Comments

Hi Rosita, Thanks for the article. Without meaning to detract from any of the points you make, I wonder to what extent income inequality is a temporary byproduct of the process of development, that may actually fix itself over time? Your comments about China, India and Indonesia reminded me of an idea in development economics that is embodied by the Kuznets curve. This idea postulates that, as a country develops, the rich get richer earlier than the poor get richer, which results in a rise then fall in inequality over time. I'm not aware of how well this is supported by empirical evidence though. In any case, this is not to say that nothing need be done - high levels of inequality in developed countries is by no means impossible (e.g. USA's and China's Gini co-efficients are roughly the same). Michael

Thank you Susana, It's good to hear of the progress towards meeting the MDGs and hopefully with time we will be clearer as to the processes involved. Terence

Stephanie, thanks for your reply. I understand the importance of measuring. In this case, no one else was doing what the MVP was doing. No similar project existed and the MVP brought in additional funders (private enterprise, new partnerships etc) that did not exist before. The bigger question is "how do we know what we know?" Measuring is important, but it is only ONE of the tools in epistemology. Other ways to know whether things work include: historical knowledge, practicing knowledge (which should be further developed in methods), experience, working with local communities and local leaders, etc. I agree that all of these other "ways of knowing" should be as rigorously applied as formal measurement methods, but they are just as valuable ways of determining what works.

Terence, thanks for your response. I would just add that many, if not all, of the MVPs are on track to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which is not necessarily the case outside of the MVPs for the country as a whole, although many have made progress on the MDGs. Susana

Thank you Stephanie, Your point about counterfactuals is well taken and very well put. Terence

Susana, the comments you make here and elsewhere actually do not speak to the issue here. We have limited funds to alleviate poverty - how do we use them best? Sure the MVP has done great work. But if I had flown over the village and thrown the equivalent amount of money out of the window, would it have done as much good, if not more? Aid interventions are expensive, often involve lots of expensive foreign experts, and often don't fix the problem over the longer term. Unless we measure carefully, and know our impact is what is making a difference, not the overall economy or other factors, our scaled-up interventions may not work at all and simply be wastes of money that could have made a bigger impact if used in other ways. Remember, ever dollar spent on the MVP is a dollar not spent on e.g. immunization, de-worming, maternal health, education etc. somewhere else - somewhere it may have done even more good, somewhere we have the evidence to know it WOULD have made a difference. Unless we measure, we won't know - and we won't be solving the challenge of poverty.

I don't want to appear an apologist for RAMSI but please provide evidence of their promotion of excessive logging. I agree that the SI economy will have trouble once logging stops and I agree that export of sawn timber would likely have been a better option but I fail to see where RAMSI fits in here. When you say "the advice was not acceptable to those MPs who were raking in the timber money from their personal involvement so the officers were sent packing.", are you suggesting RAMSI should have somehow stopped this from happening. I suggest that had RAMSI publically attempted to do that they would have set themselves up as an easy target for " those MPs who were raking in the timber money" who would then severely criticise them for neo-colonial interference in SI domestic affairs, i.e. a no win situation.

Thanks for your comment Marcus -- it's certainly an interesting question! I don't know if I'm quite game enough to weigh into that debate on Tony Abbott, but perhaps some other commenters on the blog will! Deni's 'project manager' thesis was very interesting indeed -- we will hopefully have full video of the Pacific & PNG Update presentations uploaded shortly and I'll be sure to put the link here for those who are interested in watching his excellent presentation.

This is obviously a complicated and important topic and it can't be easily summarized with one-liners like: "1978 was the best year ever" or "global society has got a lot better off over the last 30 years." I encourage you all to read the <a href="http://www.idakub.com/CV/publications/2013_Kubiszewski_GlobalGPI.pdf?attredirects=0" rel="nofollow">full paper</a>, which compares a range of indicators for the 17 countries for which GPI has been estimated. Certainly some things have improved, like the ones Steve mentions, but GDP misses most of those too along with other positive things like volunteer and household work and leaves out major environmental and social costs. The HDI also leaves out social and environmental costs and benefits, although there are efforts now underway to fold some of them in. Anyway, listing only the positives without also accounting for the negatives (as GDP tends to do) is a major accounting problem. Can you imagine running a business that only looked at gross receipts? There is growing recognition that focusing too much on GDP as a policy goal is a major mistake. See, for example, this recent book by Nobel prize winners Joe Stiglitz and Amarta Sen: Stiglitz, J. E., A. Sen and J. P. Fitoussi (2010). <em>Mismeasuring our lives: Why GDP doesn't add up</em>. New York, The New Press We certainly don't claim that GPI is the perfect indicator, but it does try to account for some of the more important negatives and it shows no NET gain globally since 1978 (while some countries and regions are still improving and others declining on net). This is a compelling result, because it contradicts the general perception that Steve has voiced. GDP was never designed to measure social well-being and its time we stopped using it as a proxy for that. GPI is a step in the right direction, but certainly just one small step and hopefully not the last step.

Thanks Susana, I'm definitely in favour of cooperating to end suffering and death. The trouble is, we don't have that good an idea of what works best in doing this. Aid isn't guaranteed to work, and aid work has as many failures to its name as it does successes. This is why I think we should look for evidence. For the record I think the MVP was an inspired idea and definitely worth doing, but also worth testing thoroughly. We do know that things have gotten better in MVP villages, but in the case of at least some of the villages -- and this is the heart of of the Clemens critique -- we also know that things have improved significantly in surrounding areas as well. So it is very hard to say for certain that the MVP interventions caused the improvements. That is an evidential weakness. To the credit of the people behind MVP they are, as I understand it, working to develop better impact evaluations. Which is great. Progress in the direction of evidence based practice -- something that I'm celebrating in this post. Thanks again for your comment.

It would appear from <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-07-16/australia-trade-minister-visits-png/4823396" rel="nofollow">this</a> interview with Richard Marles that the topic of a sovereign wealth fund was indeed canvassed in the talks between the PMs so let's hope this is a positive sign of things to come. In terms of 'challenging conversations', I would like to see more oxygen given to the poor performance of Australian banks, the AFP and Austrac in exercising appropriate vigilance regarding funds being spirited out of PNG into Cairns, Sydney, the Gold Coast, etc.

It strikes me as odd that the "battle of ideas" and the call for evidence in the development industry/academia seems to take priority over cooperation and collaboration in order to end the suffering and deaths of millions in extreme poverty. Reducing poverty, after all, is our key motivation, right?????? It's also interesting to hear from critics of MVP who have never traveled to the MVP sites. If they had, they would have found that prior to the MVP, it was living hell. This was extreme poverty at its worst with no sanitation, no access to clean water, people dying daily of disease and malnutrition, hunger. After the MVP, one finds an entirely different world, people moving around, working, going to school....in essence, living. So when I hear "where's the evidence?" from development critics, I find it ludicrous.