I can highly recommend both Lomborg’s book and the full reports! It’s the most clear and levelheaded work in development related to the SDGs I’ve read to date.
Charity Entrepreneurship is doing a research round based on these reports, so if the reports hold scrutiny hopefully there’ll be some wonderful new charities working on these problems not too long from now.
Specifically on e-procurement and land reform I have some thoughts:
E-procurement and land tenure stood out to me as the two EA’s might be particularly well suited to attack. I’m very excited for both of them, with an enormous caveat that it is much easier to mess these up and cause harm than for the rest of CCC’s recommendations.
Even for topics where we have a myriad of RCTs (ie. education), RCTs should only be a single step of a longer design process. A meta-review is a only a small signal (often the best available to decision makers) whether a project is likely to be impactful. If you want to implement ‘teaching at the right level’ (as CCC recommends), but the government is resistant and the NGO you’re contracting with is incompetent, your project will fail despite the meta-review looking positive.
For e-procurement, think of just how difficult it is for well-resourced western governments and corporations to get this right.
You run into one problem after another where some department claims the solution doesn’t work or fit their needs for reasons that never quite make any sense, as the real reason will be that it exposes corruption or makes them redundant.[1]
Land reform is even more tricky! A poorly implemented land tenure reform (where the rightful owners lose ownership) can just as well erode remaining trust that investments into land will pay off.
I remain very excited as these types of reforms have the potential to enormously increase growth in ways marginalist approaches won’t ever compete with. But whether e-procurement is net-positive, I suspect, will come down entirely down to the government and people who are responsible.
I think a great team and willing government can pull this off—I am less confident in having it as a blanket recommendation for all governments.
Im interested in what you think is so tricky about e-procurement? It seems to me relatively straightforward. The big gain in developing countries too will not just be through efficiency, but as you say through preventing corruption that is so so much harder with everything online.
Even in cases of supposed “failure”, I wonder how many of them would really have been worse than the offline alternative—failures will be more obvious with governments listing everything transparently online.
hmm yeah perhaps the downside isn’t as big as I think, I don’t have any idea to be honest.
My main reason for hesitancy on e-procurement is just how difficult it is to do well in ideal contexts. But perhaps in an LDC context the bar for what constitutes an improvement is also much lower.
I can highly recommend both Lomborg’s book and the full reports! It’s the most clear and levelheaded work in development related to the SDGs I’ve read to date.
Charity Entrepreneurship is doing a research round based on these reports, so if the reports hold scrutiny hopefully there’ll be some wonderful new charities working on these problems not too long from now.
Specifically on e-procurement and land reform I have some thoughts:
E-procurement and land tenure stood out to me as the two EA’s might be particularly well suited to attack. I’m very excited for both of them, with an enormous caveat that it is much easier to mess these up and cause harm than for the rest of CCC’s recommendations.
Even for topics where we have a myriad of RCTs (ie. education), RCTs should only be a single step of a longer design process. A meta-review is a only a small signal (often the best available to decision makers) whether a project is likely to be impactful. If you want to implement ‘teaching at the right level’ (as CCC recommends), but the government is resistant and the NGO you’re contracting with is incompetent, your project will fail despite the meta-review looking positive.
For e-procurement, think of just how difficult it is for well-resourced western governments and corporations to get this right.
You run into one problem after another where some department claims the solution doesn’t work or fit their needs for reasons that never quite make any sense, as the real reason will be that it exposes corruption or makes them redundant.[1]
Land reform is even more tricky! A poorly implemented land tenure reform (where the rightful owners lose ownership) can just as well erode remaining trust that investments into land will pay off.
I remain very excited as these types of reforms have the potential to enormously increase growth in ways marginalist approaches won’t ever compete with. But whether e-procurement is net-positive, I suspect, will come down entirely down to the government and people who are responsible.
I think a great team and willing government can pull this off—I am less confident in having it as a blanket recommendation for all governments.
I am reminded by my favorite story from Carl Icahn where he paints a picture of what this looks like
Nice one Mathias.
Im interested in what you think is so tricky about e-procurement? It seems to me relatively straightforward. The big gain in developing countries too will not just be through efficiency, but as you say through preventing corruption that is so so much harder with everything online.
Even in cases of supposed “failure”, I wonder how many of them would really have been worse than the offline alternative—failures will be more obvious with governments listing everything transparently online.
hmm yeah perhaps the downside isn’t as big as I think, I don’t have any idea to be honest.
My main reason for hesitancy on e-procurement is just how difficult it is to do well in ideal contexts. But perhaps in an LDC context the bar for what constitutes an improvement is also much lower.