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(Note: This is the second of a two-part guest post by Catherine Herrold, a PhD candidate at Duke University whose dissertation looks at the relationship between philanthropic foundations and the Egyptian revolution. The first part was posted on Monday morning.)

The US assumed, incorrectly, that Egypt’s transitional government would allow it to bypass traditional bilateral aid channels and send grants unilaterally to both international and local democracy-promotion NGOs. Instead, the government waged a public war against civil society, placing international NGO employees on trial for meddling in Egyptian politics and instilling fear into Egypt’s own NGO community.

A less public but no less important outcry came from Egypt’s development community. Democracy, they explained, would not be built by promoting elections, funding fancy NGOs, or training budding party leaders in the ways of Western politicians. In fact, democracy was already being built locally around cups of tea and through legan (popular committees) as community members came together for the first time in decades to discuss problems, debate solutions, and set agendas for action. What was needed to sustain this newfound democratic spirit, development leaders interviewed in the course of my research argued, were funds for projects related to education, job training, and health care that simultaneously addressed Egyptians’ basic human security concerns and built their capacities to be engaged democratic citizens.

My newest article, “The Welfare Impacts of Commodity Price Volatility: Evidence from Rural Ethiopia,” coauthored with Chris Barrett and David Just, is finally available on the American Journal of Agricultural Economics‘ website.

Here is the abstract:

How does commodity price volatility affect the welfare of rural households in developing countries, for whom hedging and consumption smoothing are often difficult? When governments choose to intervene in order to stabilize commodity prices, as they often do, who gains the most? This article develops an analytical framework and an empirical strategy to answer those questions, along with illustrative empirical results based on panel data from rural Ethiopian households. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that the welfare gains from eliminating price volatility are increasing in household income, making food price stabilization a distributionally regressive policy in this context.

By “newest article,” I really mean “most recently accepted article,” for I have been working on this paper since early 2007. Because the paper innovates on both the theoretical and empirical fronts, and because it makes a point of fundamental importance for policy, I think this is my finest piece of research so far.

For a more complete discussion of this paper, see here.

(Note: This is the first of a two-part guest post by Catherine Herrold, a PhD candidate at Duke University whose dissertation looks at the relationship between philanthropic foundations and the Egyptian revolution. The second part will be posted on Wednesday morning.)

Over the long term I am optimistic for Egypt. But our transition will last at least 10 to 15 years. In the meantime I am pessimistic.

This was a common sentiment expressed by civil society leaders during the first year of Egypt’s democratic transition. From January 2010 through July 2012, I conducted 75 interviews with staff of Egyptian NGOs, Egyptian philanthropic foundations, and international donors operating in Egypt. All felt that civil society had an important role to play in advancing Egypt’s political transition in the wake of the January 25, 2011 revolution.

None, however, predicted that the transition would be swift. Rather, they all agreed that while the revolution was sudden, substantive transformation would take time. They also pointed out that while change at the top levels of political power was crucial, reform would only be complete when marginalized groups were able to fully claim their economic, social, and political rights.