Results for “south africa” 310 found
A new anti-AIDS strategy?
Leading scientists fighting the world's worst Aids epidemic have called on African leaders to head a month-long sexual abstinence campaign, saying it would substantially reduce new infections.
Epidemiologists Alan Whiteside and Justin Parkhurst cite evidence that a newly infected person is most likely to transmit HIV in the month after being exposed to it. An abstinence campaign could cut new infections by up to 45%, they say – a huge step in countries such as South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Swaziland.
Unlike most abstinence campaigns, this one requires only a month of adherence [TC: does it break the chain or just postpone it? It depends why transmission is so likely in the first month]. A month with condoms could have similar effects. Will it happen? The full article is here.
What I’ve been reading
So much has happened in the world lately that I've neglected to keep you posted on which books have crossed the threshold. Here are a few of the more memorable ones:
1. R.W. Johnson, South Africa's Brave New World. In the U.S. there is only the Kindle edition, but I ordered a British edition through the library. This is a comprehensive political history of the country since the fall of apartheid; I thought I wouldn't finish it but I did.
2. Juan Goytisolo, Juan the Landless. It's odd that such a splendid author is read so little in this country. Beware, though — this one lies in the territory somewhere between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. It is very powerful for those inclined in this direction and now I can see why his name in mentioned in connection with a Nobel Prize.
3. Steven C.A. Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution. A clearly written, well-argued book, which on top of everything else is better than most books on the Industrial Revolution, hardly its main area of focus. The main point is that the Glorious Revolution was more radical than is commonly portrayed and it represented the culmination of a struggle between two very different kinds of modernizing forces in England. Chapter 12 — "Revolution in Political Economy" — is a gem. This is a very impressive book.
4. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.
5. Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey: A Novel. The premise — an alternative literary version of Homer's story — sounds contrived but I was surprised at how good and how moving this was. Here is one good review of the book.
6. Kent Annan, Following Jesus Through the Eye of the Needle: Living Fully, Loving Dangerously. What is it like to be a Christian missionary in Haiti? This is a surprisingly insightful and moving book, one of the best Haiti books but of general interest as well. Most of all, it's about the author's struggle with himself. Chris Blattman likes it too, here is his review.
Who are the friendliest people on earth?
Chug points me to this latest survey, and here is the list:
1. Bahrain
2. Canada
3. Australia
4. Thailand
5. Malaysia
6. South Africa
7. Hong Kong
8. Singapore
9. Spain
10. United States
That means friendly to expats, not friendly to each other. You’ll notice that English-speaking or English-fluent countries are overrepresented, plus Thailand (ahem).
Here is a critique of the survey and mostly I concur with the criticisms (sorry Omar). More generally, unless it is a woman seeking marriage, I view “friendliness to expats” as a social strategy, often intended for internal consumption, not necessarily insincere but not reflecting true temperament either. It’s not driven by actual friendliness. By the way, how did Spain ever make it to number nine?
Are the Japanese the most or the least friendly people on earth? “Helpful” isn’t the same as “friendly.” In what country are you most likely to make real friends? Marry a native? Aren’t those two variables inversely related?
“Friendly” is one of the words most likely to arouse my deconstructive suspicions.
Markets in everything
Stab vests for the World Cup in South Africa.
From the authorities:
The national police says the company [selling the vests] was causing "unnecessary fear".
South Africa's football boss Kirsten Nematandani has assured visitors that all safety measures were in place.
South Africa has one of the world's highest rates of violent crime. The full story is here and I thank Stan Tsirulnikov and Wes Winham for the pointer.
Teacher Absence in the Developing World
In South Africa the problem of teacher absence is so bad that frustrated students rioted when teachers repeatedly failed to show up for class. But the problem is not limited to South Africa, teachers are absent throughout the developing world. Spot checks by the World Bank, for example, indicate that on a typical day 11% of teachers are absent in Peru, 16% are absent in Bangladesh, 27% in Uganda and 25% in India.
Even when teachers are present they are often not teaching. In India, where a quarter of the teachers are absent on any particular day, only about half of those present are actually teaching. (These are national averages, in some states the problem is worse.)
The problem is not low salaries. Salaries for public school teachers in India are above the norm for that country. Indeed, if anything, absenteeism increases with salary (and it is higher in public schools than in private schools, despite lower wages in the latter). The problem is political power, teacher unions, and poor incentives.
Teachers are literate and they vote so they are a powerful political force especially where teacher unions are strong. As if this were not enough, in India, the teachers have historically had a guarantee of representation in the state Legislative Councils so political power has often flowed to teachers far in excess of their numbers. As a result, it's virtually impossible to fire a teacher for absenteeism.
The situation in South Africa is not that different than in India. The NYTimes article on South Africa has this to say:
“We have the highest level of teacher unionization in the world, but their focus is on rights, not responsibilities,” Mamphela Ramphele, former vice chancellor of the University of Cape Town, said in a recent speech.
Some reforms are planned in South Africa, including greater monitoring of teacher attendance but this offhand remark suggests the difficulties:
“We must ask ourselves to what extent teachers in many historically disadvantaged schools unwittingly perpetuate the wishes of Hendrik Verwoerd,” [President Zuma] recently told a gathering of principals, implicitly challenging the powerful South African Democratic Teachers’ Union, which is part of the governing alliance (!). (Emphasis added, AT.)
Sputum markets in everything
South Africans in an impoverished township are profiting from an illegal trade in a precious new currency †‘ saliva.
Tuberculosis
sufferers in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, were found to be selling samples
of their sputum to healthy people to pass off as their own in a scam to
gain medical grants.
An investigation by the West Cape News
identified people with TB charging R50-100 (£4.10-£8.20) for saliva
samples contained in bottles stolen from health clinics.
The
paper said that buyers of the samples were then able to get a card from
a clinic indicating they have TB and use this to fraudulently obtain a
temporary disability grant of R1,010 per month from the department of
social development.
It seems to be a competitive market:
A 54-year-old man told a reporter that he makes an average of R500 per
month from selling his saliva to people seeking to trick their way on
to the benefits system. But he said business was "not good" because so
many people were infected with TB in the township that he had a lot of
competition.
I thank Jonathan Thomas for the pointer.
Assorted links
Symposium on Paul Collier
You will find a Collier essay on democracy and development along with numerous comments, including from Bill Easterly and Nancy Birdsall, all courtesy of Boston Review.
Easterly is not happy:
I have been troubled by Paul Collier’s research and policy advocacy for
some time. In this essay he goes even further in directions I argued
were dangerous in his previous work. Collier wants to de facto
recolonize the “bottom billion,” and he justifies his position with
research that is based on one logical fallacy, one mistaken assumption,
and a multitude of fatally flawed statistical exercises.
Nancy Birdsall suggests that donors support more investment in policing. She also notes:
The economy of sub-Saharan Africa–including Nigeria and South Africa–is smaller than the economy of New York City.
There is much more at the link.
What I’ve been Reading
1. Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia, by Vladislav Zubok. This excellent Belknap book focuses on the question of how the Soviets had much of an intelligentsia at all. More fun and more readable than expected and consistently interesting throughout. Soon this book will be put through the occasionally idiosyncratic "Natasha test."
2. Economics Does Not Lie: A Defense of the Free Market in a Time of Crisis, by Guy Sorman. He is a French classical liberal, defending a market-oriented point of view.
3. Bring Me My Machine Gun: The Battle for the Soul of South Africa from Mandela to Zuma, by Alec Russell. An excellent book which shows how messed up this country is likely to remain. Zuma in particular is a nasty piece of work.
4.
The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters, by Richard Bernstein. When I first saw this book I swore I wouldn't read it or buy it. Then the excellent reviews started piling up. Eventually I broke down. It turns out the writing is superb and it has plenty of informative content. But you know what, it is still a bad book and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The always-excellent Laura Miller reviews it.
5. The Book of Psalms, translated by Robert Alter (my favorite Biblical translator). Recommended.
Fly by the minute
Taking a cue from the cellphone industry, an upstart South African
airline is selling flights by the minute and allowing customers to buy
tickets and book flights via text message.Airtime Airlines takes to
the sky later this month, offering three flights a day from its base in
Durban to Johannesburg, Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. Passengers
purchase minutes much like they would for a prepaid cell phone and
redeem them for a ticket. Fees are assessed according to the length of
the flight – say, 75 minutes for the run from Durban to Johannesburg –
and could save as much as half of what competing airlines charge.
Here is the article. It’s not yet clear whether they have managed to lease planes, but here is another part of the business plan:
The cost for Airtime minutes can fluctuate, presumably according to
promotions and market factors, so topping off
becomes an exercise comparable to fuel hedging. Buy a big block of
minutes when you think they’re at their cheapest and you look smart,
unless the price drops again the next day. Then again, it might go up.
The price recently rose from 3 Rand to 5 Rand, meaning the cost of a
round-trip flight from Durban to Cape Town climbed from about 750 Rand
($81) to 1,250 Rand (about $134). Still that’s cheaper than the $200 it
would cost on South African Airlines.
But can you sell minutes short? I thank Christopher Balding for the pointer.
Markets in everything
Mr Caballero’s clothes can withstand shots from 9mm pistols to AK-47s
and clients fearing knives can pay extra for stab-proofing.
The market is South Africa and the inspiration is Colombia. It’s the stab-proofing that impresses me. Here is the story and I thank NS for the pointer.
Johannes Fedderke and the importance of good governance
File him in the category underappreciated economists. Does good governance matter for growth? Could there be a more important question for economists? The standard cross-sectional growth tests do not show much of a robust effect. But Johannes, along with co-authors Robert Klitgaard and Kamil Akramov, has a 150-page paper showing that if you take all the relevant heterogeneities into account yes, Adam Smith and Doug North were right after all.
Or do you prefer simple regressions which meet the eyeball test?
Here is the full paper. Here is Johannes’s long paper on South African economic history.
The best two sentences I read this morning
Charge 80% per year on a loan in the U.S. and you’re called a usurer. Charge 80% on a loan in Latin America or Africa and you can be a poverty-alleviation charity.
That is Dean Karlan and Jonathan Zinman, in today’s WSJ, "In Defense of Usury," p.A18. Karlan and Zinman discuss their study showing that micro-credit borrowers in South Africa are better off for receiving the money, even when they pay very high interest rates.
How similar are your country’s products?
The network maps show that economies tend to develop through closely
related products. A country such as Colombia makes products that are
well connected on the network, and so there are plenty of opportunities
for private firms to move in to, provided other parts of the business
climate allow it. But many of South Africa’s current exports–diamonds,
for example–are not very similar to anything.If the country is to develop new products, it will mean making a big leap. The data show that such leaps are unusual.
Tim Harford explains. Here are maps of product interrelations.
Auditing natural resource revenues
When my editor and I were exchanging drafts of this piece, my spam blocker wouldn’t let them through. There is too much talk of Nigeria and diamonds! Here is one excerpt:
Paul Collier, an economics professor at Oxford University,
has a new and potentially powerful idea. In his recently published
book, “The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and
What Can Be Done About It” (Oxford University Press), Professor Collier
favors an international charter – some widely publicized guidelines
that countries can voluntarily adopt – to give transparency in spending
wealth from natural resources. A country would pledge to have formal
audits of its revenues and their disposition. Imagine
PricewaterhouseCoopers auditing the copper revenues of Zambia and
issuing a public report.
It’s not as futile as it might sound:
Professor Collier’s proposal at first glance seems toothless; a
truly corrupt country probably wouldn’t follow the provisions of the
charter, which, after all, is voluntary. Yet citizens could pressure
their government to follow such a charter, and the idea of the charter
would create a focus for political opposition and signify international
support for concrete reform.Foreign corporations would bring
further pressures to heed the charter. Multinational companies that are
active in corrupt countries might receive bad domestic publicity.
Eventually the companies might push for adherence to the charter, even
if the charter limited their ability to bribe. In another context, De
Beers has been stung by bad publicity about “blood diamonds,” and the
company is now a force for positive change where it operates.In
the optimistic case, a few poor countries start abiding by the charter.
Those countries prosper and attract more investment and status in the
international community. The pressure to adopt the charter would then
spread. Of course, promoting the charter costs relatively little and
the potential benefits are significant. International pressures did
eventually force a change in South African apartheid. So maybe they can
improve other countries as well.
Did you know that Tony Blair was already promoting such a charter? And the Nigerian government (really) already commissioned a private sector audit and now has enacted a version of this idea into law? We’ll see how that goes, but Nigerian flirtation with rule of law ideas is one of the underreported stories of this year.
Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion is a very exciting and important book. It is rare to read something on economic development that is true, non-trivial, and potentially useful. I recommend this book highly, it is also short and easy to read. Here is a good review of the book by Niall Ferguson.
Here is the whole column.