You cited an unpublished study claiming little progress at the site in Kenya. That study has many methodological problems. One is obvious: the authors didn’t realise that some of their “control” villages actually received direct interventions from the Millennium Villages project.

Ironically, the “negative” study confirms the large gains in agricultural productivity achieved by the Kenyan Millennium Village.

Jeffrey Sachs
Director
Earth Institute at Columbia University
New York

IMAGINE you run a dirt-poor agricultural economy. Your farmers want to improve their soil but have no fertilisers, so you must either build a fertiliser factory or import the stuff. You will therefore need a port, dock workers, accountants and lawyers, roads and trucks to transport it, bankers to extend credit, and plastic bags to put the fertiliser in, necessitating plastics and packaging factories, too. Your farmers then need seeds and livestock, so you must have vets, market traders, construction companies to build barns and refrigeration systems. And you will need all this before your farmers put a seed in the ground.

In development, it seems, you cannot do anything until you can do everything. That is the idea behind the “big push” theory. Outlined by Paul Rosenstein-Rodan in 1943, this says that even the simplest activity requires a network of other activities and that individual firms cannot organise such a large network, so the state or some other giant agency must step in.

The big push came to grief in the 1970s and 1980s as evidence accumulated that, in Africa at least, public investment and foreign aid had produced no perceptible change in productivity, not least because so much of it was stolen. Recently, though, the idea has come back into vogue. The UN talks constantly about its millennium development goals (eight goals, 21 targets). Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University argues that if public investment and foreign aid are big enough, they will boost household incomes, spurring savings and boosting local investment. They should also “crowd in” external investment by improving infrastructure.

Unlike most economists, Mr Sachs can put other people’s money where his mouth is. He set up the “millennium village project”, taking 14 places in rural Africa with about 500,000 people and, since 2006, making them the subjects of a $150m project run by his university and African governments.

“The big opponents of aid today are Dambisa Moyo, an African-born economist who reportedly received scholarships so that she could go to Harvard and Oxford but sees nothing wrong with denying $10 in aid to an African child for an anti-malaria bed net. Her colleague in opposing aid, Bill Easterly, received large-scale government support from the National Science Foundation for his own graduate training.”
Fight, fight, fight!

Mr Easterly and Ms Moyo respond. Mr Easterly responds again.

That said, thanks for the recommendation, maybe I will read the book. If he is saying “can”, not “will”, then I am inclined to cautiously agree.

Sachs never claims that poverty will be ended by 2025. He claims that it could be, based on the 0.7% commitment that has already been made.

The book is well worth reading.

Milan

I believe it can be abolished, but won’t…world leaders and their lazy, apathetic constituents don’t give enough of a rat’s ass. And I’ll tell you three words we won’t be hearing from anyone starting around 2012: “Millenium Development Goals”.

Anyways never mind me, I’m just depressed. Have fun in Malta.

If they are yours, please have patience and remember that I am subject to the limitations of the technology at hand.