As someone who went out to Africa in 1968 ‘to help’, and some 40 years later went to Zimbabwe where it looked like Ouagadougou in 1968…I am reminded of a friend’s comment, that our major problem is that we thought that whatever ‘good’ we did would last.

Excellent post, excellent blog. Thank you.

1. Exploit the power of peer learning – something we have much learned within the OECD over the last 50 years. Our organisation is based on the principles of soft power and mutual learning. We argue in our report that there is still enormous scope for applying peer-learning among developing countries themselves, and the cash-transfer programmes you cite is just one example (a particularly interesting one too, because it seems like the north is learning from the south – post-financial crisis, expect to see more of this in the future!)
2. Although south-south linkages (trade, FDI, migration, etc.) have grown very fast over the last two decades, developing countries can do even more to harness the development potential of these flows. For instance, our report points to the fact that manufacturing tariffs are 7 times higher on south-south manufacturing trade than trade between the OECD countries. On imports such as capital goods (machinery), tariff peaks are especially high, and developing countries are sometimes ‘shooting themselves in the foot’ by imposing such high tariffs on growth-enhancing imports from other developing countries.
3. Thirdly, as you say, all conversations lead to inequality. In line with Andy Sumner’s hypothesis, we argue that now that many developing countries have more financial resources than in the past, governments clearly need to put greater efforts into implementing pro-poor growth policies and establishing appropriate policies of social protection. It’s a domestic agenda here that primes, and relative poverty and inequality becomes much more important – after all that is the way we measure poverty in OECD countries, and we argue it is increasingly the way to look at poverty for developing countries, rather than put all the emphasis on the absolute dollar-a-day poverty line (which in any case is plagued with measurement problems).
4. One thing you don’t mention, but that our report stresses, is the importance of technology transfer and national innovation strategies. One worrying trend in the global economy is a growing technological divide within the developing world. Some developing countries have made an impressive advance in terms of their technological capacities – particular Brazil, China and India while other developing countries risk being marginalized even further by these trends. In the 1960s and 70s the words ‘technology transfer’ were very much part of the vocabulary of international negotiations and discussions. But from the 1980s onwards the words got dropped and technological progress got gradually reduced to debates on how to protect Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs). Yet, on its own, IPR protection is clearly insufficient to produce technological advance. Perhaps we need to rethink this emphasis and look again at supporting poorer countries with the articulation of national innovation strategies? Some poor countries, such as Rwanda and its strategy to become the ICT hub of East Africa, acknowledge this. But they also need help from the North and, increasingly, from other developing countries.
5. Finally, although important steps have been taken recently by international organizations to adapt their governance structures to the new circumstances described in shifting wealth, in the future these improvements in inclusiveness of the institutions of global governance will need to go further.

Apologies for taking up so much space in your blog, but we thought these reflections might be a helpful addition to the debate!

Regards,

Andy Mold
OECD Development Centre

Pete