Results for “Ethiopia” 155 found
The economics of Ethiopian floriculture
Most cut flowers have a high value-weight ratio, and are very perishable. Flowers are consumed throughout the year, and must respond to varying consumer requirements through time. Thus, the industry depends on air transport and cold-chain logistics throughout the value chain. Air transport fees account for more than half the total cost of the product…and combined with marketing account for up to 75 percent of total costs. Frequency and timeliness of flights and other logistical arrangements are of utmost importance in meeting orders on time and ensuring that flowers arrive fresh to maximize vase time. The strategic and role of EAL [Ethiopian Air Lines] becomes clear from this perspective.
That is from Arkebe Oqubay’s Made in Africa: Industrial Policy in Ethiopia. In Ethiopia, they sell this book for less than half of its Amazon list price.
Ethiopia: books on horseback
Via Malcolm Clark.
Ethiopia is still up and at it
Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populated country, is forecast to be the fastest growing economy in Sub-Saharan Africa this year, according to new data from the IMF.
Ethiopia’s economy is predicted to grow by 8.5 percent this year. The figures signal continued economic expansion following a long period of impressive growth. In the last decade, Ethiopia has averaged around 10 percent economic growth, according to the IMF.
To boost the economy, the country is pursuing a number of large-scale infrastructure projects, including the Grand Renaissance Dam and a railway network.
Here is the full story. Ivory Coast, Rwanda, Senegal, and Ghana are also growing at rapid clips.
Yes I am headed to Ethiopia
Blogging might be more erratic, if so I apologize. Please don’t think I am getting sick of this — I am not — it’s just that convenient internet connections might be hard to come by in the more rural parts of the country.
Like from 2017:
Ethiopia has cut off internet access nationwide until at least June 8 to try to stop cheats from posting high school exam papers on social media, a government official said on Thursday.
The good news is they just turned internet access “back on” last month. Let’s hope it stays that way.
At the very least, I have posts on autopilot. Let’s hope I can add to those, and at the very worst MR will be back to normal and normally timed service in less than ten days. The modal scenario is that in fact you will get more than average, but I can’t promise that either. Wish me luck.
Ethiopia bleg
I’ll be there, in a bit of time, and I’ll have the chance to get outside Addis Adaba. What do you all recommend to me? And where and what should I eat? I thank you all in advance for your counsel and wisdom.
Exotic Ethiopian Cooking
That’s the book Yana gave me for Christmas. I hadn’t realized how much the cuisine relies upon red onion and how many of the dishes require a full cup of red pepper paste. Spiced butter is common too. The recipe for red pepper paste starts by suggesting "15 lbs." of New Mexico red chiles. I’m trying it with…15 red chiles. We’ll see how that goes; I’ve also scaled back the "5 lbs. fresh ginger" to 5 pieces of fresh ginger.
If you’re ready with the spiced butter and the red pepper paste (neither is totally simple), most of the recipes take 5-10 minutes and sound quite delicious.
The menu for tonight includes fesenjan chicken, Parsee sweet and sour fish, Parsee lamb with stewed apricots, Ethiopian sauteed beef with injera, and red lentils. I’ll also make Ethoipian pumpkin if I have red pepper sauce left over. Natasha is preparing Russian vegetable salads.
When does provenance justify a consumption experience?
Konstantin emails me a question:
Hey Tyler! You said you tried coffee just once, at a coffee ceremony in an Ethiopian village, as coffee probably originates in Ethiopia.
What else would you try (or do) only due to its provenance?
What else have you tried or done only due to its provenance?
I used to always try the local foodstuffs, no matter what the expected quality, for instance that terrible fermented dish in Iceland. I guess I have stopped doing this? (“I’ll just have the beef rendang, please!” No monkey brains either. I do however make a point of trying new dishes I think I will enjoy.) In the case of coffee, I felt it would be rude to refuse. Plus after all these years I was curious what coffee tasted like.
More generally, I am a fan of consumption experiences tied to what Konstantin calls provenance. If you are in Japan at the right time of year, it makes sense to walk up Mount Fuji. The fact that the mountain has a special status in Japanese lore makes the experience more valuable, even if you don’t believe in Japanese lore per se. It is one way of “connecting” yourself to Japan, and seeing how that connection feels.
When I was younger, I took a cable car in San Francisco, even though I didn’t find the experience an intrinsically valuable one. Frankly, it bored me, but I also don’t regret doing it. Think of the underlying model as “trying to approach a native culture from as many different angles as possible.” You also should try the angles they put forward as focal. Even though those angles may not in fact be the most relevant or focal ones. How important are cable cars for understanding San Francisco? I am not sure, but if they are irrelevant that too is an angle you might try on for size. And then take off. When you are done, you can always walk over to the local bookstore.
My interview with Sam Matey
He is a podcaster who mainly does transcripts. Our discussion was largely but by no means entirely about climate change, here is one excerpt:
Sam: And India also is building huge amounts of new renewable and other electricity generating capacity. They’re building electric rail networks. They seem to be hitting their stride in a way that China was in about 2000 or 2005. I’m feeling optimistic about the rise of a new broadly-speaking-democratic powerful country in global markets and geopolitics.
Tyler: I would add the cautionary note that hardly anyone in India cares about climate change. Now, you may think they care about correlates to climate change, such as high temperatures in Delhi in the difficult months. But it’s very far from a national priority with any party that I’m aware of or any segment of the electorate. Air pollution is a major issue. But if there’s a way to fix air pollution, say through natural gas, that doesn’t, to a comparable degree, fix climate change, it could prove very popular in India.
So truly green energy has to be very cheap with the intermittency problem truly solved for India to make the transition, because there is not ideological momentum there at all.
And:
Sam: I agree that there’s not going to be a huge ideological drive to solve climate change in China or India, but I suspect that they will be doing a lot of the stuff that would have been considered a really ambitious climate change solving program 10 years ago, nonetheless, just for other reasons. Does that make sense?
Tyler: It makes sense, but keep in mind there’s also going to be technological progress for fossil fuels. And there has been; fracking was a big, big increase in productivity. It could spread to more parts of the world quite easily. The energy demands of the world, over some period of time, they could go up by 3x or 4x. And to think green energy will absorb all of that and cut into the current flows, I think it’s a bigger requirement than is often imagined.
Again, I wouldn’t say I’m pessimistic, but I’m not optimistic either. I’m genuinely uncertain.
And this:
Tyler: Maybe, but there’s two sources of quite green energy that have been declining. Nuclear we’ve already mentioned, but also hydroelectric. So some things are leaving the scene. And I would just say in general, looking at history, I’m very cautious about extrapolating either positive or negative trends. There’s so many efforts to do so. So in the 70s, there’s this great fear of overpopulation. Right now, there’s this great fear of a fertility crisis and underpopulation.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t think about either one of those, but it could well be neither comes to pass. Extrapolating current trends can rather rapidly lead us astray because of the power of the exponent. But maybe the world is just messy and not all that exponential.
In the latter part of the dialogue we talk about Morocco, Kenya, Mexico, Ethiopia, and the productivity crisis in Canada, among other issues. Will Buddhism rise or fall in influence? And what does it mean to suggest that books are overrated?
Haiti vs. the Dominican Republic
I am setting aside most of the cultural and “macro” issues, and just considering policy, in my latest Bloomberg column. Excerpt:
Consider agriculture. If you fly over Hispaniola, you can see a notable difference between the Haitian and Dominican sides of the border. The Dominican side has plenty of trees, whereas the Haitian side is denuded. Much of that can be explained by Haiti’s history of weaker property rights. A “tragedy of the commons” has led to systematic exploitation of Haitian land.
The deforestation of Haiti dates from at least 1730, when French colonial policies, timber exports and the clearing of the land for coffee production all did damage. That hurt the prospects for Haitian agriculture, but much of the tree-clearing took place in the middle of the 20th century. Haitians have long used charcoal as an energy source, which led to unchecked deforestation, soil erosion and desertification. Thus, despite its beautiful natural setting, most of Haiti does not appear green and sparkling.
In the Dominican Republic, deforestation is also a problem — but not nearly on the scale of Haiti. Forests still cover about 40% of the country’s land (estimates for Haiti have ranged as low as 2%). The Dominican Republic has some national parks and reforestation programs, and developed alternative energy sources to reduce the demand for charcoal. Forest cover, and the quality of the soil, made a comeback. The country is also working toward selling its reforestation for carbon credits, giving it further economic incentive to protect its land.
To the extent that the Dominican Republic still experiences deforestation, it often comes from livestock cultivation, a far more economically productive activity than gathering wood for charcoal.
To citizens of wealthy countries, these differences may not sound enormous. But agriculture is an important driver of early economic development. Surpluses from agriculture enable the accumulation of savings, which finances broader commercial investment and helps people start small businesses. The economy obtains a base for diversifying into manufacturing, as happened in East Asia. Ethiopia’s double-digit growth spurt, before the recent tragic civil wars, also was rooted in agricultural productivity gains.
Today the Dominican Republic is essentially self-sufficient in food, including rice. According to the US government, Haiti now relies on imports for “a significant portion of the agricultural products it consumes,” including 80% of its rice. In 1981, by contrast, food imports were only 18% of the Haitian diet.
There are further arguments at the link.
Friday assorted links
Sunday assorted links
1. The pessimistic view on Ethiopia.
2. Inside the NBA’s chess club.
3. Brian Goff on education and the cost disease.
4. Genes and depression and bad luck is endogenous.
5. TC on internet writing. And TC on Bill Laimbeer on passive-aggressive economists.
6. How should state and local governments respond to illegal retail cannabis?
7. Diaper spa for adults, and a licensing issue too.
8. The Karpathy review of Apple Vision Pro. I likely will try it once there is a small army of people who have figured out the ins and outs and who can serve as tutors, including for setting the thing up. One reason I am not “first in line” with this device is that it strikes me as a “technology of greater vividness” (a bit like some drugs? or downhill skiing?), and not so much a “technology to understand people and cultures more deeply.” I think the latter interests me more, and I also do better with the latter. But perhaps I am wrong! To be clear, I am not arguing that “technologies of greater vividness” are objectively or intrinsically worse, if anything more people seem to prefer them.
The economic returns to psychological interventions
That is the topic of my Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
One study of Ethiopia looked at the psychological impact of raising aspirations. The researchers created a randomized control trial, showing one group of people short films about business and entrepreneurial success in the community. Six months later, those who had seen the films had worked more, saved more and invested more in education, relative to those who had not seen the films. Even five years later, households that had seen the films had accumulated more wealth, and their children had on average 0.43 more years of education, which typically is considered an impressive effect.
Not all the results are so positive:
Sometimes psychological interventions produce only temporary effects. One research design taught self-efficacy lessons to women in India. The likelihood of employment rose 32% in the short run — but within a year the effects had dissipated…
None of these results demonstrates that there is a “psychology of poverty” to be overcome by external interventions. They do imply, however, that poorer economies can make marginal gains by investing in what might be called psychological and psychotherapeutic infrastructure. These research designs can be applied to hundreds or thousands of people, but it will never be easy to use them for entire citizenries. Nonetheless, countries can make therapeutic help more accessible and affordable, and foster a culture in which people feel comfortable seeking it out.
Are we in the west at the margins where more counseling and therapy are of zero value, or perhaps negatives? Perhaps the only choice is either to have too little or too much self-reflection of a particular kind.
Wednesday assorted links
1. The logic of American vs. Japanese ghost stories.
2. Paul Krugman on the economics of slavery (NYT).
3. The Year in Interintellect.
4. Casey Handmer on Elon Musk.
5. Nils Karlson open-access book on classical liberalism vs. populism. The book is very much on the mark and I was happy to blurb it.
6. What Bill Ackman is up to. A very long, programmatic tweet.
7. Good background explainer on the Ethiopia-Somaliland deal (NYT). The agreement may end up with some charter city-like elements.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Scott Sumner on money/macro GOAT (I largely agree with his perspective and picks).
2. Monopsony amplifies distortions from progressive taxes.
3. Temporarily Coasean Ethiopia and Somaliland deal.
4. Anselm Kiefer in 3-D Glory.
5. Best skyscrapers of 2023? Notably Latin America is well ahead of China.
6. 2024 is the biggest election year in history.
7. Against habits.
My excellent Conversation with Stephen Jennings
Recorded in Tatu City, Kenya, not far from Nairobi, Tatu City is a budding Special Enterprise Zone. Here is the transcript, audio, and video. Here is the episode overview:
Stephen and Tyler first met over thirty years ago while working on economic reforms in New Zealand. With a distinguished career that transitioned from the New Zealand Treasury to significant ventures in emerging economies, Stephen now focuses on developing new urban landscapes across Africa as the founder and CEO of Rendeavour.
Tyler sat down with Stephen in Tatu City, one of his multi-use developments just north of Nairobi, where they discussed why he’s optimistic about Kenya in particular, why so many African cities appear to have low agglomeration externalities, how Tatu City regulates cars and designs for transportation, how his experience as reformer and privatizer informed the way utilities are provided, what will set the city apart aesthetically, why talent is the biggest constraint he faces, how Nairobi should fix its traffic problems, what variable best tracks Kenyan unity, what the country should do to boost agricultural productivity, the economic prospects for New Zealand, how playing rugby influenced his approach to the world, how living in Kenya has changed him, what he will learn next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Just give us some basic facts. Where is Tatu City right now, and where will it be headed when it’s more or less finished?
JENNINGS: Tatu City is the only operational special economic zone [SEZ] in the country. It is 5,000 hectares of fully planned urban development. It is at quite an advanced stage. We have 70 large-scale industrial companies with us, including major multinationals and many of the regional leaders. We have 3,000 students come on site every day to our four new schools. We’re advanced in building the first phase of the first new CBD for the region. We have tens of thousands of core center jobs moving into that area, together with other modern office amenities. All of the elements — we have many residential modules, thousands of new residential units at a wide range of price points — all of the elements of a new city are in place.
COWEN: How many people will end up living here?
JENNINGS: Around 250,000.
COWEN: And how many businesses?
JENNINGS: There’ll be thousands of businesses.
And delving more deeply into matters:
COWEN: What do you think is the book [on economic development] that has influenced you most?
JENNINGS: It’s a very good question. I think I’ve read just about everything in development. There’s nothing I really like very much. Development is a black box. I don’t think there’s anything that has much predictive power. There’s a lot of ex post explanations, whether they be policy settings, location, culture. I think 90% of them are ex post; very few of them are predictive. Some of them are just tautologies. I really like factualization.
It’s descriptive more than analytical, but it just makes it clear that most of the world has been on a very similar development trajectory. It’s just not sequenced. Sweden started early; Ethiopia started late. But the nature of the transition and the inevitability of that transition, other than very extreme circumstances, is kind of the same.
COWEN: What do you think economists get wrong?
JENNINGS: I don’t think we really understand development at all, because if we could, we could predict it. We can predict virtually nothing. It’s just too complicated. It’s too connected with politics. I think there’s a lot of feedback loops and elements of development that we don’t understand properly. We certainly can’t quantify them because the development’s happening in such a wide range of settings, from communism dictatorships through to very liberal systems and with all different kinds of industrial — on every dimension, there’s a huge range of variables.
Excellent and interesting throughout.