Bringing in the Future: Strategies for Farsightedness and Sustainability in Developing Countries available in Hardcover
Bringing in the Future: Strategies for Farsightedness and Sustainability in Developing Countries
- ISBN-10:
- 0226029166
- ISBN-13:
- 9780226029160
- Pub. Date:
- 03/01/2009
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0226029166
- ISBN-13:
- 9780226029160
- Pub. Date:
- 03/01/2009
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
Bringing in the Future: Strategies for Farsightedness and Sustainability in Developing Countries
Hardcover
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$99.00Overview
Drawing on cases from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Ascher applies strategies such as the creation and scheduling of tangible and intangible rewards, cognitive exercises to increase the understanding of longer-term consequences, self-restraint mechanisms to protect long-term commitments and enhance credibility, and restructuring policy-making processes to permit greater influence of long-term considerations. Featuring theoretically informed research findings and sound policy examples, this volume will assist policy makers, activists, and scholars seeking to understand how the vagaries of human behavior affect international development.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226029160 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2009 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d) |
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Bringing in the Future
STRATEGIES FOR FARSIGHTEDNESS AND SUSTAINABILITY IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIESBy William Ascher
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2009 The University of ChicagoAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-02917-7
Chapter One
The Challenge of Farsightedness
The highway crumbles for lack of maintenance funds set aside when the road was built. The trees on the hillside have all been cut for timber revenues, without thought of the soil erosion and mudslides that someday will follow. The farmer plants only traditional annual crops, neglecting the opportunity to plant trees that would hold the soil better and could bring a handsome price five or ten years later. He had considered planting nontraditional cash crops, but this would entail investment and risk that can't be borne by the family's meager savings. Besides, the time and cost of transporting cash crops to market on the crumbling road are excessive. The farmer's children help him work the farm. They miss out on the opportunity for the schooling needed to develop skills for jobs that would be higher paying and more secure, especially in light of environmental threats to the long-term viability of the farm. Yet without charitable contributions to help defray school fees or a government policy to cover all educational expenses, the future gains of education are outweighed by the additional income that the children can provide today.
The farmer's cousin, already forced by rural poverty into the squalid shantytown on the edge of the city, can't find employment in an inefficient economy stifled by public policies that protect the immediate gains of favored constituents. She refuses to join community self-improvement efforts to upgrade the sanitation, pathways, and lighting in her neighborhood, doubting that enough of her neighbors will join and fearing that she would lose her home in the long run if the improvements attract well-connected real estate speculators who may displace her. No nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are available to organize or otherwise assist self-improvement efforts. Her teenage son is experimenting with alcohol and glue sniffing and is willing, if the opportunity arises, to engage in unprotected sex. When he is intoxicated or suffering from a hangover, he stays with his older brother, who has built a hut on a steep hillside even further from the city center. They hope that a mudslide will not bury them and the other residents. Their precarious position is exacerbated by the government's lack of planning for the influx of rural migrants.
This dismal scenario is hardly an exaggeration. For developing countries, household savings are crucial for family security, maintaining progress while emerging from poverty, and contributing to total savings. Yet Attanasio and Szekely (2000: 5) found that the household savings rates in Mexico and Peru were both less than 10 percent of annual disposable income, compared to nearly 30 percent for Thai households and nearly 50 percent for Taiwanese households. Even worse, for each of the three bottom quintiles (i.e., 60 percent of the households), the Mexican and Peruvian savings rates were negative, while for Thailand a negative savings rate was experienced only by the poorest 20 percent of the population, and all of the Taiwanese quintiles showed positive savings (Attanasio and Szekely 2000: 5).
For Sub-Saharan Africa, not only are household savings rates and total savings rates low, they have been declining. Aryeetey and Udry's 2000 assessment for all of Sub-Saharan Africa concludes that "aside from being generally low, [gross domestic] saving rates have shown consistent decline over the last thirty years in most countries, seldom exceeding 15 percent of GDP" (Aryeetey and Udry 2000: 1).
The farmer's exposure to soil erosion represents a worldwide problem: Pimentel (2006: 123) estimates that "currently, about 80% of the world's agricultural land suffers moderate to severe erosion, while 10% experiences slight erosion." Part of this erosion is due to deforestation, which in Africa resulted in a 9 percent decline in forest area from 1990 to 2005 and in Latin America amounted to a 10 percent decline over the same period. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (2007a) reports that "Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean are currently the two regions with the highest losses. Africa, which accounts for about 16 percent of the total global forest area, lost over 9 percent of its forests between 1990 and 2005. Latin America and the Caribbean, with over 47 percent of the world's forests saw an increase in the annual net loss between 2000 and 2005, from 0.46 percent to 0.51 percent"—the pace of Latin American deforestation has been increasing even as the forest acreage declines.
The adolescent's willingness to engage in risky behavior reflects another disturbing trend throughout much of the developing world, as drugs become more accessible and widely used and sexual abstinence loses its cultural support. Cocaine use is increasing in Africa, Asia, and Latin America; the use of opiates such as heroin is increasing in Africa, Central and West Asia, and India (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2007: 13, 83). Exposure to sexually transmitted diseases through unprotected sex, particularly at young ages, has resulted in high incidence of a wide variety of diseases. Despite recent indications that the rate of HIV infections may be declining, 2.5 million people are infected annually, the majority in Africa (United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS 2006: 2).
Regarding cigarette smoking—an even greater mortality risk to health than illicit drugs or AIDS—the World Health Organization estimates that currently two-thirds of the 5.5 million deaths attributed to tobacco occur in low-income and middle-income countries and that this will rise to 80 percent of the 8.3 million deaths in the baseline projection for the year 2030 (Mathers and Loncar 2006: 2025).
While these statistics demonstrate the shortsightedness of individuals or families, other statistics demonstrate that the very costly governmental shortsightedness reflected in this scenario is no exaggeration either. If we return to the problems of physical infrastructure, we would see that the neglect of road maintenance in developing countries is extreme, particularly in light of the fact that in developing countries the maintenance and rehabilitation of roads typically have far greater returns than the initial construction. A 2006 assessment by the Sub-Saharan Africa Transport Policy Program reports that of the eighteen Sub-Saharan African countries that have established road-maintenance funds and provide enough data to assess the degree to which routine and periodic maintenance is accomplished, only four countries are meeting the full routine maintenance, and none is fully meeting the periodic maintenance needs; the median level of meeting periodic needs is less than 40 percent. (Benmaamar 2006: 13). Gunter Zietlow's 2004 assessment of road maintenance in Latin America concluded that "unfortunately, even today, countries in the region are spending normally between 20% and 50% of the funding required for adequate road maintenance only. In addition, these already insufficient funds often are being used inefficiently in a poor state" (Zietlow 2004: 3). Even pressure by the World Bank to require governments to address road maintenance in Bank-funded transport projects has been ineffective. A 2007 assessment of the projects approved during the 1995–2005 period notes: "Despite the Bank's emphasis on adequate and timely road maintenance, this objective was seldom satisfactorily accomplished. The limited funds allocated to roads were often wasted through inefficient work methods and too much spending on new construction at the expense of the maintenance budget. As a result, a high proportion of the roads in developing countries remained in poor condition" (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2007: 24).
Yet it is not just road maintenance that is underfunded —physical infrastructure suffers woefully from underinvestment in most of the developing world. World Bank infrastructure experts estimated that for the 2005–10 period, developing countries would need US$550 billion to US$650 billion in physical infrastructure development, requiring 6.5–7.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), but current infrastructure investment is only half as much (Briceño-Garmendia, Estache, and Shafik 2004). The consequences of underinvestment in infrastructure are severe. One assessment for Latin America estimated an annual loss during the 1990s of 1–3 percent of GDP growth due to infrastructure shortfalls (Easterly and Serven 2003).
Inadequate infrastructure is only one of the obstacles that stand in the way of improving economic welfare in developing countries. The low savings and investment rates mentioned above, combined with questionable economic policies, dampen the productivity gains that are essential for economic growth. The International Labour Organization (2007: 15, fig. 18b) reported that as of 2006 output per worker in Sub-Saharan Africa, even adjusting for cost-of-living differences, was only one-twelfth of the levels of developed countries; South Asian labor productivity was less than one-seventh of the developed-country nations; Southeast Asia's productivity was less than one-sixth; and for Latin America and the Caribbean, the worker-output productivity was less than one-third of that of developed countries. Middle Eastern nations, with relatively high output per worker because of oil production, have actually declined overall in worker productivity over the past decade.
Low productivity also reflects low educational levels. High dropout rates in developing countries reflect weak public education funding, difficulties in paying school fees for both public and private schools, and weak incentives for families to encourage their children to attend. For many of the poorest families, school-based feeding programs would provide a strong incentive, but public or private charitable funding is lacking in many countries. Government spending on education in all developing world regions is less than that of North America and Western Europe, even as a proportion of total gross national product (United Nations Educational, Social and Cultural Organization 2007: 9). A consequence is that only a quarter of Sub-Saharan African secondary-school-age children are enrolled in secondary school—with low levels also found in the Arab states (58 percent), Latin America and the Caribbean (68 percent), and East Asia and the Pacific (70 percent) (United Nations Educational, Social and Cultural Organization 2007: 109).
The gap left by governments in providing the wherewithal for poor children to attend school is not commonly filled by domestic charitable contributions. Despite numerous calls for "indigenous philanthropy," Acs and Desai (2007: 8) conclude that "there does not currently exist a robust and effective local philanthropy sector in many developing countries." The tradition of private philanthropy beyond contributions to religious institutions has generally been weak outside of North America and parts of northern Europe.
These problems all require greater short-term sacrifice to make long-term improvements. This raises a series of crucial questions: How can families be induced to save at adequate levels and to invest in the education of their children? How can conservation and environmental protection be promoted— to stimulate individuals, collective action groups, and governments to be both proactive and protective about ecosystems and natural-resource endowments? How can people be discouraged from engaging in behaviors that risk health and security, ranging from HIV exposure to building in areas subject to floods or fire? How can the participation of residents in community self-improvement be increased where these efforts are essential to complement the work of government or NGOs and to instill enough pride to ensure that the neighborhoods will not be allowed to deteriorate? How can firms be persuaded to improve their long-term productivity through investments in appropriate research and development, providing on-the-job training and accepting sound economic policy reforms? How can governments be induced to reform economic policies that discourage long-term productivity gains? How can commitment to improvements in physical infrastructure be promoted despite the long gestation periods for such initiatives? How can the charitable impulses of the wealthy be harnessed to provide for the long-term public good beyond governmental efforts?
All of these challenges have two elements in common. First, they call for overcoming the shortsighted perspectives that so often prevail among individuals, governments, and nongovernmental entities. If the essence of sustainable development is the capacity to take sound, farsighted actions, what strategies and institutional arrangements can promote these actions—on the part of citizens, government, businesses, labor unions, and other nongovernmental groups?
Second, all of these challenges entail risk and uncertainty. The short-term sacrifices themselves frequently present risks to economic, political, or social standing. If the poor farmer invests in seed and fertilizer for a new type of crop or diverts effort from annual cultivation in order to build dams or plant trees, the risk is that current savings or income may not be sufficient to rebuild the home if it is damaged by fire or flood or to meet a health emergency. If the political leader adopts a policy that is unpopular because of the short-term sacrifices required of constituents, the immediate risk is the possibility of loss of leadership position. The longer-term risk is that the initiative will fail, wasting the resources devoted to it and the credibility of the initiator. The uncertainty as to whether these failures will materialize brings the problem into the present: Will people agree to bear today's costs and risks in light of the uncertainty about the long-term gains? How can initiators of farsighted pursuits either reduce risk and uncertainty, or convince others that the initiative is worth pursuing despite these concerns?
As daunting as these challenges seem, many individuals, nongovernmental groups, and governments in developing countries have addressed these long-term challenges successfully. As examples of meeting the challenges, many have noted that family savings rates have increased dramatically in East Asia (Lee, Mason, and Miller 1991). School enrollments in many countries have improved—for the seventeen countries that the United Nations Development Programme deems as "low in human development" that reported enrollment figures, the primary school enrollment rate increased to 69 percent in 2005 from 45 percent in 1991 (United Nations Development Programme 2007: 270). In Brazil, school enrollments rose dramatically during the 1990s, with primary school enrollments rates increasing to 95 percent in 2005 from 85 percent in 1991 and secondary school enrollments rates rising to 78 percent from 17 percent. These increases can be traced, in part, to families' decisions to limit family size in order to reduce the overall financial burdens of having large families (Lam and Marteleto 2006), which of course includes the costs of sending children to school.
While many parts of the developing world are experiencing excessive deforestation, North America, Europe, and Asia have reversed the deforestation trend—Asia because of huge efforts in plantation forests in China. And these government-initiated Chinese plantations, along with the efforts of individual farmers to build dams and terraces and adopt new tillage techniques, have resulted in considerable progress in soil erosion control since the 1980s (Xiubin, Tang, and Zhang 2006: 345). We cannot overlook the additional effort of dam and terrace building, nor the short-term risks of adopting new farming techniques.
Indeed, some farsighted arrangements for safeguarding natural resources have been successful for centuries. In Japan, many villages developed communal arrangements for sustainable commons land management by the seventeenth century that are still in effect today (McKean 1982, 1992). Similarly, systems for sharing irrigation water in Valencia, Spain, date back to the fifteenth century or even earlier (Ostrom 1990: 69–76). Environmental and conservation movements demonstrated extraordinary farsightedness and dedication long before these topics became mainstream. We see organizations such as the Nature Conservancy thoroughly committed to protecting land in perpetuity.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bringing in the Future by William Ascher Copyright © 2009 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
List of TablesPreface
Acknowledgments
I The Challenges and Hopes for Farsighted Action
1 The Challenge of Farsightedness
2 The Root Causes of Shortsightedness and Their Manifestations in Developing Countries
3 Gaining Traction to Overcome Obstacles to Farsightedness
II Structuring Rewards and Risks
4 Creating and Rescheduling Tangible Benefits and Costs
5 Creating and Rescheduling Social and Psychological Rewards
6 Realigning Performance Evaluation
7 Self-Restraint Instruments
III Improving Analytic Frameworks
8 Analytic Exercises
9 Deepening Problem Definitions
IV Framing the Appeals
10 Design Dimensions of Communicating Farsighted Appeals
11 The Triple Appeal Principle
12 Managing Heuristics
V Changing the Policy Process
13 Empowering and Insulating the Farsighted Leader
14 Structuring Decision-Making Processes
15 Conclusions
Notes
References
Index