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Month: November 2011

Published November 28, 2011

DC Folks: Talk on Food Prices and Food Riots at the CGD on Monday, December 5

I will be giving the Center for Global Development’s Massachusetts Avenue Development Seminar next Monday, December 5, 2011, at 4 pm. In case anyone would like to meet beforehand, I am free in late morning and early afternoon, so please drop me an email.

Here is the announcement for the seminar:

The Center for Global Development presents
a Massachusetts Avenue Development Seminar (MADS) on

Food Prices and Riots:
Estimating How the Level and Volatility of Food Prices Shape Social Unrest in the Developing World, 1990-2011

Featuring
Marc Bellemare
Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Economics
Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University

With Discussant
Ed Carr
Associate Professor
Department of Geography, University of South Carolina
and
American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow
United States Agency for International Development

Monday, December 5, 2011
4:00pm–5:30pm

at

Center for Global Development
1800 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Third Floor, Washington, DC
*Please bring photo identification*

Paper Abstract:  Can food prices cause political unrest? Throughout history, riots have frequently broken out, ostensibly as a consequence of high food prices. This paper studies the impact of food prices on political unrest using monthly data at the international level. Results indicate that in the period 1990-2011, food price increases appear to have led to increases in political unrest, whereas food price volatility has been associated with decreased political unrest.

Published November 23, 2011

Hilton’s Bits and Pieces of Soap: #SWEDOW?

According to an article in USA Today, the Hilton hotel chain is going to donate the partially used soap bars its customers leave behind to charity:

Hilton Worldwide has partnered with Atlanta-based nonprofit Global Soap Project to donate discarded soap from its 3,750 properties to be recycled for use in impoverished communities throughout the world.

In the first year of the partnership, the hotel chain expects to provide more than 1 million new 4-ounce bars of soap. Over the next three years, Hilton will also contribute $1.3 million to the effort.

Global Soap Project, founded by Uganda native Derreck Kayongo, uses a process of sanitizing, melting and remolding discarded soap from hotels throughout the country. Since 2009, the organization has sent recycled soap to 20 countries on four continents, including Afghanistan, Ecuador and Haiti.

Forgive my asking — and I am truly agnostic about this question — but isn’t this just another case of #SWEDOW (the acronym stands for “stuff we don’t want”)? Wouldn’t the recipient countries just be better off with the money made from selling the recyled soap in the US? Or from Hilton using its own (sanitized, melted, and remolded) discarded soaps and giving away the savings from doing so?

I haven’t visited that many sub-Saharan African countries (only Ethiopia, Madagascar, and Mali), but in all three places, I remember seeing soap that was made locally. Even if it were not dumping as per World Trade Organization rules, wouldn’t sending all that soap to those countries depress local industries? Is this really what we want?

Twitter for Dummies

When retweeted that article, someone on Twitter responded:

“SWEDOW or re-cycled product? Prefer Africa shea butter soap, but reality is soap in demand.”

Soap’s in demand? So is food. And when I pointed out that most African countries had their own soap-making industries, which this charity might well depress, that same person told me:

“as by-product bio-fuel industry — FOREIGN owned (to meet home country bio-fuel regs). Knee jerk criticism of RECYCLING wrong”

Right, because criticizing an entire industry because it is foreign-owned is not a knee-jerk reaction. Of course not.

Lest anyone question my recycling cred, here is what’s in the back of our house:

And here is what’s inside what’s in the back of our house:

Also, for anyone who would like to engage me in a conversation via social media, here is a bit of advice. Tweets like these:

“Guess academics can AFFORD cynicism”

“Suggest visit w/ Duke’s medical school and ask about connection SOAP and disease control…”

“Whatever happened to intellectual curiousity [sic]? Suggest study market dev early US – recycling/used goods stepping stones growth.”

Those tweets tell more about the twit that tweets them than they tell about my thoughts and thinking–especially when the twit that tweets them is cowardly comfortably hiding behind an anonymous Twitter account.

Published November 22, 2011

The Cost of Complex Land Titles and Ellickson’s Must-Read Book for Development Folks

Chinese customs and law have traditionally prevented a land seller from conveying outright title to a buyer. The ancient custom of dian, which persisted until the 1949 revolution, gave a land seller and his lineage an immutable option to buy back sold land at the original sale price. This little-analyzed custom discouraged soil conservation and land improvements, and, especially after 1600, contributed to China’s inability to keep pace with England. After calamitous experiences with land collectivization between 1951 and 1981, China’s Communist government began to confer private land-use rights. But, instead of making outright sales, it chose to award contractual rights only for a fixed-term, for example, 50 years in the case of an industrial parcel. For the same reasons dian did, this policy threatens to impair China’s prospects of economic development.

This is the abstract of Robert C. Ellickson’s latest paper. Land rights have been very much on my mind lately, as I am revising a paper studying their effect on rice productivity in Madagascar.

If you have an interest in development and are not familiar with Ellickson’s work, you are seriously missing out.

Ellickson is Walter E. Meyer Professor of Property and Urban Law at the Yale Law School. The first half of his book Order Without Law — which ranks among my the top five social science books — develops a theory of social norms, the essence of which is that social norms emerge and evolve in a way that maximizes the welfare of the community. This is the informal-sector equivalent to Posner’s hypothesis that the common law evolves in a way that is wealth-maximizing.

The second half of Order Without Law illustrates that theory by presenting a case study of the many social norms observed by the cattle ranchers of Shasta County, CA.

If you think you might be interested in reading Ellickson’s book but aren’t sure about purchasing the book and would like a teaser, read Ellickson’s 1989 Journal of Legal Studies article titled “A Hypothesis of Wealth-Maximizing Norms: Evidence from the Whaling Industry.” That article presents Ellickson’s theory of social norms and applies it to the norms that emerged to regiment New England’s whaling industry in the 18th and 19th centuries.