Jonathan Rauch describes the concept of honest graft in Washington politics and policymaking. Politics needs good leaders, but it needs good followers even more, and they don’t come cheap. Loyalty gets you only so far, and ideology is divisive. Political machines need to exist, and they need to work.

       

John Kerry to travel to Kenya and Djibouti next week

Exactly one year after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s last multi-country tour of sub-Saharan Africa, he is preparing for another visit to the continent—to Kenya and Djibouti from May 3 to 5, 2015. In Kenya, Kerry and a U.S. delegation including Linda Thomas-Greenfield, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, will engage in talks with senior Kenyan officials on U.S.-Kenya security cooperation, which the U.S. formalized through its Security Governance Initiative (SGI) at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit last August. Over the past several years, the U.S. has increased its military assistance to Kenya and African Union (AU) troops to combat the Somali extremist group al-Shabab and has conducted targeted drone strikes against the group’s top leaders.  In the wake of the attack on Kenya’s Garissa University by al-Shabab, President Obama pledged U.S. support for Kenya, and Foreign Minister Amina Mohamed has stated that Kenya is currently seeking additional assistance from the U.S. to strengthen its military and intelligence capabilities.

Kerry will also meet with a wide array of leaders from Kenya’s private sector, civil society, humanitarian organizations, and political opposition regarding the two countries’ “common goals, including accelerating economic growth, strengthening democratic institutions, and improving regional security,” according to a U.S. State Department spokesperson. These meetings are expected to build the foundation for President Obama’s trip to Kenya for the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in July of this year.

On Tuesday, May 5, Kerry will become the first sitting secretary of state to travel to Djibouti. There, he will meet with government officials regarding the evacuation of civilians from Yemen and also visit Camp Lemonnier, the U.S. military base from which it coordinates its counterterror operations in the Horn of Africa region.

Protests erupt as Burundian president seeks third term

This week saw the proliferation of anti-government street demonstrations as current President Pierre Nkurunziza declared his candidacy for a third term, after being in office for ten years.  The opposition has deemed this move as “unconstitutional” and in violation of the 2006 Arusha peace deal which ended the civil war. Since the announcement, hundreds of civilians took to the streets of Bujumbura, despite a strong military presence. At least six people have been killed in clashes between police forces and civilians. 

Since the protests erupted, leading human rights activist Pierre-Claver Mbonimpa has been arrested alongside more than 200 protesters. One of Burundi’s main independent radio stations was also suspended as they were covering the protests.  On Wednesday, the government blocked social media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook, declaring them important tools in implementing and organizing protests. Thursday, amid continuing political protests, Burundi closed its national university and students were sent home. 

Amid the recent protests, Burundi’s constitutional court will examine the president’s third term bid. Meanwhile, U.N. secretary general Ban Ki-moon has sent his special envoy for the Great Lakes Region to hold a dialogue with president Nkurunziza and other government authorities. Senior U.S. diplomat Tom Malinowski also arrived in Bujumbura on Thursday to help defuse the biggest crisis the country has seen in the last few years, expressing disappointment over Nkurunziza’s decision to run for a third term.

China invests billions in African infrastructure

Since the early 2000s, China has become an increasingly significant source of financing for African infrastructure projects, as noted in a recent Brookings paper, “Financing African infrastructure: Can the world deliver?” This week, observers have seen an additional spike in African infrastructure investments from Chinese firms, as three major railway, real estate, and other infrastructure deals were struck on the continent, totaling nearly $7.5 billion in investments.

On Monday, April 27, the state-owned China Railway Construction Corp announced that it will construct a $3.5 billion railway line in Nigeria, as well as a $1.9 billion real estate project in Zimbabwe. Then on Wednesday, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (one of the country’s largest lenders) signed a $2 billion deal with the government of Equatorial Guinea in order to carry out a number of infrastructure projects throughout the country. These deals align with China’s “One Belt, One Road” strategy of building infrastructure in Africa and throughout the developing world in order to further integrate their economies, stimulate economic growth, and ultimately increase demand for Chinese exports. For more insight into China’s infrastructure lending in Africa and the implications of these investments for the region’s economies, please see the following piece by Africa Growth Initiative Nonresident Fellow Yun Sun: “Inserting Africa into China’s One Belt, One Road strategy: A new opportunity for jobs and infrastructure?”

      

       

If you want to understand what drove the intense opposition to the nuclear deal with Iran in certain quarters of the American political establishment, as well as across the broader Middle East, all you have to do is look at the photos from Iranian president Hassan Rouhani’s inaugural tour of Europe this week. The most notorious shot shows plywood barricades concealing ancient Roman statues, apparently out of concern that their nudity would shock or offend the leader of an Islamic theocracy.

The alacrity with which Italian leaders jettisoned their values and historical legacy in hopes of gaining some advantage in Iran’s post-sanctions gold rush is precisely what nuclear deal opponents predicted and hoped to forestall. After all, a Europe that would so readily censor the treasures of its own glorious antiquity, in an obsequious gesture that was apparently unbidden by Tehran, is unlikely to jeopardize any budding business to penalize any Iranian infractions of the agreement, or to put pressure on Iran over any of its other objectionable policies.

As I wrote 10 months ago:

After a deal, the Islamic Republic will be back in business, its standing as an investment destination restored and its place in the community of nations effectively normalized. This is, of course, precisely what Tehran is seeking and what Hassan Rouhani was elected to the presidency to accomplish — redemption. An imperfect, incomplete redemption, but a new beginning nonetheless.

But redemption is precisely what [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and other opponents of an Iranian deal are determined to prevent. They appreciate that once the current network of multilateral sanctions is unraveled, it will never be reinstated, absent some extraordinary provocation by Tehran. The presumption, then, is that the threat posed by Iran’s regional ambitions will never be successfully blunted. For Netanyahu—and for many in the American policy community—that is an unacceptable outcome. They believe, as the prime minister declared on Tuesday, that “If Iran wants to be treated like a normal country, let it act like a normal country.”

Netanyahu and other opponents of the deal did not achieve that goal. Much of the U.S. unilateral sanctions regime remains intact, and these measures—along with some residual uncertainty about the longevity of the nuclear deal—will restrain the horizons of Iran’s economic and geopolitical reintegration into the international community. But for all practical purposes, the Islamic Republic’s redemption is complete.

The alacrity with which Italian leaders jettisoned their values and historical legacy in hopes of gaining some advantage in Iran’s post-sanctions gold rush is precisely what nuclear deal opponents predicted and hoped to forestall.

So in the wake of this broad normalization, how can the world continue to nudge Tehran toward “acting like a normal country”? For starters, by restraining the impulse to placate ideological excesses of Iranian politics—or, for that matter, those of its neighbors.

The Italian deference to Rouhani is not without precedent: similar measures were taken last year to protect the delicate sensibilities of Abu Dhabi’s crown prince. And it was not without foundation—in 1999, photos of a previous Iranian president, Mohammad Khatami, enjoying an Italian state dinner provoked a furor among opponents of his reformist agenda because they revealed wine glasses on the tables.

However, there were an infinite number of ways for circumventing these civilizational conflicts without repudiating Italian artistic glory. To avoid a repeat of his Roman fiasco, Khatami simply adapted his future European visits to incorporate a greater number of official breakfast meetings, where abstinence was more easily ensured.

Iran’s rehabilitation without full-fledged reformation compounds the already urgent challenges of an unstable Middle East. Its reintegration can be a stabilizing force, but only if Tehran reconciles itself to the world, rather than the reverse.

       

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared on Lawfare.

Faced with the breakdown of national armies in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, Arab states have increasingly turned toward alliances with armed militias to ensure security. Popular, anti-government protests and insurgencies for the most part precipitated the breakdown of regime military institutions, yet pre-existing internal ethnic, clan, and ideological cleavages helped to hasten the breakdown. The beleaguered state security forces have now entered into a variety of alliances—tacit or active—with militias they deem sympathetic to their interests, often organized on the basis of entrenched ethno-sectarian or tribal identities. Such militia forces supplement and at times even stand in for the weak or absent army and police as providers of local security.

On the one hand, militia forces have in certain circumstances proven effective at counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. On the other hand, they have also committed atrocities against civilians that hamper long-term efforts to build trust and stability. Their greatest risk is that, by eroding the central government’s monopolization on force, they jeopardize the territorial cohesion of the state.

In Iraq, the rise of powerful communal militias has paralleled the growth of the threat from the Islamic State. This has presented the United States with a quandary: how to combat the Islamic State by mobilizing local Sunnis while at the same time safeguarding the broader integrity of the Iraqi state and its security institutions. The national guard concept, which successive Iraqi governments have tried in the past, was seen as one way to do this. A national guard force would retain the militias’ local knowledge and roots, both unique tools necessary for a successful counterinsurgency against the Islamic State. At the same time, the guard would (at least in theory) be subject to increased oversight and control by the central government.

Other fractured Arab states, most notably Libya, have tried to implement a national guard model as a way to harness militia power, but this too has failed. Variations of hybrid, provincially-organized military forces exist in Yemen and Syria. While each case is different, the failure of national guards bears certain similarities. Examining the Iraqi case in particular can highlight the potential utility of national guards but also the parallel political and institutional reforms that are necessary to make the concept work.

False Analogies and False Starts in Iraq

The idea of creating a national guard in Iraq has been a centerpiece of U.S. engagement since the dramatic advance of the Islamic State on Tikrit and Mosul in 2014. President Obama specifically mentioned U.S. support for a national guard as a means to help Iraqi Sunnis “secure their own freedom” from the Islamic State. Much of U.S. thinking about the Iraqi National Guard (ING) was guided by the example of the Sunni Awakening of 2006 and 2007, when the United States actively recruited and “flipped” Sunni tribes that had supported the al-Qaeda-inspired insurgency. In return for guarantees of autonomy and military, financial, and political backing, the Sunni tribes were able to turn the tables on the insurgent fighters and impose a measure of peace and stability. The 2014 initiative essentially sought to reproduce this arrangement. The idea was that given proper incentives, the Sunni tribes would again fight the radical Islamists who threatened their supremacy. Over the long term, such national guard forces could be integrated formally as auxiliary troops in a federal structure, comparable in many ways to the U.S. National Guard.

Yet the Awakening analogy failed on a number of levels. The Shi’i-dominated Iraqi central government had never been enthusiastic about empowering Sunni tribes in the first place. With the dismantling of the Iraqi army in 2003, security had effectively devolved to party, tribal, and sectarian militias. Many Iraqis wondered why the United States would seek to create new militias, especially ones recently tied to al-Qaeda and other terrorists. As Iraq scholar Adeed Dawisha described, the gains in security came“not because of the state, but in spite of it.”

As the U.S. began withdrawing from Iraq in 2009 and 2010, then-Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki quickly moved to dismantle the Awakening-associated militias. Only a handful of former militia fighters received their promised positions in the police, army, or civil services. Some former militia leaders were arrested on seemingly politically-motivated charges of terrorism or subversion. Efforts to enact a Sunni-dominated super-region comparable to the federal status of the Kurdish Regional Government in the north were rebuffed, despite the provisions of Iraq’s constitution that allowed for the creation of such an entity. Politically marginalized, some Sunnis returned to their alliance with the radical mujahideen.

The election of the new prime minister Haydar al-Abadi in 2014 raised the promise of renewed Sunni-Shi’i reconciliation. Abadi expressed support for the national guard initiative and forwarded a bill to parliament in 2014. Thousands of volunteers came forward from the Sunni tribes in the west and U.S. and Iraqi officials met with tribal leaders to help solidify support. The United States began to enlist support from Iraq’s Sunni neighbors to provide training and support for the ING.

Yet resistance within Abadi’s own political coalition stymied these efforts. The National Guard bill foundered in parliamentary committee, with open questions about the extent of control vested in provincial governors and the chain of command subordinating the ING to the ministries of interior, defense, or the prime minister himself. Officers of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) regarded the militias as unfit for duty and as rivals for budget and resources. Iraq’s constitution specifically prohibited the formation of militias outside the framework of the armed forces (with an exception of the peshmergaforces of the Kurdish Regional Government). Moreover, there was concern that once the Sunnis were authorized to organize a militia, other ethno-sectarian communities, such as Christians or Turkomen,might try to follow suit out of fear of falling under the mercy of their more powerful neighbors. The ING, then, could undercut any pretense of the Iraqi state possessing a monopoly over the use of force.

At base, though, many of Iraq’s Shi’i leaders simply believed that they didn’t need Sunni support. With the ING initiative stalled in parliament, the Shi’i factions have actively cultivated Shi’i militias as part of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF, or Hashd al-Shaabi). The origins of the PMF can be traced to a statement by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq’s senior Shi’i cleric, which explicitly called on the faithful to take up arms to defend Iraq in the face of the Islamic State onslaught in 2014. Muqtada al-Sadr’s Jaysh al-Mahdi, the Badr Organization, and other political factions quickly took the opportunity to reconstitute or expand their private armies.

Backed by Iran’s expeditionary al-Qods Force, PMF militias played a prominent role in the spring 2015 offensive against the Islamic State in Tikrit. By spring 2015, PMF counted around 60,000 men under arms. Still, the performance of these militias has been less than stellar. In the spring 2015 offensive on Tikrit, PMF forces failed repeatedly to dislodge Islamic State resistance, despite enjoying superiority in numbers. U.S. air support proved critical to allowing the offensive to proceed. Some PMF units quit the fight instead of working under American air cover. Others were involved in a campaign of terror against Sunnis, looting, kidnapping, and killing those suspected of collaborating with the Islamic State.

Awakening Again?

The prospects for the mobilization of Iraq’s Sunnis are not dead—yet. A handful of Sunni tribes joined the PMF during the Tikrit offensive. In Anbar, likely the next front in the campaign against the Islamic State, U.S. and Iraqi officials have cultivated ties with local Sunni tribes and organized some 8,000 men into Sunni PMF units. Some tribes have made their service conditional on guarantees of greater autonomy and the removal of Shi’i militia forces. Yet the intake for training programs remains slow and drop-out rates high. On the one hand, tribes continue to resent the central government. On the other hand, they fear retribution should the Islamic State return.

Abadi’s visit to Washington in April 2015 focused on expanding and enhancing security cooperation with the United States. The United States has insisted that the PMF be brought more fully under the control of the Iraqi Security Forces and that PMF units reflect the demographics of the provinces and districts in which they operate. This would mean that in ethnically-mixed areas, such as in Nineveh or Babil, each ethnic group would have its own militia proportional to its size in the locality. The Iraq Train and Equip Program (ITEP) is slowly coming online, funneling American money and weapons to various local militia forces as well as ISF.

Cooperating with the United States has been a delicate balancing act for Abadi. While Kurdish and Sunni leaders see U.S. military support as a means to their own ends, Abadi’s own Shi’i political camp—as well as his allies in Tehran—are far more wary. When the U.S. Congress passed a bill in May 2015 effectively mandating the Defense Department to bypass Baghdad and provide support for Sunni and Kurdish fighters directly, Abadi protested that this constituted a grave violation of Iraqi sovereignty.

Still, reliance on the ragtag PMF alone is not sustainable in the long term. Operating far from home and with limited training, these overwhelmingly Shi’i forces cannot be expected to become an army of occupation in Sunni areas like Tikrit or Fallujah. Ultimately, local partners will be necessary to build and maintain peace and stability. The national guard, then, may well re-emerge as a more sustainable structure for administrative and security devolution.

Lessons Learned From Failure

While analysts and policymakers naturally focus on cases of success, there are important lessons to be learned from Iraq’s failures. For countries like Iraq where central armies have more or less broken down and a bevy of militias has emerged in its stead, as in Libya, Yemen, and Syria, the national guard could represent a path to reconstituting fragile state authority.

But for this to happen, several broad principles need to be heeded:

• National guards cannot simply be conceived as short-term, improvised solutions to immediate security crises. Rather, the creation of national guards is part of the impetus of security-sector reform (SSR) and post-conflict demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration (DDR) of armed groups.
• National guards must overcome the legacies of past authoritarian experiences where pro-government militias were often seen as mere thugs for the regime, not a disciplined professional fighting force. In particular, the older officer class of regular forces may see them as competitors. To build trust among the population and other military institutions, national guards should be accompanied by revisions to chain of command establishing clear relationships of authority between the guards, the police, the army, and other security agencies, and subordinating all security services to civilian authorities.
• National guard initiatives must also be accompanied by moves toward political power-sharing arrangements. The success of national guards ultimately depends not just on their short-term tactical effectiveness but on the degree of local buy-in. Constitutions can provide a structure for bolstering confidence between a central government and subnational militia forces. Since militia membership and cohesion is often based on geographic linkages—to town, municipality or province—national guards may well be a part of federalist power devolution, especially in countries with overlapping ethno-sectarian and regional cleavages.
• Western governments can assist in setting up and training national guards, but they must ensure that proper political and institutional reforms are also undertaken. In many cases, Western states provide models for how decentralized, federally-organized military forces can complement national armies and local police. The United States, for instance, has a great deal of experience with its own federalized national guard structure and can draw on this example in its train-and-equip programs. There are other potentially useful models as well, including the British Territorial Army, a part-time, volunteer force that was integrated into the British Army in the early twentieth century; the Danish Home Guard, which incorporated anti-Nazi resistance militias into a national command structure after World War II; or the Italian Carabineri, which is often discussed as a potential model for dealing with Libya’s unique security challenges.

Outside assistance to national guards must avoid exacerbating existing communal and political fault lines. Helping peripheral and minority groups set up their own armed forces can, on one hand, embolden these groups to resist the central government and, on the other hand, spur resentment from the central government and fear of future disloyalty or rebellion. These concerns become even more acute when national guards are seen as proxies for outside powers. With this in mind, the U.S. and outside powers should calibrate their assistance to both regionally-based national guards and central government forces to ensure rough parity between the two. This could entail making funding, equipment and training for the central security services contingent on a proportional commitment to strengthen the guards.

National guards are political institutions, not just military instruments. They can have far-ranging consequences for political stability and cohesion. While no panacea for the challenge of building effective states, they can play an important role in addressing security concerns and moving toward more meaningful power sharing.

      

It’s easy to imagine a future in a decade or less when most people will have a smartphone. In our recent paper Pathways to Smarter Digital Financial Inclusion, we explore the benefits of extending financial services to the mass of lower-income people in developing countries who are currently dubious of the value that financial services can bring to them, distrustful of formal financial institutions, or uncomfortable with the treatment they expect to receive.

The report analyzes six inherent characteristics of smartphones that have the potential to change market dynamics relative to the status quo of simple mobile phones and cards. 

Customer-Facing Changes:

1. The graphical user interface.
2. The ability to attach a variety of peripheral devices to it (such as a card reader or a small printer issuing receipts).
3. The lower marginal cost of mobile data communications relative to traditional mobile channels (such as SMS or USSD).

Service Provider Changes:

4. Greater freedom to program services without requiring the acquiescence or active participation of the telco.
5. Greater flexibility to distribute service logic between the handset (apps) and the network (servers).
6. More opportunities to capture more customer data with which to enhance customer value and stickiness.

Taken together, these changes may lower the costs of designing for lower-income people dramatically, and the designs ought to take advantage of continuous feedback from users. This should give low-end customers a stronger sense of choice over the services that are relevant to them, and voice over how they wish to be served and treated.

Traditionally poor people have been invisible to service providers because so little was known about their preferences that it was not possible build a service proposition or business case around them. The paper describes three pathways that will allow providers to design services on smartphones that will enable an increasingly granular understanding of their customers. Each of the three pathways offers providers a different approach to discover what they need to know about prospective customers in order to begin engaging with them. 

Pathway One: Through Big Data

Providers will piece together information on potential low-income customers directly, by assembling available data from disparate sources (e.g. history of airtime top-ups and bill payment, activity on online social networks, neighborhood or village-level socio-demographic data, etc.) and by accelerating data acquisition cycles (e.g. inferring behavior from granting of small loans in rapid succession, administering selected psychometric questions, or conducting A/B tests with special offers). There is a growing number of data analytics companies that are applying big data in this way to benefit the poor.

Pathway Two: Through local Businesses

Smartphones will have a special impact on micro and small enterprises, which will see increasing business benefits from recording and transacting more of their business digitally. As their business data becomes more visible to financial institutions, local firms will increasingly channel financial services, and particularly credit, to their customers, employees, and suppliers. Financial institutions will backstop their credit, which in effect turns smaller businesses into front-line distribution partners into local communities.

Pathway Three: Through Socio-Financial Networks

Firms view individuals primarily as managers of a web of socio-financial relationships that may or may not allow them access to formal financial services. Beyond providing loans to “creditworthy” people, financial institutions can provide transactional engines, similar to the crowdfunding platforms that enable all people to locate potential funding sources within their existing social networks. A provider equipped with appropriate network analysis tools could then promote rather than displace people´s own funding relationships and activities. This would provide financial service firms valuable insight into how people manage their financial needs.

The pathways are intended as an exploration of how smartphones could support the development of a healthier and more inclusive digital financial service ecosystem, by addressing the two critical deficiencies of the current mass-market digital finance systems. Smartphones could enable stronger customer value propositions, leading to much higher levels of customer engagement, leading to more revelation of customer data and more robust business cases for the providers involved. Mobile technology could also lead to a broader diversity of players coming into the space, each playing to their specific interests and contributing their specific set of skills, but together delivering customer value through the right combination of collaboration and competition.

      

Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series on the 2015 Financial and Digital Inclusion Project (FDIP) Report and Scorecard, which were launched at a Brookings public event in August. Previous posts have highlighted five key findings from the 2015 FDIP Report, explored financial inclusion developments in India, and examined the rankings for selected FDIP countries in Southeast and Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

The 2015 Financial and Digital Inclusion Project (FDIP) Report and Scorecard were launched in August of this year and generally reflect data current through May 2015. Since the end of the data collection period for the report, countries have continued to push forward to greater financial inclusion, and international organizations have continued to assert the importance of financial inclusion as a mechanism for promoting individual well-being and macroeconomic development. Financial inclusion is a key component of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, signaling international commitment to advancing access to and use of quality financial products among the underserved.

We discussed one recent groundbreaking financial inclusion development in a previous post. To learn more about the approval of payments banks in India, read “Inclusion in India: Unpacking the 2015 FDIP Report and Scorecard.”

Below are four other key developments among our 21-country sample since the end of the data collection period for the 2015 FDIP Report and Scorecard. The list is in no way intended to be exhaustive, but rather to provide a snapshot illustrating how rapidly the financial inclusion landscape is evolving globally.   

1) The Philippines launched a national financial inclusion strategy.

In July 2015, the Philippines launched a national financial inclusion strategy (NFIS) and committed to drafting an Action Plan on Financial Inclusion. The Philippines’ NFIS identifies four areas central to promoting financial inclusion: “policy and regulation, financial education and consumer protection, advocacy programs, and data and measurement.”

 As discussed in the 2015 FDIP Report, national financial inclusion strategies often serve as a platform for identifying key priorities, clarifying the roles of key stakeholders, and setting measurable targets. These strategies can foster accountability and incentivize implementation of stated initiatives. While correlation does not necessarily equal causation, it is nonetheless interesting to note that, according to the World Bank, “[o]n average, there is a 10% increase in the percentage of adults with an account at a formal financial institution for countries  that launched an NFIS after 2007, whereas the increase is only 5% for those countries that have not launched an NFIS.”

2) Peru adopted a national financial inclusion strategy.

With support from the World Bank, Peru’s Multisectoral Financial Inclusion Commission established an NFIS that was adopted in July 2015 through a Supreme Decree issued by President Ollanta Humala Tasso. The strategy contains a goal to increase financial inclusion to 50 percent of adults by 2018. This is quite an ambitious target: As of 2014, the World Bank Global Financial Inclusion (Global Findex) database found that only 29 percent of adults in Peru had an account with a formal financial services provider. The NFIS also commits the country to facilitating access to a transaction account among at least 75 percent of adults by 2021.

Peru’s NFIS emphasizes the promotion of electronic payment systems, including electronic money, as well as improvements pertaining to consumer protection and education. Advancing access to both digital and traditional financial services should boost Peru’s adoption levels over time. As noted in the 2015 FDIP Report, while Peru’s national-level commitment to financial inclusion and regulatory environment for financial services are strong, adoption levels remain low (Peru ranked 15^th on the adoption dimension of the 2015 Scorecard, the lowest ranking among the Latin American countries in our sample).

3) Colombia updated its quantifiable targets and released a financial inclusion survey.

The 2015 Maya Declaration Progress Report, published in late August 2015, highlights a number of quantifiable financial inclusion targets set by the Ministerio de Hacienda y Crédito Público de Colombia (Colombia’s primary Maya Declaration signatory) relating to the percentage of adults with financial products and savings accounts. For example, the target for the percentage of adults with a financial product is now 76 percent by 2016, up from a target of 73.7 percent by 2015. The goal for the percentage of adults with an active savings account in 2016 is now 56.6 percent, up from a target of 54.2 percent by 2015. To learn more about concrete financial inclusion targets among other FDIP countries, read the 2015 Maya Declaration Progress Report.

In July, Banca de las Oportunidades, a key financial inclusion stakeholder in Colombia, presented the results of the country’s first demand-side survey specifically related to financial inclusion. As noted by the Economist Intelligence Unit, previous national-level surveys conducted by entities such as the Superintendencia Financiera and Asobancaria have identified supply- and demand-side indicators pertaining to various financial services. As discussed in the 2015 FDIP Report, national-level surveys that focus on access to and usage of financial services can help identify areas of greatest need and enable countries to better leverage their resources to promote adoption of quality financial services among marginalized populations.

4) Nigeria’s “super agent” network enables greater access to digital financial services.

In September 2015, telecommunications company Globacom launched a “super agent” network, Glo Xchange, which can access the mobile money services of any partner mobile money operator. The network has been launched in partnership with four banks. Globacom was given approval in 2014 to develop this network; since then, the company has been recruiting and training its agents. About 1,000 agents will initially be part of this system, with a goal to recruit 10,000 agents by September 2016. Expanding access points to financial services by building agent networks is hoped to boost adoption of digital financial services.

Despite having multiple mobile money operators (19 as of October 2015, according to the GSMA’s Mobile Money Deployment Tracker), Nigeria’s mobile money adoption levels have not reached the degree of success of some other countries in Africa: The Global Findex noted that less than 3 percent of adults in Nigeria had mobile money accounts in 2014, compared with over 30 percent in Tanzania and about 60 percent in Kenya. Nigeria’s primarily bank-led approach to financial services, which excludes mobile network operators from being licensed as mobile money operators, is one factor that may have constrained adoption of mobile money services to date. You can read more about Nigeria’s regulatory environment and financial services landscape in the 2015 FDIP Report.

We welcome your feedback regarding recent financial inclusion developments. Please send any links, questions, or comments to FDIPComments@brookings.edu.

       

       

      

In the new music video from OK Go, the band uses a drone with a camera to capture some fantastic footage. Businesses, artists, and hobbyists are using drones for a variety of purposes. But, the rock group didn’t film the music video in the United States. They filmed it in Japan and one possible contributing factor is that filming the video in the U.S. may have been illegal. The laws and regulations governing drones are still being sorted out by authorities. Both state governments and the federal government have started to take notice of the problem. Civil liberties advocates have emerged in support for strong federal oversight of drone surveillance to ensure that privacy is protected. Others argue that states and their preexisting privacy laws are already equipped to deal with nongovernment drone surveillance.

Photo credit: OK Go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1ZB_rGFyeU

State Privacy Law

Wells C. Bennett’s recent report Civilian Drones, Privacy, and the Federal-State Balance describes how most state privacy laws could be applied to drone operators. Most states offer three general types of privacy protections:

1. Protection against intrusion: Common law that makes it unlawful for a person to trespass on someone else’s property.
2. Protection against aerial surveillance: Laws in this category are either criminal or civil in nature and aim to specifically block aerial surveillance.
3. Anti-Voyeurism: These laws deal with “peeping toms” and other moments when people have an expectation of privacy.

Federal Aviation Rules

Those who believe that drones ought to be heavily regulated argue that the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) should introduce strong new rules. In 2012 Congress has called on the FAA to develop new rules for drones by 2015. The FAA has long regulated aircraft of all types but the agency has less experience with privacy issues. In 2013, the agency selected six test sites where it would be legal to fly drones. The operators at these sites were required to abide by privacy rules the FAA created, which over time developed into a set of comprehensive standards. These standards ultimately remained applicable to test sites only as the agency was reticent to enforce privacy regulations for the whole country. However, the standards still serve as the foundation for the FAA’s roadmap to integrating drones into American skies and as a set of recommendations for policymakers.

The FAA’s reticence to regulate privacy creates a policy conundrum. Bennett proposes an approach that involves the states taking the lead with policy. The states already have a broad, legal framework that can be applied to privately owned drones. Where the states lack authority, Bennett suggests the Federal government can fill in the gaps. This mixed approach allows the states to use tested privacy laws and for the federal government to wait until it has the mission-critical data necessary to even begin crafting regulations for nongovernment drone surveillance.

Matt Mariano contributed to this piece.

      

      

Businesses, citizens, and law enforcement officials are discovering innovative new uses for drones every day. Drones have a distinctively menacing reputation because TV footage typically depicts them flying over a faraway battlefield launching missiles. In the popular imagination, drones have replaced the black helicopters of the 1990s and the satellite images of the 2000s as the primary surveillance tool. For this reason many perceive the drone as a threat to civil rights and safety in the United States. Privacy advocates have called upon lawmakers to pass legislation that keeps drones out of American skies. Others see a potentially beneficial role from drones if effective regulations are developed. In a recent paper titled Drones and Aerial Surveillance: Considerations For Legislators, Gregory McNeal proposes a model for how Congress should regulate drones.

McNeal’s Policy Recommendations

Privacy advocates have argued that law enforcement officers should secure a warrant before ever using a drone for surveillance. McNeal contends that the best standard relies on an interpretation of property rights law with a few supplementary criteria:

1. Property Rights: As mentioned above, landowners should be allowed to deny aircraft access to a column of airspace extending from their property for up to 350ft.
2. Duration-Based Surveillance: Law enforcement officials should only be able to survey an individual using a drone for a specific amount of time.
3. Data Retention: Data collected from a drone on a surveillance flight should only be accessible to law enforcement officials for a period of time. The data would eventually be deleted when there is no longer a level of suspicion associated with the monitored individual.
4. Transparency: Government agencies should be required to regularly publish information about the use of aerial surveillance equipment.

Expectation of Privacy

The crucial factors in determining whether the 4^th Amendment prohibits drone monitoring has to do with the surveyed individuals’ expectation of privacy. In California vs. Ciraolo a police officer received a tip that a man was growing marijuana in a walled off part of his yard not visible from the street. The officer obtained a private aircraft and flew at an altitude of 1,000 feet in order to survey the walled off space. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled this type of “naked-eye” surveillance was not unlawful because it was within what the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) calls a publicly navigable airspace. The officer had the right to view the walled off portion of the yard because it could be viewed in public airspace.

McNeal cites the expectation of privacy as a central point of his argument against the advocates who don’t want any drones in the air. He asserts that his approach actually offers more protections for privacy as opposed to a warrant requirement approach. He argues that it is not reasonable to expect privacy in a public place. For example there is no functional difference between a police officer monitoring a public protest and a drone monitoring one. McNeal wisely argues that it is possible to live in a world where a person’s privacy is respected and drones can be utilized to help create a safer society.

Matt Mariano contributed to this post.

      

President Obama's announcement last month that earlier this year a “U.S. counterterrorism operation” had killed two hostages, including an American citizen, has become a fresh occasion for questioning the rationales for continuing attacks from unmanned aerial vehicles aimed at presumed, suspected, or even confirmed terrorists. This questioning is desirable, although not mainly for hostage-related reasons connected to this incident. Sometimes an incident has a sufficient element of controversy to stoke debate even though what most needs to be debated is not an issue specific to the incident itself. More fundamental issues about the entire drone program need more attention than they are getting.

The plight of hostages held by terrorists has a long and sometimes tragic history, almost all of which has had nothing to do with drones. Hostage-taking has been an attractive terrorist tool for so long partly because of the inherent advantages that the hostage-holders always will have over counterterrorist forces. Those advantages include not only the ability to conceal the location of hostages—evidently a successful concealment in the case of the hostages mentioned in the president's announcement—but also the ability of terrorists to kill the hostages themselves and to do so quickly enough to make any rescue operation extraordinarily difficult. Even states highly skilled at such operations, most notably Israel, have for this reason suffered failed rescue attempts.

It is not obvious what the net effect of operations with armed drones is likely to be on the fate of other current or future hostages. The incident in Pakistan demonstrates one of the direct negative possibilities. Possibly an offsetting consideration is that fearing aerial attack and being kept on the run may make, for some terrorists, the taking of hostages less attractive and the management of their custody more difficult. But a hostage known to be in the same location as a terrorist may have the attraction to the latter of serving as a human shield.

The drone program overall has had both pluses and minuses, as anyone who is either a confirmed supporter or opponent of the program should admit. There is no question that a significant number of certified bad guys have been removed as a direct and immediate consequence of the attacks. But offsetting, and probably more than offsetting, that result are the anger and resentment from collateral casualties and damage and the stimulus to radicalization that the anger and resentment provide. There is a good chance that the aerial strikes have created more new terrorists bent on exacting revenge on the United States than the number of old terrorists the strikes have killed.

This possibility is all the more disturbing in light of what appears to be a significant discrepancy between the official U.S. posture regarding collateral casualties and the picture that comes from nonofficial sources of reporting and expertise. The public is at a disadvantage in trying to judge this subject and to assess who is right and who is wrong, but what has been pointed out by respected specialists such as Micah Zenko is enough to raise serious doubt about official versions both of the efforts made to avoid casualties among innocents and of how many innocents have become victims of the strikes.

The geographic areas in which the drone strikes are most feasible and most common are not necessarily the same places from which future terrorist attacks against the United States are most likely to originate. The core Al-Qaeda group, which has been the primary target and concern in northwest Pakistan, is but a shadow of its former self and not the threat it once was. Defenders of the drone strikes are entitled to claim that this development is in large part due to the strikes. But that leaves the question: why keep doing it now?

The principal explanation, as recognized in the relevant government circles, for the drone program has been that it is the only way to reach terrorists who cannot be reached by other tools or methods. It has been seen as the only counterterrorist game that could be played in some places. That still leaves more fundamental questions about the motivations for playing the game.

Policy-makers do not use a counterterrorist tool just because the tool is nifty—although that may be a contributing factor regarding the drones—but rather because they feel obligated to use every available tool to strike at terrorists as long as there are any terrorists against whom to strike. In the back of their minds is the thought of the next Big One, or maybe even a not so big terrorist attack on U.S. soil, occurring on their watch after not having done everything they could to prevent it, or doing what would later be seen in hindsight as having had the chance to prevent it.

The principal driver of such thoughts is the American public's zero tolerance attitude toward terrorism, in which every terrorist attack is seen as a preventable tragedy that should have been prevented, without fully factoring in the costs and risks of prevention or of attempted prevention. Presidents and the people who work for them will continue to fire missiles from drones and to do some other risky, costly, or even counterproductive things in the cause of counterterrorism because of the prospect of getting politically pilloried for not being seen to make the maximum effort on behalf of that cause.

This piece was originally published by The National Interest.

      

As noted in our recent Brookings Institution report, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly referred to as drones, are an emerging technology that requires the attention of local governments. Unfortunately, regulations governing their usage are significantly lagging the pace of innovation. Individual citizens who do not want these devices flying over (or even near) their property due to privacy or safety concerns have limited options. You can stay in your home and turn the music up until it goes away. Or you can go about your business and ignore the possibility that the drone has a camera to see inside your home. Others might prefer a more active response. In fact, there have been several recent instances where residents have taken it upon themselves to remove these drones from the skies…by force.

Misuses of drones

The usage of UAVs and the lack of a functional regulatory environment have not been without incident. Fire personnel in southern San Bernardino County were fighting the first major fire of the season and had to abort their tanker flights due to someone flying a drone at approximately 12,000 feet and interfering with the safety of the pilots. Just two weeks later, firefighters in Southern California were using several manned aircraft to help put out 20 car fires on an interstate highway that were caused when a wildfire jumped the highway unexpectedly.  Pilots had to ground the planes when it was reported that five drones were flying around the area to get a good look at the fires (two of which were witnessed actually chasing the tanker planes!).

In addition to the general lack of common sense by a few users interfering with life-saving aircraft around the U.S., Britain, Poland, and elsewhere, there have been an increasing number of incidents involving drones accused of serving as remote “peeping toms.” UAVs have also crashed into cars and homes; they have even been used to smuggle drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border in addition to smuggling marijuana into prisons in South Carolina and in Ohio.

Uneven regulations

When it comes to regulations around drones, we are living in the proverbial wild-west. A few states, like Nevada and Wisconsin, have passed legislation to prevent the weaponization of drones. But in July, a YouTube video went viral of a teenager in Connecticut who modified his drone to fire a semi-automatic handgun successfully. When confronted by law enforcement officials, they determined that no laws had actually been broken. Virginia was the first state legislature to put in place a two-year moratorium on drone usage by state or law enforcement agencies. That moratorium expired July 1^st. By the end of 2014, 36 states had introduced legislation aimed at protecting individual privacy in some manner. Only four of those passed last year. Currently, there are 17 states with some form of drone regulation on their books, and several other states still have legislation pending. Most of the laws that have passed, such as those in Idaho and Florida, focus on limiting police usage of drones by requiring probable cause warrants.

Nevada has been one of the more active states in the drone legislation arena. In addition to their legislation prohibiting the weaponization of civilian drones, the state also has passed legislation to provide homeowners rights to sue drone owners who fly their drones over personal property in certain circumstances. Furthermore, Nevada now requires law enforcement agencies to get warrants when using drones near any home “where there is an expectation of privacy.”

Potential benefits and rulemaking challenges

We do acknowledge and are excited about the positive benefits that drone technology is poised to provide. Amazon has been testing their commercial “Prime Air” package delivery system under an experimental testing agreement with the FAA since early 2015, which will likely impact the nature of their almost two year old partnership with the U.S. Postal Service. Drone startup company Flirtey successfully demonstrated their ability to deliver medicine to a rural medical facility in Virginia as part of their proof of concept efforts this July. Drones may even represent the future of pizza delivery.

The challenge this rapidly developing technology is creating is well ahead of local government efforts to rein in excessive activities. State and local governments need to engage on this policy issue more proactively. To do so, however, requires a delicate balancing act of the multiple competing interests of legitimate commercial uses, policing, public safety, privacy, and private property concerns. And this balancing has to take place in an environment where federal law remains unsettled too.

One thing we would definitely caution against is ‘regulation by default.’ To date, the efforts to regulate drone policy has focused on the drones themselves. As is commonly the case with new technology, governments typically engaged with a heavy hand that sometimes misses the opportunities afforded by the new technologies to improve city services and quality of life. Examples of this possible overreaction is Iowa City, Iowa and Charlottesville, Virginia, both of which were early adopters of complete bans on all surveillance drones within city limits back in 2013.

Local governments need to accept that drone technology is here for the near future. They must recognize that technology is not the problem, but how it is used can be a potential problem. Given the potential drawbacks and benefits, there is justification for reasoned regulation of drone technology.

       

Editors’ Note: Organized crime actors have increasingly adopted advanced technologies, with law enforcement agencies adapting accordingly. However, the use of ever fancier-technology is only a part of the story. The future lies as much behind as ahead, writes Vanda Felbab-Brown, with criminal groups now using primitive technologies and methods to counter the advanced technologies used by law enforcement. This post was originally published by the Remote Control Project, a project hosted by the Oxford Research Group.

The history of drug trafficking and crime more broadly is a history of adaptation on the part of criminal groups in response to advances in methods and technology on the part of law enforcement agencies, and vice versa. Sometimes, technology trumps crime: The spread of anti-theft devices in cars radically reduced car theft. The adoption of citadels (essentially saferooms) aboard ships, combined with intense naval patrolling, radically reduced the incidence of piracy off Somalia. Often, however, certainly in the case of many transactional crimes such as drug trafficking, law enforcement efforts have tended to weed out the least competent traffickers, and to leave behind the toughest, meanest, leanest, and most adaptable organized crime groups. Increasingly, organized crime actors have adopted advanced technologies, such as semi-submersible and fully-submersible vehicles to carry drugs and other contraband, and cybercrime and virtual currencies for money-laundering. Adaptations in the technology of smuggling by criminal groups in turn lead to further evolution and improvement of methods by law enforcement agencies. However, the use of ever fancier-technology is only a part of the story. The future lies as much behind as ahead (to paraphrase J.P. Wodehouse), with the asymmetric use of primitive technologies and methods by criminal groups to counter the advanced technologies used by law enforcement.

The seduction of SIGINT and HVT

The improvements in signal intelligence (SIGINT) and big-data mining over the past two decades have dramatically increased tactical intelligence flows to law enforcement agencies and military actors, creating a more transparent anti-crime, anti-terrorism, and counterinsurgency battlefield than before. The bonanza of communications intercepts of targeted criminals and militants that SIGINT has come to provide over the past decades in Colombia, Mexico, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other parts of the world has also strongly privileged high-value targeting (HVT) and decapitation policies-i.e., principally targeting the presumed leaders of criminal and militant organizations.

The proliferation of SIGINT and advances in big-data trawling, combined with some highly visible successes of HVT, has come with significant downsides. First, high-value targeting has proven effective only under certain circumstances. In many contexts, such as in Mexico, HVT has been counterproductive, fragmenting criminal groups without reducing their proclivity to violence; in fact, exacerbating violence in the market. Other interdiction patterns and postures, such as middle-level targeting and focused-deterrence, would be more effective policy choices. 

A large part of the problem is that the seductive bonanza of signal intelligence has lead to counterproductive discounting of the need to:

1. develop a strategic understanding of criminal groups’ decisionmaking—knowledge crucial for anticipating the responses of targeted non-state actors to law enforcement actions; Mexico provides a disturbing example;
2. cultivate intelligence human intelligence assets, sorely lacking in Somalia, for example;
3. obtain a broad and comprehensive understanding of the motivations and interests of local populations that interact with criminal and insurgent groups, notably deficient in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan; and 
4. establish good relationships with local populations to advance anti-crime and counterinsurgency policies, such as in Colombia where drug eradication policy antagonized local populations from national government and strengthened the bonds between them and rebel groups. 

In other words, the tactical tool, technology—in the form of signal intelligence and big-data mining—has trumped strategic analysis. The correction needed is to bring back strategic intelligence analysis to drive interdiction targeting patterns, instead of letting the seduction of signal data drive intelligence analysis and targeting action. The political effects, anticipated responses by criminal and militant groups, and other outcomes of targeting patterns need be incorporated into the strategic analysis. Questions to be assessed need to include: Can interdiction hope to incapacitate—arrest and kill—all of the enemy or should it seek to shape the enemy? What kind of criminals and militants, such as how fractured or unified, how radicalized or restrained in their ambitions, and how closely aligned with local populations against the state, does interdiction want to produce? 

Dogs fights or drone fights: Remote lethal action by criminals

Criminal groups have used technology not merely to foil law enforcement actions, but also to fight each other and dominate the criminal markets and control local populations. In response to the so-called Pacification (UPP) policy in Rio de Janeiro through which the Rio government has sought to wrestle control over slums from violent criminal gangs, the Comando Vermelho (one of such gangs), for example, claimed to deploy remote-sensor cameras in the Complexo do Alemão slum to identify police collaborators, defined as those who went into newly-established police stations. Whether this specific threat was credible or not, the UPP police units have struggled to establish a good working relationship with the locals in Alemão.

The new radical remote-warfare development on the horizon is for criminal groups to start using drones and other remote platforms not merely to smuggle and distribute contraband, as they are starting to do already, but to deliver lethal action against their enemies—whether government officials, law enforcement forces, or rival crime groups. Eventually, both law enforcement and rival groups will develop defenses against such remote lethal action, perhaps also employing remote platforms: drones to attack the drones. Even so, the proliferation of lethal remote warfare capabilities among criminal groups will undermine deterrence, including deterrence among criminal groups themselves over the division of the criminal market and its turfs. Remotely delivered hits will complicate the attribution problem— i.e., who authorized the lethal action—and hence the certainty of sufficiently painful retaliation against the source and thus a stable equilibrium. More than before, criminal groups will be tempted to instigate wars over the criminal market with the hope that they will emerge as the most powerful criminal actors and able to exercise even greater power over the criminal market—the way the Sinaloa Cartel has attempted to do in Mexico even without the use of fancy technology. Stabilizing a highly violent and contested—dysfunctional—criminal market will become all the more difficult the more remote lethal platforms have proliferated among criminal groups.

Back to the past: The Ewoks of crime and anti-crime

In addition to adopting ever-advancing technologies, criminal and militant groups also adapt to the technological superiority of law enforcement-military actors by the very opposite tactic—resorting asymmetrically to highly primitive deception and smuggling measures. Thus, both militant and criminal groups have adapted to signal intelligence not just by using better encryption, but also by not using cell phones and electronic communications at all, relying on personal couriers, for example, or by flooding the e-waves with a lot of white noise. Similarly, in addition to loading drugs on drones, airplanes, and submersibles, drug trafficking groups are going back to very old-methods such as smuggling by boats, including through the Gulf of Mexico, by human couriers, or through tunnels. 

Conversely, society sometimes adapts to the presence of criminal groups and intense, particularly highly violent, criminality by adopting its own back-to-the-past response—i.e., by standing up militias (which in a developed state should have been supplanted by state law enforcement forces). The rise of anti-crime militias in Mexico, in places such as Michoacán and Guerrero, provides a vivid and rich example of such populist responses and the profound collapse of official law enforcement. The inability of law enforcement there to stop violent criminality—and in fact, the inadvertent exacerbation of violence by criminal groups as a result of HVT—and the distrust of citizens toward highly corrupt law enforcement agencies and state administrations led to the emergence of citizens’ anti-crime militias. The militias originally sought to fight extortion, robberies, theft, kidnapping, and homicides by criminal groups and provide public safety to communities. Rapidly, however, most of the militias resorted to the very same criminal behavior they purported to fight—including extortion, kidnapping, robberies, and homicides. The militias were also appropriated by criminal groups themselves: the criminal groups stood up their own militias claiming to fight crime, where in fact, they were merely fighting the rival criminals. Just as when external or internal military forces resort to using extralegal militias, citizens’ militias fundamentally weaken the rule of law and the authority and legitimacy of the state. They may be the ewoks’ response to the crime empire, but they represent a dangerous and slippery slope to greater breakdown of order.

In short, technology, including remote warfare, and innovations in smuggling and enforcement methods are malleable and can be appropriated by both criminal and militant groups as well as law enforcement actors. Often, however, such adoption and adaptation produces outcomes that neither criminal groups nor law enforcement actors have anticipated and can fully control. The criminal landscape and military battlefields will resemble the Star Wars moon of Endor: drone and remote platforms battling it out with sticks, stones, and ropes.

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

        

       

       

Abstract

Scaling up of development interventions is much debated today as a way to improve their impact and effectiveness. Based on a review of scaling up literature and practice, this paper develops a framework for the key dynamics that allow the scaling up process to happen. The authors explore the possible approaches and paths to scaling up, the drivers of expansion and of replication, the space that has to be created for interventions to grow, and the role of evaluation and of careful planning and implementation. They draw a number of lessons for the development analyst and practitioner. More than anything else, scaling up is about political and organizational leadership, about vision, values and mindset, and about incentives and accountability—all oriented to make scaling up a central element of individual, institutional, national and international development efforts. The paper concludes by highlighting some implications for aid and aid donors.

An annotated bibliography of the literature on scaling up and development aid effectiveness was created by Oksana Pidufala to supplement this working paper. Read more »

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Chattanooga a few years ago faced what many smaller cities are struggling with today—a sudden decline after years of prosperity in the "old" economy. This case study offers a roadmap for these cities by chronicling Chattanooga's demise and rebirth.

Chattanooga is located in the southern end of the Tennessee Valley where the Tennessee River cuts through the Smoky Mountains and the Cumberland Plateau. The city’s location, particularly its proximity to the Tennessee River, has been one of its greatest assets. Today, several major interstates (I-24, I-59, and I-75) run through Chattanooga, making it a hub of transportation business. The city borders North Georgia and is less than an hour away from both Alabama and North Carolina. Atlanta, Nashville, and Birmingham are all within two hours travel time by car.

Chattanooga is Tennessee’s fourth largest city, with a population in 2000 of 155,554, and it covers an area of 143.2 square miles. Among the 200 most populous cities in the United States, Chattanooga—with 1,086.5 persons per square mile—ranks 190th in population density.2 It is the most populous of 10 municipalities in Hamilton County, which has a population of 307,896, covers an area of 575.7 square miles, and has a population density of 534.8 persons per square mile.

With its extensive railroads and river access, Chattanooga was at one time the “Dynamo of Dixie”—a bustling, midsized, industrial city in the heart of the South. By 1940, Chattanooga’s population was centered around a vibrant downtown and it was one of the largest cities in the United States. Just 50 years later, however, it was in deep decline. Manufacturing jobs continued to leave. The city’s white population had fled to the suburbs and downtown was a place to be avoided, rather than the economic center of the region. The city lost almost 10 percent of its population during the 1960s, and another 10 percent between 1980 and 1990. It would have lost more residents had it not been for annexation of outlying suburban areas.

The tide began to turn in the 1990s, with strategic investments by developing public-private partnerships—dubbed the “Chattanooga way.” These investments spurred a dramatic turnaround. The city’s population has since stabilized and begun to grow, downtown has been transformed, and it is once again poised to prosper in the new economy as it had in the old.

This report describes how Chattanooga has turned its economy around. It begins with a summary of how the city grew and developed during its first 150 years before describing the factors driving its decline. The report concludes by examining the partnerships and planning that helped spur Chattanooga’s current revitalization and providing valuable lessons to other older industrial cities trying to ignite their own economic recovery. 

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Leaders from the world’s largest economies are gathering in Cannes, France for the second round of G-20 talks this year. The most pressing issue on the agenda is the ongoing sovereign debt crisis that is still looming despite a plan to help stabilize the fiscal free fall in Greece. The call from all quarters is for leaders to hammer out an action plan that spurs global growth, promotes investment and facilitates trade. Nonresident Senior Fellow Colin Bradford says dealing with the eurozone debt crisis presents an opportunity for leaders to make a serious commitment to a serious problem.

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How to react to presidential candidates who are running, in part or wholly, on their experience in private business?

It’s impossible for anyone to come into the White House with all the skills required to be a good president. We can know that key traits include intelligence, both cognitive and emotional; self-confidence; and decisiveness. Also needed are the ability to communicate; to listen and learn; to delegate; to recognize problems–and a sense of humor and humility.

Candidates’ stands on the issues are critical in primaries and in the general election, but I suspect that the views of many independent voters–whose ranks are growing–may not be as intensely held as those of partisan voters.

Given Americans’ widespread frustration with traditional politicians, it is understandable why a few candidates with at least some business experience have entered the fray. Having run a business exposes one to how government affects the private sector, which is the engine of economic growth and drives improvements in living standards.

But running a private-sector business is very different from heading a federal government that employs millions, and that takes in and spends trillions, while also dealing with a wide range of domestic and foreign policy issues, many of which demand immediate attention. These things require dexterity–and the combined challenges are ones that no business ever comes close to dealing with. (Probably the closest experience to the presidency is running a large state. But even then, no governor has had to confront the range of foreign policy challenges facing the president.)

A critical difference between running a business and government is that CEOs can usually make sure that their orders are carried out; and if they’re not, those who didn’t do their jobs can be fired. Imagine a president tried working with Congress that way. “My way or the highway” won’t cut it.

One might think that military leaders would face the same problem, but successful generals, especially in recent times, have had to develop and hone political skills as well as knowing how to fight. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower is now regarded as a good president not only because of his military experience but because he also was a politician-administrator while commanding allied forces during World War II. George Washington had both a military and business background, but he was a politician too–and the government he oversaw wasn’t much larger than his (substantial) private business.

Some 2016 voters will cast ballots based on particular issues. But for others, particularly those who believe this country is on the wrong track, a candidate running on his or her business background in an effort to stand out from the pack is not likely to have the qualifications most important to being a successful president.

      

       

       

       

       

       

There is a marriage gap in America. This is not just a gap in choices and actions, but in norms and attitudes. Each generation is more liberal, on average, when it comes to issues like premarital relationships, same-sex marriage, and divorce. But generational averages can obscure other divides, including ideology—which in many cases is a more powerful factor.

Take opinions on the most important prerequisites for marriage, as explored in the American Family Survey conducted earlier this year by Deseret News and the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy (disclosure: I am an adviser to the pollsters). There is widespread agreement that it is best to have a stable job and to have completed college before tying the knot. But there is less agreement in the 3,000-person survey on other questions, including premarital cohabitation.

Living in sin, or preparing for commitment?

In response to the question of whether it is “important to live with your future spouse before getting married,” a clear gap emerges between those who identify as Democrats and those who identify as Republicans. This gap trumps the generational one, with younger Republicans (under 40) more conservative than Democrats over the age of 40:

The importance of family stability for a child’s wellbeing and prospects is well-documented, not least in Isabel Sawhill’s book, Generation Unbound. The question is not whether stability matters, but how best to promote it. To the extent that biological parents stay together and provide a stable environment, it doesn’t much matter if they are married. For children living with both biological parents, there is no difference in outcomes between those being raised by a married couple compared to a cohabiting couple, according to research by Wendy Manning at Bowling Green State University.

But people who marry are much more likely to stay together:

Marriage, at least in America, does seem to act as an important commitment device, a “co-parenting” contract for the modern world, as I’ve argued in an essay for The Atlantic, “How to Save Marriage in America.”

The varied meaning of “cohabitation”

Cohabitation can signal radically different situations. A couple who plan to live together for a couple of years, then marry, and then plan the timing of having children are very different from a couple who start living together, accidentally get pregnant, and then, perhaps somewhat reluctantly, get married.

There is some evidence that cohabitation is in fact becoming a more common bridge to marriage and commitment. First-time premarital cohabiting relationships are also lasting longer on average and increasingly turn into marriage: around seven in ten cohabiting couples are still together after three years, of whom four have married.

In the end what matters is planning, stability, and commitment. If cohabitation is a planned prelude to what some scholars have labeled “decisive marriages,” it seems likely to prove a helpful shift in social norms, by allowing couples to test life under the same roof before making a longer-term commitment. Sawhill’s distinction between “drifters” and “planners” in terms of pregnancy may also be useful when it comes to thinking about cohabitation, too.

      

Time and again, China has defied the skeptics who claimed its unique mixed model—an ever-more market-driven economy dominated by an authoritarian Communist Party and behemoth state-owned enterprises—could not possibly endure. Today, those voices are louder than ever. Michael Pettis, a professor at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management and one of the most persistent and well-regarded skeptics, predicted in March that China's economic growth rate "will average not much more than 3% annually over the rest of the decade." Barry Eichengreen, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, warned last year that China is nearing a wall hit by many high-speed economies when growth slows or stops altogether—the so-called "middle-income trap."

No question, China has many problems. Years of one-sided investment-driven growth have created obvious excesses and overcapacity. A weaker global economy since the 2008 financial crisis and rapidly rising labor cost at home have slowed China's vaunted export machine. Meanwhile, a massive housing bubble is slowly deflating, and the latest economic data is discouraging. Real growth in GDP slowed to an annualized rate of less than 7 percent in the first quarter of 2012, and April saw a sharp slowdown in industrial output, electricity production, bank lending, and property transactions. Is China's legendary economy in serious trouble?

Not just yet. The odds are that China will navigate these shoals and continue to grow at a fairly rapid pace of around 7 percent a year for the remainder of the decade, overtaking the United States to become the world's biggest economy around 2020. That's a lot slower than the historical average of 10 percent, but still solid. Considerably less certain, however, is whether China's secretive and corrupt Communist Party can make this growth equitable, inclusive, and fair. Rather than economic collapse, it's far more likely that a decade from now China will have a strong economy but a deeply flawed and unstable society.

China's economic model, for all its odd communist trappings, closely resembles the successful strategy for "catch-up growth" pioneered by Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan after World War II. The theory behind catch-up growth is that poor countries can achieve substantial convergence with rich-country income levels by simply copying and diffusing imported technology. In the 1950s and 1960s, for instance, Japan reverse-engineered products such as cars, watches, and cameras, enabling the emergence of global firms like Toyota, Nikon, and Sony. Achieving catch-up growth requires an export-focused industrial policy, intensive investment in enabling infrastructure and basic industry, and tight control over the financial system so that it supports infrastructure, basic industries, and exporters, instead of trying to maximize its own profits.

China's catch-up phase is far from over. It has mastered the production of basic industrial materials and consumer products, but its move into sophisticated machinery and high-tech products has only just begun. In 2010, China's per capita income was only 20 percent of the U.S. level. By most measures, China's economy today is comparable to Japan's in the late 1960s and South Korea's and Taiwan's around 1980. Each of those countries subsequently experienced another decade or two of rapid growth. Given the similarity of their economic systems, there is no obvious reason China should differ.

For catch-up countries, growth is mainly about resource mobilization, not resource efficiency, which is the name of the game for lower-growth rich countries. Historically, about two-thirds of China's annual real GDP growth has come from additions of capital and labor. Mainly this means moving workers out of traditional agriculture and into the modern labor force, and increasing the amount of capital inputs (like machinery and software) per worker. Less than a third of growth in China comes from greater efficiency in resource use.

In a rich country like the United States—which already has abundant capital resources and employs all its workers in the modern sector—the reverse is true. About two-thirds of growth comes from efficiency improvements and only one-third from additions to labor or capital. Conditioned by their own experience to believe that economic growth is mainly about efficiency, analysts from rich countries come to China, see widespread waste and inefficiency, and conclude that growth must be unsustainable. They miss the larger picture: The system's immense success in mobilizing capital and labor resources overwhelms marginal efficiency problems.

All developing economies eventually reach the point where they have moved most of their workers into the modern sector and have installed roughly as much capital as they need. At that point, growth tends to slow sharply. In countries that fail to make the tricky transition from a mobilization to an efficiency focus (think Latin America), real growth in per capita GDP can virtually grind to a halt. Such countries also find themselves stuck with high levels of income inequality, which tends to rise during the resource mobilization period and fall during the efficiency phase. Some worry that China—which for the last decade has had by far the highest capital spending boom in history—is already on the edge of this precipice. But the data do not support this pessimistic view. First, much surplus agricultural labor remains. Just over one-third of China's labor force still works in agriculture; the other northeast Asian economies did not see their growth rates slow noticeably until the agricultural share of the workforce fell below 20 percent. It will take about a decade for China to reach this level.

And despite years of breakneck building, China's stock of fixed capital—the total value of infrastructure, housing, and industrial plants—is not all that large relative to either the economy or the population. Rich countries typically have a capital stock a bit more than three times their annual GDP. For China, the figure is about two and a half. And on a per capita basis, China has about as much fixed capital as Japan did in the late 1960s and less than a third of what the United States had as long ago as 1930. Further large-scale investments are still required. So China's economy can continue to grow in part based on capital spending, though a gradual transition to a consumer-led economy does need to begin soon.

One illustration of China's enduring capital deficit is housing. Scarred by the catastrophic U.S. housing bubble, many observers see an even scarier property bubble in China. Robert Z. Aliber, who literally wrote the book on financial manias, called China's housing boom "totally unsustainable" this January. And it's true: Since 2005, land and housing prices have rocketed, and the outskirts of many cities are dotted by blocks of vacant apartment buildings.

But China's housing situation differs dramatically from that of the United States. The U.S. bubble started with too much borrowing (mortgages issued at 95 percent or more of a house's supposed market value), which caused a rise in housing prices far beyond the well-established trend of the previous 40 years and sparked the construction of far more houses than there were families to buy them. In China, mortgage borrowing is modest; price appreciation was mainly a one-off growth spurt in an infant market, rather than a deviation from established trend; and there is a desperate shortage of decent housing.

Since 2000, the average house in China has been bought with around 60 percent cash down, according to research by my firm, GK Dragonomics, and the minimum legal down payment has been something in the range of 20 to 30 percent—a far cry from the subprime excesses of the United States. House prices rose rapidly, but that's partly because they were artificially low before 2000, when state-owned enterprises allocated most of the housing and there was no private market. Much of the home-price appreciation of the last decade was simply a matter of the market catching up with underlying reality. And despite articles about "ghost cities" of empty apartment blocks, the bigger truth is that urban China has a housing shortage—the opposite of what typically happens at the end of a bubble.

Nearly one-third of China's 225 million urban households live in a dwelling without its own kitchen or toilet. That's like the entire country of Indonesia living in factory dormitories, temporary shelters on construction sites, basement air-raid shelters, or shanties on city outskirts. Over the next two decades, if present trends continue, another 300 million people— equivalent to nearly the entire population of the United States—will move from the countryside to China's cities. To accommodate these new migrants, alleviate the present shortage, and replace dilapidated housing, China will need to build 10 million housing units a year every year from now to 2030. Actual average completions from 2000 to 2010 were just 7 million a year, so China still has a lot of building to do. The same goes for much basic infrastructure such as power plants, gas and water supplies, and air cargo facilities.

Yet the housing market also illustrates China's true problem: not that growth is unsustainable, but that it is deeply unfair. The overall housing shortage coexists with an oversupply of luxury housing, built to cater to a new elite. Although most Chinese have benefited from economic growth, the top tier have benefited obscenely—often simply because of their government or party connections, which enable them to profit immensely from land grabs, graft on construction projects, or insider access to lucrative stock market listings. A 2010 study by Chinese economist Wang Xiaolu found that the top 2 percent of households earned a staggering 35 percent of national urban income. A handful of giant state firms, secure in monopoly positions and flush with cheap loans from state banks, has almost unlimited access to moneymaking opportunities. The state-owned banks themselves earned a staggering $165 billion in 2011. Yet private firms, which produce almost all of China's productivity and employment gains, earn thin margins and suffer pervasive discrimination.

At the root lies a political system built on a principle of unfairness. The Communist Party ultimately controls the allocation of all resources; its officials are effectively immune to legal prosecution until they first undergo an opaque internal disciplinary process. Occasionally a high official is brought down on corruption charges, like former Chongqing party secretary Bo Xilai. But such cases reflect elite power struggles, not a determined effort to end corruption. In a few years' time, China will likely surpass the United States as the world's top economy. But until it solves its fairness problem, it will remain a second-rate society.

      

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While countless factors have contributed to China’s dramatic economic transformation, the groundbreaking economic reforms instituted by Premier Zhu Rongji from 1998 to 2003 were critical in setting the stage for China to become one of the world’s dominant economic powers. From combatting corruption and inefficient state-owned enterprises at home to engineering China’s ascension to the World Trade Organization, Zhu left behind a legacy on which successive administrations have sought to build. What similarities, differences or parallels can be drawn between Zhu’s time and today? And what lessons can China’s current leaders learn from Zhu’s reforms?

On January 9, the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution launched the second English volume of Zhu Rongji: On The Record (Brookings Press, 2015), which covers the critical period during which Zhu served as premier between 1998-2003. In addition to highlighting Zhu’s legacy, this event also featured public panel discussions outlining the past, present and future of Chinese economic reform and its impact domestically and internationally.

Audio

• Chinese Economic Reform: Past, Present and Future - Part 1
• Chinese Economic Reform: Past, Present and Future - Part 2

Transcript

• Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20150109_china_economic_reform_transcript

       

As part of his economic revitalization plan, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been touting “womenomics,” a plan to increase the number of women in the labor force. One way for women to enter the workforce but bypass the conventional corporate structure is through entrepreneurship.

Four questions for three female entrepreneurs

At a recent Center for East Asia Policy Studies event on womenomics and female entrepreneurship in Japan, we brought together three successful female entrepreneurs to discuss their experiences both in the United States and Japan. Prior to their panel discussion, we asked each of the speakers four questions about their careers.

1. What was the trigger that made you decide to start your own business?
2. What was the biggest hurdle in starting and/or running your business?
3. How or when was being a woman an asset to you as an entrepreneur and/or running your business?
4. How has the climate for female entrepreneurs changed compared to when you started your business?

Despite the differing environments for entrepreneurs and working women in the two countries, the speakers raised many of the same issues and offered similar advice. Access to funding or financing was an issue in both countries, as was the necessity to overcome fears about running a business or being in male-dominated fields. All of the speakers noted the positive changes in the business environment for female entrepreneurs since they had started their own businesses, as well as the impact this has had in creating more opportunities for women.

Donna Fujimoto Cole

Donna Fujimoto Cole is the president and CEO of Cole Chemical and Distributing Inc. in Houston, Texas. She started her company in 1980 at the urging of her clients. Today Cole Chemical is ranked 131 among chemical distributors globally by ICIS (Independent Chemical Information Service) and its customers include Bayer Material Scientific, BP America, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Lockheed Martin, Procter & Gamble, Shell, Spectra Energy, and Toyota. Cole is also an active member of her community and serves on the boards of a variety of national and regional organizations.

Fujiyo Ishiguro

A founding member for the Netyear Group, Fujiyo Ishiguro is now the president and CEO of the Netyear Group Corporation based in Tokyo, Japan. The firm, which was established in 1999, devises comprehensive digital marketing solutions for corporate clients. The Netyear Group was listed on the Mothers section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2008. Recently, Ishiguro has served on a number of Japanese government committees including the Cabinet Office’s “The Future to Choose” Committee and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s “Internet of Things” Committee. 

Sachiko Kuno

Sachiko Kuno is the co-founder, president, and CEO of the S&R Foundation in Washington, D.C., a non-profit organization that supports talented individuals in the fields of science, art, and social entrepreneurship. A biochemist by training, Kuno and her research partner and husband Ryuji Ueno have established a number pharmaceutical companies and philanthropic foundations including R-Tech Ueno in Japan and Sucampo Pharmaceuticals in Bethesda, Maryland. Together, Kuno and Ueno hold over 900 patents. Kuno is active in the greater Washington community and serves on the boards of numerous regional organizations.

Full video of the event featuring these speakers can be found here.

Video

• The importance of mentors for female entrepreneurs
• Female entrepreneurs: Different options and different styles
• Female leadership creates opportunities

       

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Japan may face political uncertainty in the weeks ahead with an election slated for the Diet’s Upper House this summer. Only a few months ago, it was widely thought that Prime Minister Abe would dissolve the Lower House in order to have a double election this summer. However, lackluster economic performance, the pending decision on a consumption tax increase, and the task of reconstruction after the Kumamoto earthquakes may encourage the Prime Minister to reevaluate his options. How will the ruling coalition redefine its electoral strategy as voters expect further progress on the economic agenda? Can the newly-formed Democratic Party use this first electoral test to demonstrate greater potential?

On May 3, the Center for East Asia Policy Studies hosted a panel of distinguished Japanese politicians for a discussion on the future of Japanese politics. Yoshimasa Hayashi, Yasutoshi Nishimura, and Itsunori Onodera of the Liberal Democratic Party and Goshi Hosono of the Democratic Party shared their thoughts on their respective parties’ preparations for the upcoming election and the impact the election may have on the balance of power in the Diet, as well as issues such as the ratification of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the implementation of signature reform policies, and the potential resurgence of the opposition Democratic Party.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #JapanPolitics

Audio

• The future of Japanese politics (Japanese)

       

       

       

       

       

Volunteer, civil society and governmental delegates from 22 nations gathered in Johannesburg this month for the Southern Africa Conference on Volunteer Action for Development. The conference was co-convened by United Nations Volunteers (UNV) and Volunteer and Service Enquiry Southern Africa (VOSESA), in observance of the 10th anniversary of the United Nations International Year of Volunteers (IYV).

Naheed Haque, deputy executive coordinator for United Nations Volunteers, gave tribute to the late Nobel Laureate Wangari Mathai and her Greenbelt tree planting campaign as the “quintessential volunteer movement.” Haque called for a “new development paradigm that puts voluntarism at the center of community-centered sustainable development.” In this paradigm, human happiness and service to others would be key considerations, in addition to economic indicators and development outcomes including health and climate change.  

The international gathering developed strategies to advance three key priorities for the 15 nations in the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC): combating HIV/ AIDS; engaging the social and economic participation of youth; and promoting regional integration and peace. Research data prepared by Civicus provided information on the rise of voluntary service in Africa, as conferees assessed strategies to advance “five pillars” of effective volunteerism: engaging youth, community involvement, international volunteers, corporate leadership and higher education in service.

VOSESA executive director, Helene Perold, noted that despite centuries of migration across the region, the vision for contemporary regional cooperation between southern African countries has largely been in the minds of heads of states with “little currency at the grassroots level.” Furthermore, it has been driven by the imperative of economic integration with a specific focus on trade. Slow progress has now produced critiques within the region that the strategy for integrating southern African countries cannot succeed on the basis of economic cooperation alone. Perold indicated that collective efforts by a wide range of civic, academic, and governmental actors at the Johannesburg conference could inject the importance of social participation within and between countries as a critical component in fostering regional integration and achieving development outcomes. 

This premise of voluntary action’s unique contribution to regional integration was underscored by Emiliana Tembo, director of Gender and Social Affairs for the Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA). Along with measures promoting free movement of labor and capital to step up trade investment, Tembo stressed the importance of “our interconnectedness as people,” citing Bishop Desmond Tutu’s maxim toward the virtues of “Ubuntu – a person who is open and available to others.”

The 19 nation COMESA block is advancing an African free-trade zone movement from the Cape of South Africa, to Cairo Egypt. The “tripartite” regional groupings of SADC, COMESA and the East Africa Community are at the forefront of this pan-African movement expanding trade and development.

Preliminary research shared at the conference by VOSESA researcher Jacob Mwathi Mati noted the effects of cross border youth volunteer exchange programs in southern and eastern Africa. The research indicates positive outcomes including knowledge, learning and “friendship across borders,” engendered by youth exchange service programs in South Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania and Kenya that were sponsored Canada World Youth and South Africa Trust.   

On the final day of the Johannesburg conference, South Africa service initiatives were assessed in field visits by conferees including loveLife, South Africa’s largest HIV prevention campaign. loveLife utilizes youth volunteer service corps reaching up to 500,000 at risk youths in monthly leadership and peer education programs. “Youth service in South Africa is a channel for the energy of youth, (building) social capital and enabling public innovation,” Programme Director Scott Burnett stated. “Over the years our (service) participants have used their small stipends to climb the social ladder through education and micro-enterprise development.”

Nelly Corbel, senior program coordinator of the John D. Gerhart Center for Philanthropy and Civic Engagement at the American University in Cairo, noted that the Egyptian Arab Spring was “the only movement that cleaned-up after the revolution." On February 11^th, the day after the resignation of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, thousands of Egyptian activists  removed debris from Tahrir Square and engaged in a host of other volunteer clean-up and painting projects. In Corbel's words: “Our entire country is like a big flag now,” from the massive display of national voluntarism in clean-up projects, emblematic of the proliferation of youth social innovation aimed at rebuilding a viable civil society.

At the concluding call-to-action session, Johannesburg conferees unanimously adopted a resolution, which was nominated by participating youth leaders from southern Africa states. The declaration, “Creating an Enabling Environment for Volunteer Action in the Region” notes that “volunteering is universal, inclusive and embraces free will, solidarity, dignity and trust… [creating] a powerful basis for unity, common humanity, peace and development.”  The resolution, contains a number of action-oriented recommendations advancing voluntarism as a “powerful means for transformational change and societal development.” Policy recommendations will be advanced by South African nations and other stakeholders at the forthcoming Rio + 20 deliberations and at a special session of the United Nations General Assembly on December 5, the 10^th anniversary of the International Year of the Volunteer.

      

After being made aware of their racial biases in referee calls through widespread media exposure, individual National Basketball Association referees became unbiased, suggesting that raising awareness of even subtle forms of racism can bring about meaningful change.

The authors examined a real-world setting—professional sports referees who had big incentives to make unbiased decisions but were still exhibiting significant amounts of racial bias—and found that after learning of their bias via media coverage of a major academic study, their behaviors changed.

The original study, authored by Price and Wolfers and in 2007, looked at nearly two decades of NBA data (1991-2002) and found that personal fouls are more likely to be called against basketball players when they are officiated by an opposite-race refereeing crew than when officiated by an own-race refereeing crew. The results received widespread media attention at the time, with a front-page piece in the New York Times and many other newspapers, extensive coverage on the major news networks, ESPN, talk radio and in the sports media including comments from star players at the time such as LeBron James, Kobe Bryant and Charles Barkley, to then-NBA Commissioner David Stern.

The new paper compares the next time period after the first study (2003-2006) to the timeframe immediately after the study was publicized (2007-2010). The authors found the bias continued in the first 3-year period after the study but that no bias was apparent after the widespread publicity of the first study’s findings. The researchers found that the media exposure alone was apparently enough to bring about the attitude change: the NBA reported that it not take any specific action to eliminate referee discrimination, and in fact never spoke to the referees about the study, nor change referee incentives or training.

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Abstract

Can raising awareness of racial bias subsequently reduce that bias? We address this question by exploiting the widespread media attention highlighting racial bias among professional basketball referees that occurred in May 2007 following the release of an academic study. Using new data, we confirm that racial bias persisted in the years after the study's original sample, but prior to the media coverage. Subsequent to the media coverage though, the bias completely disappeared. We examine potential mechanisms that may have produced this result and find that the most likely explanation is that upon becoming aware of their biases, individual referees changed their decision-making process. These results suggest that raising awareness of even subtle forms of bias can bring about meaningful change.

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ABSTRACT

This study analyzes the willingness to pay for health insurance and hence the potential market for new low-cost health insurance product in Namibia, using the double bounded contingent valuation (DBCV) method. The findings suggest that 87 percent of the uninsured respondents are willing to join the proposed health insurance scheme and on average are willing to insure 3.2 individuals (around 90 percent of the average family size). On average respondents are willing to pay NAD 48 per capita per month and respondents in the poorest income quintile are willing to pay up to 11.4 percent of their income. This implies that private voluntary health insurance schemes, in addition to the potential for protecting the poor against the negative financial shock of illness, may be able to serve as a reliable income flow for health care providers in this setting.

Read the full paper on ScienceDirect »

      

The Chinese government has recently made early childhood development a national priority, recognizing the social and economic dividends that quality early learning opportunities reap for its human capital in the long term. As the country with the largest population in the world, 100 million children under the age of six in China stand to benefit from increased access to high quality early childhood education.

The quality of education in a country is indicative of its overall development prospects. Over the past two decades – building on the momentum generated by the Education for All and Millennium Development Goals – there have been significant increases in the number of children enrolled in school. Now, with discussions heating up around what the next set of development goals will look like in 2015, it is critical that learning across the education spectrum – from early childhood through adolescence and beyond – is included as a global priority. Starting early helps children enter primary school prepared to learn. High-quality early childhood development opportunities can have long-term impacts on a child’s later success in school.

Last month, the Chinese Ministry of Education, in partnership with the United Nations Children’s Fund, launched its first national early childhood advocacy month to promote early learning for all children. The campaign, which includes national television public service announcements on the benefits of investing early in education, builds on a commitment made by the government in 2010 to increase funding for early childhood education over the next decade. The Chinese government pledged to build new preschool facilities, enhance and scale up teacher training, provide subsidies for rural families for access to early learning opportunities, and increase support for private early childhood education centers.

A new policy guide by the Center for Universal Education outlines recommendations that education stakeholders, including national governments, can take to ensure that all children are in school and learning. These steps include establishing equity-based learning targets for all children, systematically collecting data for tracking progress against these targets, and allocating sufficient resources to education beginning in early childhood. The policy guide, based on a report calling for a Global Compact on Learning, is available in Mandarin, as well as Spanish, Portuguese, French and, soon, Arabic.

The success of China’s productivity and growth over the last few decades is attributable in part to its commitment to building a robust education system. As international attention mounts around the post-2015 education and development agendas, the priorities of national governments must be a central organizing principle. When national governments take bold steps to prioritize early childhood development, the global community should take its cue and integrate early childhood development into the broader push toward access plus learning. There is an opportunity for the global education community to push toward reaching the Education for All and Millennium Development Goals while ensuring that the post-2015 agendas include a focus on the quality of education, learning and skills development, beginning with the youngest citizens.

       

      

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Five years have passed since the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia sparked revolts around the Arab world and the beginning of the Arab Spring. Despite high hopes that the Arab world was entering a new era of freedom, economic growth, and social justice, the transition turned out to be long and difficult, with the Arab world now in turmoil with revolutions, counter revolutions, wars, civil strife, and the worst refugee crisis of our times. The response to the Arab Spring and its aftermath has focused almost exclusively on political and security issues, and on the very divisive questions of national identity and political regimes. Economic and social questions have been put on the back burner.

On January 15, Global Economy and Development at Brookings hosted a discussion on a new book, "The Arab Spring Five Years Later," which explores the critical economic and social issues driving the Arab Spring agenda and the real economic grievances that must be addressed in order to achieve peace, stability, and successful political transitions as well as provides an approach to addressing those grievances.

Hafez Ghanem and Shinchi Yamanaka presented the key findings of the book, followed by a panel discussion. 

Audio

• The Arab Spring Five Years Later: Toward greater inclusiveness

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

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• 20160115_arab_spring_transcript