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Beware of the man with the Big Plan
William Easterly
Guardian Weekly, April 22nd to 28th 2005
In this review of Jeffrey Sachs's book The End of Poverty: Economic
Possibilities for Our Time (Penguin Press, 2005) William Easterly a
veteran development economist welcomes Sachs's description of poverty but
disagrees with its top-down Big Plan solution.
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Jeffery D Sachs's guided tour to the poorest regions of the world is both
enthralling and maddening - enthralling, because his eloquence and
compassion make you care about some very desperate people; maddening,
because he offers solutions that range all the way from the practical to
the absurd. It is a shame that Sachs's prescriptions are unconvincing
because he is resoundingly right about the tragedy of world poverty. As he
puts it, newspapers should (but don't) report every morning, "More than
20,000 people perished yesterday of extreme poverty."
That appalling toll has given Sachs his life's mission. Two themes recur
in his long career of advising heads of state in poor nations, which he
chronicles in fascinating detail in his book. First is his favoured
approach of "shock therapy" (a term he dislikes but has found impossible
to shake off): a comprehensive package of economic reforms that attempts
to fix all problems simultaneously and quickly. Second is his conviction
that the West should always give a lot of money to support these packages.
These two themes unify a book that sometimes seems like a disparate
collection of Sachs's adventures in Bolivia, Poland, Russia and Africa on
issues ranging from stopping high inflation, leaping from communism to
capitalism, cancelling third world debt, curing malaria and Aids, and now
eliminating poverty in Africa and everywhere else.
Over the past two decades Sachs has been the world's greatest economic
reformer. It is perhaps fitting that he has enlisted Bono, the lead singer
of U2 and development activist, to pen an introduction: the rock star as
economist meets the economist as rock star. Perhaps someone so gifted and
hardworking can be forgiven if his narrative is a little self-serving -
for instance when he portrays his plans as responsible for early successes
in Bolivia and Poland. At the same time he prefers a more complicated
analysis for the failure in Russia, later stagnation in Bolivia and
Africa's perpetual crisis (their geography was bad, they didn't follow his
advice, the West didn't give them enough aid, etc).
The climax of The End of Poverty is Sachs's plan to end world poverty - a
sort of Great Leap Forward. His characteristically comprehensive approach
to eliminating world poverty derives from his conviction that everything
depends on everything else - that, for instance, you cannot cure poverty
in Africa without beating Aids, which requires infrastructure, which
requires stable government, and so forth. He offers a detailed Big Plan
that covers just about everything, from planting nitrogen-fixing trees to
replenishing soil fertility, to antiretroviral therapy for Aids, to
programmed cell phones to provide real-time data to health planners, to
rain-water harvesting, to battery-charging stations and so on. Sachs
proposes that the UN secretary general personally run the overall plan,
coordinating the actions of thousands of officials in six UN agencies, UN
country teams, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Sachs's Big Plan would launch poor countries out of the "poverty trap" and
end world poverty by 2025, as the book's title advertises. The world's
rich countries would pay for a large share of the Big Plan - somehow doing
an exact financial "Needs Assessment", seeing how much poor governments
can pay and then having rich donors pay the rest. The donors will double
donor-nation foreign aid in 2006, then nearly doubling it again by 2015.
What's the evidence on how well this approach would work? Sachs pays
surprisingly little attention to the history of aid approaches and
results. He seems unaware that his Big Plan is strikingly similar to the
ideas that inspired foreign aid in the 1950s and 60s. Just like Sachs,
development planners then identified countries caught in the "poverty
trap", did an assessment of how much they would need to make a "big push"
into growth, and called upon foreign aid to fill the "financing gap"
between the countries' own resources and needs. This legacy has influenced
the bureaucratic approach to economic development that has been followed
since - albeit with some lip service to free markets - by the World Bank,
regional development banks, national aid agencies and the UN development
agencies. Spending $2.3 trillion (measured in today's dollars) in aid over
the past five decades has left most aid-intensive regions wallowing in
continued stagnation; it is fair to say this approach has not been a great
success.
Meanwhile some piecemeal interventions have brought success. Vaccination
campaigns, oral re-hydration therapy and other aid-financed health
programmes are likely to have contributed to a fall in infant mortality
everywhere. Aid projects have probably helped increase access to primary
and secondary education, clean water and sanitation. Perhaps it is also
easier to hold aid agencies accountable for results in these tangible
areas. Moreover the West itself achieved success through piecemeal reforms
over many centuries, not through Big Plans offered by outsiders. Do we try
out shock therapy only on the powerless poor?
"Success in ending the poverty trap," Sachs writes, "will be much easier
than it appears." Really? If it's so easy, why haven't five decades of
effort got the job done? Sachs should redirect some of his outrage to the
question of why the previous $2.3 trillion dollars didn't reach the poor
so that the next $2.3 trillion dollars does. In fact ending poverty is not
easy at all.
Perhaps we can excuse these allegedly easy-to-achieve dreams as the
tactics of a fundraiser for the poor. The danger is that when the utopian
dreams fail, the rich-country public will get even more disillusioned
about foreign aid. Sachs rightly notes that we need not worry whether the
pathetic amount of current US foreign aid - little more than a 10th of a
penny for every dollar of US income - is wasted. Foreign aid's prospects
will brighten only if aid agencies become more accountable for results,
and demonstrate to the public that some piecemeal interventions improve
lives. So yes, do read Sachs's eloquent descriptions of poverty and his
compelling ethical case for the rich to help the poor.
Just say no to the Big Plan.
© The Guardian 2005 www.guardian.co.uk
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Further Information
William Easterly is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development
and the Institute of International Economics in Washington DC. He is also
a member of the economics faculty at New York University. In 2001 he
published the widely acclaimed The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists'
Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (MIT Press).
He can be e-mailed at: weasterly@cgdev.org
or visit the website at:
www.cgdev.org
Video Interview by Riz Khan on
youtube
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