontrolled way. This, if it happened, would lead to a full-scale nuclear meltdown.

For detailed and technically sound updates of what’s currently happening at Fukushima, the go-to site is World Nuclear News.

Second, what it means for commodity prices – above all oil, which was, of course, spiking strongly last week amid concerns about risks to production in Libya and the wider Middle East. The immediate impact has been a sharp drop in prices, to $99 a barrel according to AP (though Brent is still up at $112): AP continues that,

Three of Japan’s five largest refineries have been shut down, which will immediately crimp demand for crude. Japan is the world’s third-largest crude consumer at 4.5 million barrel a day, the second-largest net oil importer and the biggest importer of liquefied natural gas and coal.

That’s consistent with the prediction made earlier today by the FT’s Commodities Editor Javier Blas, who reckoned that

The impact of the disaster will drive prices lower in the very short term as Japanese economic activity comes to a halt – big companies such as carmakers have said they will not open on Monday, and with the country’s power supply severely disrupted, some others – particularly big electricity consumers – may not be able to open even if they try.

But, he continues,

Over the medium term, Japan is going to need huge amounts of commodities to rebuild the areas hit by the quake and tsunami. This will boost Asia’s regional demand. Besides, global energy markets are braced for a big shake-up as Japan replaces a large chunk of its nuclear power capacity – if not all of it, if Tokyo is forced to undertake big safety checks after serious problems in two of the country’s reactors – with electricity generated by burning oil, natural gas and coal…

…The International Energy Agency, the western countries’ oil watchdog, estimates that it takes about 38.8 barrels of crude oil to replace 1MW of idled nuclear power generation capacity in Japan. If the country were to replace its missing nuclear capacity with oil alone, it would have to import a further 375,000 barrels a day, on top of expected purchases this year of about 4.25m b/d. Japan is more likely to opt for a combination of oil, LNG and thermal coal, however.

Third, to pick up from where Javier leaves off, there are the longer term questions. Is the world about to back away from nuclear power (as, for instance, David Pilling suggests) – and if so, what will pick up the slack?

My own guess is that the prospects of such a global U-turn on nuclear power will recede - if the primary containment layers hold. That would allow the nuclear industry to argue, as the media moves on to other stories, that a) this was a freak event in an unusually seismically active zone and that b) even then, the reactor design prevented disaster. Whether those arguments really stack up is, of course, another question.

But if we do see a global retreat from nuclear, then the question of what new global fuel mix we head towards – and above all, the balance between natural gas and coal – will be of absolutely crucial importance to climate change, given coal’s far higher carbon intensity. But either way, emissions would rise strongly, given that nuclear is (for all its other issues) carbon-free.

There’s a new paper out from the Washington-based Centre for Global Development, on the ever declining number of poor countries.

Moss and Leo estimate that more than half of the 68 countries currently eligible for concessional World Bank lending (under the IDA -the International Development Association) will ‘graduate’ by 2025.

Most (80%) of the remaining countries eligible for concessional World Bank lending will be sub-Saharan African countries (25 of 31). The only non-African countries will be Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, Haiti, and Timor-Leste. Countries currently defined as fragile will account for sixty percent (18 of 31 countries) of the countries.

In a recent post one of the authors, Todd Moss suggests that aid agencies as currently orientated are not ready for the world of non-aid tools and global public goods that flow from the decline in poor countries, new donors and weak public support for large increases in aid budgets (UK aside maybe).

I couldn’t agree more – and as they note the implications for the aid system are enormous.

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Nearly two years ago I had warned on this blog of the deep risks linked to China’s (then-widely-praised) fiscal stimulus and financial easing measures, which while displaying early signs of efficacy also reinforced the structural imbalances at the source of China’s economic vulnerabilities and environmental ills (see my earlier blog post here).  I pointed out that much of the RMB 1 trillion (GBP 100 billion) stimulus spend and an even larger amount in bank lending was being funneled into energy-intensive manufacturing and export-oriented sectors already plagued by overcapacity, even as global demand was dropping off (hence dimming prospects for Chinese exports).

In a follow up post later that year (see the post here) I again highlighted concerns about the sustainability of the stimulus and pointed to the environmentally detrimental consequences of the fiscal and credit ‘binge’, noting that the recovery was unlikely to be nearly as ‘green’ as many pundits at the time – including analysts at HSBC – had made it to be (NB: HSBC were so gung-ho as to speak of a ‘New Green Deal’ in China. See their report here), and notwithstanding China’s pledge to join other G20 leaders in using fiscal stimulus programs to build a “resilient, sustainable, and green recovery.” I lamented that the government had missed the opportunity of a massive counter-cyclical boost to steer the economy on to a more equitable and sustainable growth path powered by domestic demand.

Now finally, Premier Wen has come clean on the fragility of the recovery. During a recent online chat with netizens ahead of the meeting of China’s congress, Wen explained that the government would reduce its growth target down a percentage point to 7% (GDP growth was 10.3% last year) in order to check inflationary pressures and mitigate the environmental and socially adverse consequences of runaway growth fueled by the stimulus. In the interview, he counseled that:

“We must not any longer sacrifice the environment for the sake of rapid growth and reckless roll-outs, as that would result in unsustainable growth featuring industrial overcapacity and intensive resource consumption”

He further noted that China must become more self-sustainable by increasing domestic consumption and reducing its reliance on exports and investment. He cautioned that:

[continuing on the current path] will lead to production capacity gluts and deepening pressure on the environment and resources so that economic development will be unsustainable.

Mr. Wen’s online interview was held against the backdrop of widespread public dissatisfaction with soaring inflation and a call for Chinese “Jasmine rallies” – a reference to the Jasmine revolution in Tunisia which set of a domino of unrest through the Middle East.

The UN this week announced a June MDG review meeting in Tokyo. This is the conference that Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan at the MDGs Summit proposed that Japan convene in 2011 (see page 4, paragraph 1 of his speech).

One thing it may or may not discuss (depending on who you speak to) is what might replace the MDGs in 2015 which is likely to be one of the big global development policy debate of the next few years.

At the MDG summit last September the outcome document requested the President of the UN general assembly to organise a ‘special event’ in 2013 ‘to follow up on efforts made’. However, it is not yet clear exactly what this will mean. The outcome document also mandated the UN Secretary General to initiate a consultation process of what would come after 2015, and to recommend in his annual reports ‘further steps to advance the United Nations development agenda beyond 2015’.

It is possible though that there will be neither an agreement on any post-2015 framework nor an extension of the current MDGs.

Not surprisingly, the subject of what a new global framework might look like in detail is really starting to bubble up in debates.

The NGOs via GCAP are already discussing MDGs 2.0 and there was a workshop at the World Social Forum recently and blog convened by the UK NGOs. UNDP’s Helen Clark has it on her radar in a recent interview as does UNDP assistant SG, Olav Kjorven at UNDP in comments on a Guardian blog.

There’s also a global group convened by the International Red Cross and the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), a recent Lancet Commission report and one by International Alert and papers by MDG architects such as the former chair of the OECD DAC, Richard Manning and former UN official, Jan Vandemoortele (and a set of papers from a Brussels Forum on the ‘MDGs and Beyond’) as well as work at the Center for Global Development (for example, here in Global Policy, and here), a symposium at Harvard and – launching soon – CAFOD’s work on Voices of the South on the MDGs and post-MDGs.

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Joshua Keating at ForeignPolicy.com has returned from the Chinese blogosphere bearing treasure. Footage posted by the PLA that purports to show a recent air force drill bears an uncanny resemblance to a certain much loved 80s movie:

Now check out what happens when the target plane blows up:

Yee-hah, Jester’s dead! Or something like that.

Yes, according to the annual survey of US ‘independent watchdog’ Freedom House and carried by Foreign Policy and Voice of America.

Every year the Washington-based organisation, whose findings feed into World Bank governance indicators assesses political rights and civil liberties around the world, and grades countries in accordance with their levels of political freedom.

Freedom House (FH) is not without considerable controversy – visible recently in the Washington Post’s blog.

The data is produced by a set of ‘experts’ (50 analysts and 18 ‘senior-level academic advisors’). However, Freedom House scores are largely used due to a lack of alternatives. The organisation’s ‘Freedom in the World’ surveys like this years have been criticised for using arbitrary classifications, and critics argue their approach is too narrow. For example there is no way to consider the interdependence of human rights (for example, that you need certain education levels for genuine participation in politics). Moreover, is it even possible to reach an objective, comparable measure of something as complex as ‘political freedom’? and produce the ‘map of freedom’.

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