Category: Uncategorized

A recent post over at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative on the staples trap made me dust off an idea I had a few years ago about the futility of development policy. The staple trap is such that

While exporting [natural] resources can generate great wealth, the danger of such a path is that a staples economy becomes overspecialized in raw material extraction to meet foreign needs, and runs up large external and domestic debts over-developing the resource base and associated infrastructure. These become hard to service if and when external demand collapses, setting the stage for widespread financial dislocation along with painful losses of jobs and output.

What I discuss in this post is similar to the staples trap, but it is not quite the same. The staples trap is generally the result of market forces: As demand for a staple increases, the industry surrounding that staple develops and generates side industries (e.g., processing, packaging, exporting, etc.)

What I discuss here is the result of policy making–and it illustrates the futility of development policy, by which I mostly mean “industrial policy” rather than specific development policies like building roads and bringing clean water into villages. If I can be Minnesota nice about it, this post illustrates the development policy trap.

The above map, which shows the prevalence of female genital mutilation (FGM) in Africa and the Middle East, is from The Economist‘s Espresso email for last Thursday.

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you may recall that I have been doing some work on FGM. My paper on the topic (coauthored with Tara Steinmetz and Lindsey Novak; see here for the slides) used to focus on Senegal and The Gambia for the most recent years, but in giving us a chance to resubmit, the editor in charge at the Journal of Development Economics has asked us to look at all of West Africa for all available years. This has obviously meant a lot more work, but we are hoping to have a revised (and much longer) version after the Holidays.

If, like me, you happen not to have time to read The Economist cover to cover every week and are too lazy get too busy to visit their website, the Espresso email service delivers the top international news straight to your inbox every morning.

My recent article (gated; email me if you’d like a copy) with Nick Carnes is now available on ScienceDirect and will be published in the January 2015 issue of Food Policy. Here is the abstract:

It seems paradoxical that until recently, developed countries have continued subsidizing agriculture even though their agricultural sectors had been declining in relative importance since the middle of the 20th century. What drives support for agricultural protection—the broad array of subsidies to farmers and taxes and quotas imposed on agricultural imports—in developed countries? We answer this question by testing three competing hypotheses about what drives support for agricultural protection in the US: (i) legislator preferences, (ii) electoral incentives, or (iii) lobbying. Using data on the roll call votes of the members of the 106th through the 110th Congresses (1999–2009) and the scores given to each legislator by the Farm Bureau, our findings suggest that electoral incentives explain a great deal of the variation in support for agricultural protection, but that legislator preferences and lobbying might play a role, too. Moreover, legislator preferences and electoral incentives appear to be substitutes for one another. Why does Congress support agricultural protection? Because many members have electoral incentives to—and because many of those who do not still have other personal or strategic interests at stake.