Howard W. French (http://www.howardwfrench.com)

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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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Copyright - The Financial Times

The spectre of a rising China has returned to haunt Washington. This is the principal lesson I have drawn from a week just spent in the US. The attention of US policymakers has turned once again towards China. Relations between the world’s incumbent superpower and Asia’s rising giant are, indeed, of great importance. But the correct conclusions will not be drawn from this debate if Washington insists that the onus of change is on China alone. The US, too, must reconsider its role in the world.
>
I learned at first hand about the sensitivity of Washington’s “China question” from participation in a conference marking the launch of the Brookings Institution’s imaginative new China Initiative. A laudable aim of this initiative is to combat the hostility to China now surfacing in Washington.

> Listing the anxieties is, alas, all too easy. Yet the US could reasonably regard China’s resurgence as a triumph. Indeed, this is precisely what Robert Zoellick, the deputy secretary of state, said last week.*
>
> As Mr Zoellick remarked, since 1978 the US has supported China’s opening to the world and to the world economy. Moreover, “our policy has succeeded remarkably well: the dragon emerged and joined the world”. Singapore’s Kishore Mahbubani makes the same point more broadly: “As the main architect of the world order today, the US should be among the first to celebrate China’s progress.”**

Yet celebratory is exactly what many Americans do not feel: they view China solely through what Mr Zoellick called “the lens of fear”. Thus, Mr Zoellick’s speech had two audiences: the obvious one was China; the more important one was the US itself.

Mr Zoellick told China that it needs to change neither what it is nor what it aspires to, but how it behaves. If China is to be a “responsible stakeholder”, he suggests it needs to take account of its responsibility for
> the global system. Among instances of China’s failure to do so, Mr Zoellick lists its mercantilist attempts to “lock up” energy supplies, its support for unsavoury oil producers (such as Sudan), its toleration of “rampant theft” of intellectual property, its burgeoning current account surplus, its need to contribute to completion of the Doha round of trade negotiations and its potential role in halting proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Zoellick’s remarks on China’s role have force. But more important still is what he says – and does not say – about the proper response of the US. He insists that the US “welcomes a confident, peaceful and prosperous China”. Alas, many Americans disagree with this view. Some regard China as a new Soviet Union; others regard it as a 19th century Germany, reborn.

>
> Yet China is no Soviet Union: it seeks neither to spread anti-American ideologies, nor to struggle against democracy across the globe, nor to oppose capitalism, nor to overturn the international system. Equally, the balance of power politics of late-19th century Europe make no sense. Then they led to disaster. Today, as Mr Zoellick says: “We are too interconnected to try to hold China at arm’s length, hoping to promote other powers in Asia at its expense”. Still worse would be to try to halt China’s development altogether. That would be both morally wicked and practically calamitous.

Yet avoiding such stupidities is not enough. The US has to reconsider the systemic consequences of its actions.
> Many Americans would, after all, now accept the following propositions about the appropriate US role in the world: as sole superpower and a uniquely moral force, the US has both the capacity and the right to act as it sees fit on the world stage. The US is exceptional, they believe, not just in its size and power, but also as a moral agent. This point of view suffers from two sizeable defects: the first is that few outside the US believe it is true; the second is that it cannot underpin a co-operative global order.
>
> Of the great powers of the past several centuries, the US is indeed the most benign. Even so it is not hard to produce a list of its follies – and worse. For this reason, few outside the US would concede to the US the carte blanche it desires.
>
> Moreover, these claims are incompatible with the requirement that principles of action must apply equally to everybody in the same position. This is true within societies and must also be true between them. Thus, “I should do what I want and you should also do what I want” is not a morally legitimate basis of action.
>
> Yet precisely such double standards were inherent in the question from Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, last June: “Since no nation threatens China, one must wonder: why this growing investment? Why these continuing large and expanding arms purchases?”
>
> To this, the Chinese can justifiably react by asking why the US needs to spend as much on its military as the rest of the world put together. With Canada and Mexico as its neighbours, why does it feel so threatened? To this the US would respond that it has special responsibilities as guarantor of world peace and, in any case, threatens no other nation. China, in its turn, could then ask who elected the US global policeman and why, given the public debate in the US about whether and how to curb its rise, it should trust its security to the US.
>
> China will, in short, take both US behaviour and the principles that underlie it as the moral norms of the international system. If the US acts on the assumption that it is entitled to remove remote threats by force, so surely will China. A unilateralist US can surely expect an equally unilateralist China. The biggest question for the US is therefore not how China can be a responsible stakeholder but how the US itself can be one.
> In deciding on any of its actions, the US must ask itself whether this is how it wants China, too, to behave in the coming decades. That is the fundamental debate on the US role in the world that must lie ahead. The US needs to decide whether it stands for the power of universal principles or the principle of unilaterally exercised power. It should do so, moreover, in the expectation that the China it will ultimately have is one that is no better than its own example deserves.
>
* Whither China: from Membership to Resp

Posted at 4:18 PM · Comments (0)

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2005

MILAN On Wednesday, Italian fashion tries to answer the burning question about the upcoming generation. “Who’s Next?” - a show of three finalists out of 300 nationwide sweep - aims to nurture the future.
It is, above all, an attempt to support creativity at a time when the “Made in Italy” era is literally going out of fashion.
Even as the new talents take to the runway, under the auspices of Franca Sozzani, editor of French Vogue and of Rome’s Alta Moda organization, yet another small Italian company will be going out of business.
The threat of China has become a scourge in this country which has been the manufacturing hub of European design for 30 years - and consequently the greatest supporter of emerging talent.
But the happy days of the Italian industrial colossus buttressing innovative fashion are over - just at the moment when creativity, know-how and deeply felt luxury are the only weapons to fight the onslaught of the Chinese.
Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana celebrate this season the 20th anniversary of the vibrant company they founded from scratch, yet fashion folk are aware that this is the last of Italy’s titans. Since they emerged, building up first a designer line, then an affordable range, with myriad accessories and ancillary products, there has been no one in Italy to challenge them.
The emergence of China as a manufacturing force has had much the same trajectory as a start-up designer company: a small nibble at the market, followed by a solid business and increasing export success. But the growth of China since the global trade regulations were lifted in January has become colossal, causing such a worldwide flood of shirts, pants, underwear, socks and shoes that the European Union finally took action. This month’s crisis meetings, blocking an excess of Chinese exports to Europe, has led to so-called “bra wars,” resulting in a shortage of low-cost underwear on the European market and pictures of containers of clothing banked up at ports.
What is the connection between Chinese-manufactured T-shirts and the high fashion on the Milan runways? Ultra-cheap clothes, welcomed by consumers and retailers, undermine the fashion manufacturers, already challenged by the arrival of fast-fashion chains such as H&M and Zara, whose products are often also made in the Far East. As Li Edelkoort, the respected fashion forecaster, warns, the Chinese whirlwind will flatten the fashion world as we know it and change radically its familiar landscape.
“I am afraid that we are seeing the genocide of the culture of textiles,” says Edelkoort. “Everyone is putting eggs in one basket - China - and that is potentially devastating for our cultural heritage.”
“We are already taking away work from Morocco, Turkey and Greece, betraying our former partners.”
“The day a T-shirt is cheaper than a croissant, we are arriving at indecent prices,” she continues. “We know what goes into making a croissant, but when you bring the price of clothes down so dramatically, all other things like newspapers and coffee seem overvalued. It becomes a moral problem.”
Edelkoort’s concern is not so much with clothing - since “we already know that the Far East copies Western design” - but with textiles.
“The day we radically want to renew fabrics, we will need traditional skills,” she says.
“And people don’t realize that if we don’t get textile ideas out of Italy, Spain and maybe Scotland and Ireland, Asia is not ready to pick up the culture.”
Others see a less apocalyptic scenario, believing that small Italian companies have the ability to be flexible.
Raffaello Napoleone, chief executive of Florence’s Pitti Imagine exhibitions, even sees a ray of hope for Europe in its attempt to tame the Chinese dragon.
“The industrial system of the south of Europe (Italy included) is changing structurally, becoming more aggressive and difficult to govern,” Napoleone says. “At the same time, it is a big opportunity for the companies of the textile and apparel industry. The Italian industry is made of small companies and this gives them the opportunity to react with agility and intervene speedily, thinking over and updating the industrial districts. Beside this, the countries overlooking the Mediterranean offer an excellent opportunity in terms of competitiveness against China.”
China as a consumer also offers hope on the horizon. Ever since the nation swapped Mao jackets for designer sunglasses, it has been perceived as an opportunity by Italy’s luxury companies - particularly those such as Ermenegildo Zegna or Salvatore Ferragamo, which entered the country in 1991 and 1992 respectively and which have already gained brand recognition. Vogue China, which was launched in Milan on Monday, is about to hit the stands in Shanghai.
“China is - and will be - an opportunity for many other brands,” says Ferruccio Ferragamo, the company’s chief executive. Ferragamo will celebrate next month a decade in Beijing, where it has refurbished its store.
“Thanks to an early start, we are in good position - and we have to make sure we maintain it,” says Ferragamo. “At the top end of the market, they appreciate especially things that are not made in China. And we are 100 percent made in Italy.”
Armando Branchini, the secretary general of the Altagamma clothing federation and also an economist and university professor in Milan, says that how China is perceived depends on the “very articulated and segmented” Italian industry on its different levels.
“Size matters,” Branchini says, referring to the situation of a luxury company with a heritage and reputation versus the small and unknown producer.
“In very short time, the Chinese consumers have become capable of understanding real values,” Branchini says, citing the top tier of 10 million thirty-somethings with money to spend and “a second tier of 90 million, much younger and not as rich, but some of them will become a market.”
On the debit side are the difficulties of exporting, when “if you don’t have any mythical value, you aren’t allowed to sell to the entire China market.” And the impossibility of finding a business partnership if there is no name recognition in other key markets: Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea.
Napoleone even strikes a note of caution about the euphoria over China as luxury’s new Promised Land.
“We have to remember that today only 2.7 percent of the Chinese earns $12,000 and 21 percent of the population has an income between $6,000 and $12,000,” Napoleone says. “Sure these are 350 million people, but a billion Chinese suffer serious health and alimentation problems with an income of less than $2,000. This means that it will certainly take a lot of time before China resolves its profound contradictions.”
The counterfeit problem adds to the general difficulties. Ferragamo says that most of the world’s fakes now come from China or other Asian countries where labor costs are low.
“Fakes are so easy that they grow and grow - and the margins are astronomical,” Ferragamo says.
Matteo Marzotto calls counterfeit “a dirty business” and says that he has issues with China not “playing fair” in terms of giving any support to its workers, compared to the Italian concern for social services, welfare and quality of life, as well as pollution control.
Marzotto, whose family business is in fashion (including Hugo Boss and Valentino) and textiles (which are still one third of its business), encapsulates the tug-of-love in many traditional made-in-Italy companies.
“For me, it’s a personal drama. I grew up in a little village where my parents’ home was identified with Marzotto,” says the young Valentino executive, who has had to share the family decision over the last two years to survive by transferring manufacturing to Lithuania and the Czech Republic, thus shuttering 1,500 Italian jobs.
“How can we manage China as an opportunity?” asks Marzotto, explaining that the “long, long history” of Valentino in China has led to another problem: the Chinese fashion pretenders called “Rudolf Valentino or “Valentyna”.
“China is a big opportunity only if they work clearly and play a fair game,” Marzotto says. “They have one-tenth of our labor costs and in Italy it costs 8,000 just to establish a company. It is not a matter of open markets. Everyone has to play with some rules. To remain competitive, we need a little bit of control.”
Marzotto believes that Italian fashion may have a more subtle and secret weapon than slapping taxes on cheap imports: its heritage and its potential for creativity.
“Prices cannot be the only issue,” he says. “There is also the capacity of Italy to invent something new. When you are talking about knitting yarns, you cannot invent too much. But Italy has its archaeology and historical heritage, even if it has not reserves underground in oil or mining.”
Ferragamo also hopes that Italy can offer intangible plus factors both in selling and manufacturing.
“Everyone is scared about China,” he says. “Potentially we can all have the same machines. But Italians have feeling and perception that you don’t suddenly acquire. There is a tradition here that I hope will be preserved, from one worker to another and from father to son, that the Chinese cannot suddenly implement.”
Ferragamo believes that even the first post-Mao generation of Chinese consumers is already responsive to myth and mystique.
“The Chinese consumers are very quick in understanding,” he says. “They have a deep culture and are much better than five years ago. In very short time, the Chinese consumers have become capable of understanding real values.”
What about a nightmare scenario that the Chinese suppliers, equipped with state-of-the-art machinery, will rebuild their smashed cultural heritage - and draw on it to create garments with the intangible plus factor?
Edelkoort believes that already the downward price spiral is leading to disaster. She believes that Europe will abandon a centuries-old heritage and that the industry will end up with bland clothing, limited varieties of textiles and basic prints.
But Napoleone is more positive.
“I do not believe that in the future there will a sole and dominant culture,” he says. “We will be confronted with different strong cultures which will stay in competition, everyone with its own prevailing identity.”

Copyright © 2005 The International Herald Tribune

Posted at 11:27 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Wall Street Journal
September 24, 2005; Page A10

NEW YORK — When Paul Wolfowitz returned to the World Bank from a trip to Africa in June, he made a presentation to his staff. “I made the mistake of calling on the first questioner, somebody who was obviously even older than I am,” recalls the 61-year-old but freshly minted World Bank president in an interview. “And he said, ‘I’ve been around since 1972 and we’ve heard all this stuff before.’”

Welcome to the soaring idealism of the world’s greatest “development” body. When President Bush appointed Mr. Wolfowitz to run the World Bank last spring, liberal critics quickly attributed it to cynical politics — rewarding an architect of the Iraq War, turning the Bank into a tool of U.S. foreign policy. Mr. Wolfowitz would never say this (or even agree with it), but I think the truth is closer to the opposite.

He’s the idealist. The World Bank is the land of lifers and experts who’ve seen and heard it all before. His mission — since he’s been crazy enough to accept it — is to make the world’s largest development bank believe once again that it really can help the poor. It certainly would be one of history’s larger ironies if the man so reviled by the political left ended up helping more people than all of those who spend their lives attending U.N. conferences.

Regarding his staff skeptic, Mr. Wolfowitz says he replied, “I don’t think so. I don’t think you ever really heard African leaders talking about the essential need to combat corruption. I don’t think you’ve seen African leaders, the way the president of Nigeria recently did, jailing the inspector general of police on corruption. I don’t think you’ve seen things like the president of South Africa dismissing the deputy president because his financial adviser took a bribe, by the way, from a company from a developed country.”

He speaks softly — a trait that can disarm critics who have never met him — but also intensely. “I think, at least in significant parts of Africa, there is something new. I profoundly hope there is something new, because I don’t think it’s healthy for the world for 600 million people to be sinking into deeper misery, which admittedly they are.”

No, it’s not healthy at all. But why would Paul Wolfowitz think that he can do something about it? And why leave a job as deputy secretary of defense — arguably the most famous deputy secretary in American history — to run a bureaucracy notoriously resistant to change and known for chewing up its previous presidents?

The answer includes a desire to finish his career as something more than a loyal number two. Especially after Mr. Bush declined to name him national security adviser — a mistake — the Bank job was at least a chance for Mr. Wolfowitz to run his own show. More than a few of his friends also thought it was time he got out from under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who didn’t always agree with his deputy about Iraq strategy. (Mr. Wolfowitz won’t comment on that one.) But there’s also the possibility that he really does believe this stuff about helping Africa, which he is making his top priority at the Bank.

* * *

I’d be more skeptical myself if I hadn’t seen him in action for the last 20 years. We first met in Asia, when he was an assistant secretary of state and I was a reporter in Hong Kong. That’s when I discovered his belief in the strategic uses of democracy, when he helped to fashion the U.S. policy that eased Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos from power in the Philippines, with barely a shot fired.

Next I watched him focus on Iraq over the decade after Saddam Hussein was allowed to retain the helicopters that slaughtered the Shiites and kept him in power. Mr. Wolfowitz was in the Pentagon at the time and has believed ever since that, if we didn’t take out Saddam Hussein, the dictator would someday take his revenge on us. In his new job representing the world, Mr. Wolfowitz has taken a vow of near-silence on Iraq. But suffice it to say he still believes toppling Saddam was the right thing to do.

“I just heard today from Ann Clwyd,” a British Labour politician recently in Iraq, he says, and she “was telling me about the work of the Free Prisoners Association, which documents the death certificates of people executed … and she said it’s over 300,000. I mean, if you think it’s bad now — the silence of the world in the face of what was going on before is just stunning.”

A skeptic — never mind a Bank cynic — might point out that in Africa Mr. Wolfowitz has a challenge every bit as difficult as Iraq. Leon Louw, the South African economist, says that in the past 30 years the world has poured $450 billion of aid into Africa, but that average per capita income is lower than it was in the late 1960s. According to the World Bank’s data, 39% of sub-Saharan Africa’s private wealth was somewhere other than Africa in 1990 — compared to 3% for South Asia, and only 10% even for Latin America.

Why invest in Africa if Africans won’t? “It’s a very fair question, and I think part of the answer is to deal with the kinds of regulations and taxes that I’ve been talking about,” Mr. Wolfowitz says. “I’m absolutely sure that part of the answer is dealing with the corruption factor.”

His favorite new source book is the World Bank’s “Doing Business” report, an annual guide to the obstacles that countries impose on their own entrepreneurs. The 2006 version is just out, and for the first time Mr. Wolfowitz had it rank countries, from 1 to 155, on the “ease of doing business.” New Zealand ranked first, and the U.S. third (after Singapore), but African nations held down 25 of the last 30 places.

Take Burkina Faso, a landlocked West African country that came in at … 154. “If you were in a food supply business,” Mr. Wolfowitz says, “registering a business would require minimum capital equal to nearly five times annual income. Fees alone cost 1½ times income per capita … to register your land, you have to pay fees, 16% of the value of the land. So the result is in a country of 12 million people, only 50,000 are in the formal” economy.

So why is he optimistic? Burkina has grown for the last decade, he says, and the country has political cohesion. “I had a great meeting with the president of Burkina” on a recent trip, and “I shouldn’t say this, but I want to find a way to communicate these results to him and say, do something about it, your country will grow even more.”

* * *

Harder even than changing African policies, however, will be changing World Bank culture. The Meltzer Commission recommended in 1999 that the Bank focus on sub-Saharan Africa. But as with any political body, it seeks to satisfy all clients. The Bank even continues to lend to China and Brazil, two “middle-income” countries that can easily tap private capital markets. It does so in part because the interest on those market-priced loans keeps the Bank and its 10,000 employees in business. Seven thousand of them work in Washington and many earn salaries that are tax-free, including 31 vice presidents who earn the equivalent of more than $225,000 after taxes. (It’s safe to say the Bank itself has no “culture of poverty.”)

Shouldn’t the Bank get out of those richer countries? “I don’t think so,” Mr. Wolfowitz says. “I need to understand that one better.” Aren’t resources finite? “Grant resources are finite,” he concedes, but the income from those loans finances operations elsewhere. “Where there may be a case is the intellectual resources” of the Bank “get spread around over a lot of different regions … and I definitely want to take a look at whether we are applying the right proportion of the Bank’s own resources to Africa.”

Mr. Wolfowitz also has a chance to reform the Bank’s International Finance Corp. unit, which often invests as partners with such unpoor, unsmall outfits as General Motors Acceptance Corp. “I want to push harder,” he says. “I mean, I’d like to see the IFC much more engaged in Africa and much more looking at getting small businesses starting rather than making — you’ve got to get the balance right here.” In a lucky break of timing, Mr. Wolfowitz was recently able to name a new IFC head, Swedish businessman Lars Thunell.

“I remember George Shultz,” whom he once worked for, “was once asked how he would compare management in the private sector, public sector, and academics,” Mr. Wolfowitz says. “In the private sector you better be careful what you ask for because people are going to go out and do it… . The government, you don’t have to worry about that. You tell people do something and you check back two months later and nothing’s happened. But in the academic world, you tell people to do something and they look at you strangely and they say, ‘Who the heck do you think you are giving us orders?’”

This is meant as a joke, but it’s also a measure of Mr. Wolfowitz’s challenge. “Hard and slow, and you’ve got to be persistent,” he says about the way to change a giant public bureaucracy. “I did it in a university [Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies]. It took seven years.”

In public institutions, he adds, “you’ve got to focus much more on getting people agreeing on the mission.” At the Bank, “they are, I think, overwhelmingly people who really want to see that their work makes a difference, and if we can set — if there is a culture of getting money out the door, I think we can change that culture and get people looking more at the results.” As I say, Paul Wolfowitz is nothing if not an idealist.

Mr. Gigot is the Journal’s editorial page editor

Posted at 11:19 AM · Comments (0)

September/October 2005

This year, economists, politicians, and rock stars in rich countries have pleaded for debt relief and aid for the world’s poorest countries. It certainly sounds like the right thing to do. But utopian dreams of alleviating poverty overlook some hard facts. By promising so much, rich-world activists prolong the true nightmare of poverty.

The past has prepared all the materials and means in superabundance to well-feed, clothe, lodge, train, educate, employ, amuse, and govern the human race in perpetual progressive prosperity—without war, conflict, or competition between nations or individuals.”

These words were not uttered by a hopeful world leader at the most recent Group of 8 (G-8) summit, or by Bono at a rock concert—but they certainly sound familiar. They were written in 1857, when British reformer Robert Owen called upon rich countries, who could “easily induce all the other governments and people to unite with them in practical measures for the general good all through futurity.” Owen was laughed out of town as a utopian.

How comforted Owen would be if he were alive in 2005, when some of the most powerful and influential people seem to believe that utopia is back. American President George W. Bush has dispatched the U.S. military to spread democracy throughout the Middle East, G-8 leaders strive to end poverty and disease sometime soon, the World Bank promises development as the path to world peace, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is trying to save the environment. In a world where billions of people still suffer, these are certainly appealing dreams. But is this surprising new fondness for utopia just harmless, inspirational rhetoric? Are utopian ambitions the best way to help the poor-world majority?

Unfortunately, no. In reality, they hurt efforts to help the world’s poor. What is utopianism? It is promising more than you can deliver. It is seeing an easy and sudden answer to long-standing, complex problems. It is trying to solve everything at once through an administrative apparatus headed by “world leaders.” It places too much faith in altruistic cooperation and underestimates self-seeking behavior and conflict. It is expecting great things from schemes designed at the top, but doing nothing to solve the bigger problems at the bottom.

The Year of Living Utopianly

At the dawn of the new millennium, the United Nations realized Robert Owen’s dream of bringing together the “Potentates of the Earth” in what the global organization called a Millennium Assembly. These potentates set Millennium Development Goals for 2015, calling for, among other things, dramatic reductions in poverty, child mortality, illiteracy, environmental degradation, AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, unsafe drinking water, and discrimination against women.

But it is in 2005 that utopia seems to have made its big breakthrough into mainstream discourse. In March, Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs, celebrity economist and intellectual leader of the utopians, published a book called The End of Poverty, in which he called for a big push of increased foreign aid to meet the Millennium Development Goals and end the miseries of the poor. Sachs proposes everything from nitrogen-fixing leguminous trees to replenish soil fertility to antiretroviral AIDS therapy, cell phones that provide up-to-date market information to health planners, rainwater harvesting, and battery-charging stations. His U.N. Millennium Project proposed a total of 449 interventions.

British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown likewise called in January for a major increase in aid, a “Marshall Plan” for Africa. Brown was so confident he knew how to save the world’s poor that he even called for borrowing against future aid commitments to finance massive increases in aid today. At the World Economic Forum in January, British Prime Minister Tony Blair called for a “big, big push” to meet the goals for 2015, and his administration issued a fat report on saving Africa in March. The World Bank and the IMF issued their own weighty document in April about meeting these goals and endorsing the call for a big push, and utopians of the world will reconvene at the U.N. World Summit in September to evaluate progress on the Millennium Development Goals. The G-8 leaders agreed on a plan in June to cancel $40 billion worth of poor-country debt to help facilitate the “push.” The IMF might even tap its gold reserves to bolster the effort.

The least likely utopian is George W. Bush, who has shown less interest in vanquishing poverty, but has sought to portray the Iraq misadventure as a step toward universal democracy and world peace. As he modestly put it in his Second Inaugural Address in January 2005, “America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof.”

These leaders frequently talk about how easy it is to help the poor. According to Brown, medicine that would prevent half of all malaria deaths costs only 12 cents per person. A bed net to prevent a child from contracting malaria costs only $4. Preventing 5 million child deaths over the next 10 years would cost just an extra $3 for each new mother, says Brown.

The emphasis on these easy solutions emerged as worry about terrorist havens in poor states intersected with the campaigning on the part of Sachs, Bono, rocker Bob Geldof, and the British Labourites. All these factions didn’t seem to realize aid workers had been trying for years to end poverty.

All Talk, No Traction

We have already seen the failure of comprehensive utopian packages in the last two decades: the failure of “shock therapy” to convert the former Soviet Union from communism to capitalism and the failure of IMF/World Bank “structural adjustment” to transform nations in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America into free-market paragons. All of these regions have suffered from poor economic growth since utopian efforts began. In the new millennium, apparently unchastened, the IMF and World Bank are trying something even more ambitious—social, political, economic, and environmental transformation of the poorest nations through Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers. These reports, which the IMF and World Bank require that governments design in consultation with the poor, are comprehensive plans to make poverty vanish in each nation. It is a little unclear how a bureaucratic document can make often undemocratic governments yield some of their power to the poor, or how it will be more successful than previous comprehensive plans that seem modest by comparison.

Indeed, we have seen the failure of what was already a “big push” of foreign aid to Africa. After 43 years and $568 billion (in 2003 dollars) in foreign aid to the continent, Africa remains trapped in economic stagnation. Moreover, after $568 billion, donor officials apparently still have not gotten around to furnishing those 12-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths.

With all the political and popular support for such ambitious programs, why then do comprehensive packages almost always fail to accomplish much good, much less attain Utopia? They get the political and economic incentives all wrong. The biggest problem is that the rich people paying the bills do not share the same goals as the poor people they are trying to help. The wealthy have weak incentives to get the right amount of the right thing to those who need it; the poor are in no position to complain if they don’t. A more subtle problem is that if all of us are collectively responsible for a big world goal, then no single agency or politician is held accountable if the goal is not met. Collective responsibility for world goals works about as well as collective farms in agriculture, and for the same reason.

To make things worse, utopian-driven aid packages have so many different goals that it weakens the accountability and probability of meeting any one goal. The conditional aid loans of the IMF and World Bank (structural adjustment loans) were notorious for their onerous policy and outcome targets, which often numbered in the hundreds. The eight Millennium Development Goals actually have 18 target indicators. The U.N. Millennium Project released a 3,751-page report in January 2005 listing the 449 intermediate steps necessary to meet those 18 final targets. Working for multiple bosses (or goals) doesn’t usually work out so well; the bosses each try to get you to work on their goal and not the other boss’s goal. Such employees get overworked, overwhelmed, and demoralized—not a bad description of today’s working-level staff at the World Bank and other aid agencies.

Top-down strategies such as those envisioned by President Bush, Prime Minister Blair, and Bono also suffer from complex information problems, even when the incentive problems are solved. Planners at the global top simply don’t know what, when, and where to give to poor people at the global bottom.

That is not to say that it is impossible to meet multiple goals for multiple customers with multiple agents. The various needs of the rich are met easily enough by a system of decentralized markets and democracy, which utilize feedback from the customers and accountability of the suppliers. Rich, middle-aged men can buy Rogaine to grow hair on their heads, while women can buy Nair to get rid of hair on their legs. No Millennium Development Goal on Body Hair was necessary. The Rogaine and Nair corporations are accountable to their customers for satisfaction. If the customers don’t care for the product, the corporations go out of business; if the customers do like the product, corporations have a profit incentive to supply it. Similarly, men and women in wealthy countries can complain to democratically accountable bureaucrats and politicians if garbage collectors do not pick up their discarded Rogaine and Nair bottles. Private markets also specialize; there is no payoff for them to produce a comprehensive product that both removes hair from women’s legs and transfers it to men’s heads. The irony of the situation is tragically obvious: The cosmetic needs of the rich are met easily, while the much more desperate needs of the poor get lost in centralized, utopian, comprehensive planning.

Poverty Starts at Home

Free markets and democracy are far from an overnight solution to poverty—they require among many other things the bottom-up evolution of the rules of the game, including contract enforcement and fair political competition. Nor can democratic capitalism be imposed by outsiders (as the World Bank, IMF, and U.S. Army should now have learned). The evolution of markets and democracy took many decades in rich countries, and it did not happen through “big pushes” by outsiders, Millennium Development Goals, or Assemblies of World Leaders. Progress in wealthy countries arrived through piecemeal steps, gradual reforms, incremental improvements, and experimental probing, accompanied by gradually accelerating economic growth, rather than through crash programs.

The problems of the poor nations have deep institutional roots at home, where markets don’t work well and politicians and civil servants aren’t accountable to their citizens. That makes utopian plans even more starry-eyed, as the “big push” must ultimately rely on dysfunctional local institutions. For example, there are many weak links in the chain that leads from Gordon Brown’s 12-cent malaria drug to actual health outcomes in poor countries. According to research by Deon Filmer, Jeffrey Hammer, and Lant Pritchett at the World Bank, anywhere from 30 percent to as much as 70 percent of the drugs destined for rural health clinics in several African countries disappear before reaching the clinics. According to one survey in Zimbabwe, pregnant women were reluctant to use public health clinics to give birth because nurses ridiculed them for not having better baby clothes, forced them to wash bed linens soon after delivery, and even hit them to encourage them to push the baby out faster during delivery. And Africa is not alone—nearly all poor countries have problems of corrupt and often unfriendly civil servants, as today’s rich countries did earlier in their history. Researchers find that many people in poor countries bypass public health services altogether, in favor of private doctors or folk remedies.

The poor have neither the income nor political power to hold anyone accountable for meeting their needs—they are political and economic orphans. The rich-country public knows little about what is happening to the poor on the ground in struggling countries. The wealthy population mainly just wants to know that “something is being done” about such a tragic problem as world poverty. The utopian plans satisfy the “something-is-being-done” needs of the rich-country public, even if they don’t serve the needs of the poor. Likewise, the Bush Doctrine soothes the fears of Americans concerned about evil tyrants, without consulting the poor-country publics on whether they wish to be conquered or democratized.

The “something-is-being-done” syndrome also explains the fixation on money spent on world poverty, rather than how to meet the needs of the poor. True, doubling the relatively trivial proportion of their income that rich Westerners give to poor Africans is a worthy enough cause. But let’s not kid ourselves that spending more money on foreign aid accomplishes anything by itself. Letting total aid money stand for accomplishment is like the Hollywood producers of Catwoman, recently voted the worst movie of 2004, bragging about their impressive accomplishment of spending $100 million on its production.

The Way Out

Certainly not all aid efforts are futile. Instead of setting utopian goals such as ending world poverty, global leaders should simply concentrate on finding particular interventions that work. Anecdotal and some systematic evidence suggests piecemeal approaches to aid can be successful. Routine childhood immunization combined with measles vaccination in seven southern African nations cut reported measles cases from 60,000 in 1996 to 117 in 2000. Another partnership among aid donors contributed to the near eradication of guinea worm in 20 African and Asian countries where it was endemic. Abhijit Banerjee and Ruimin He at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology list examples of successful aid programs that passed rigorous evaluation: subsidies to families for education and health costs for their children, remedial teaching, uniforms and textbooks, school vouchers, deworming drugs and nutritional supplements, vaccination, HIV prevention, indoor spraying for malaria, bed nets, fertilizer, and clean water.

Of course, finding and maintaining piecemeal approaches that work well requires improving incentives for aid agencies. Better incentives might come from placing more emphasis on the independent evaluation of aid projects. Given the vast sums that are being spent, reliable evaluations remain surprisingly rare. Better incentives could also come from devising means to get more feedback from the poor people that the programs are trying to help, and holding aid agencies accountable when the feedback is negative. It seems more productive to focus on such critical problems in foreign aid rather than simply promising the rich-country public the end of world poverty.

If an aid-financed “big push” will not generate society-wide development, are things hopeless for poor countries? Fortunately, poor countries are making progress on their own, without waiting for the West to save them. The steady improvement in health and education in poor countries (except for the AIDS crisis), the market-driven growth of China and India, the movement toward democracy in Latin America and Africa (even amid continued disappointing economic growth), not to mention earlier successes such as Botswana and the East Asian Tiger economies, offer hope for homegrown and gradual development.

The outpouring of donations for last December’s tsunami victims shows that Europeans and Americans have genuine compassion for those in need. Can the rich-country public call their politicians’ bluff and refuse to let them get away with utopian dreams as a substitute for the hard slogging of delivering benefits to the poor? Will they hold the aid agencies accountable for getting money to those in need? Will they figure out new ways to give voice to the voiceless? If they asked, they would likely find that the poor are unmoved by utopian dreams. They probably just want those 12-cent medicines.

William Easterly is professor of economics at New York University, nonresident fellow at the Center for Global Development, and author of The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2005

NEW DELHI This is a capital city in layers, where the remnants of successive pasts live in strange juxtaposition: the aging temples of Hindu antiquity, the domed mosques of Islamic empire, the colonnaded bungalows of the British Raj. It is, as William Dalrymple, a British writer, has called it, “a city disjointed in time, a city whose different ages lay suspended side by side as in aspic.”
Now it is adding a new layer. Under Sheila Dikshit, chief executive of this sprawling city of 14 million, New Delhi is attempting a makeover from smoggy megalopolis to a city to rival Bangalore or Mumbai as a global showcase for a world ever more inquisitive about India. It is a steep, unlikely climb for a national capital that was long the staid company town of the national government, a place reeking of officialdom - a city, as V.S. Naipaul wrote, “built for parades rather than people.”
But New Delhi is staging a comeback. In doing so, it is creating a model not seen before in this mostly agrarian country.
As a city-state with few rural voters, New Delhi is emerging as the only city in India able to focus on giving itself a largely aesthetic facelift, without worrying about spawning rural envy.
“When you look at a world-class city, it should be neat, clean, spic and span - with good amenities, wide roads, aesthetically well developed,” Dikshit said in an interview at her elegant residence. “And, of course, intellectually sharp, something that attracts, that has a soul - culture, intellectual happenings.”
This may seem like froth in a city that remains, like all Indian cities, a place of vast inequities and chronic poverty.
Millions of New Delhi residents still languish in slums. The city’s acute shortages of power and water, and the resulting rationing, infuriate residents - “my weaknesses,” Dikshit said.
Dikshit is working to simulate the atmospherics of a global metropolis even before a middle-income economy arrives, the trappings, says a government report, of a “clean, green, hassle-free, world-class capital city.”
The widening of roads and bridges is shaving commute times. A campaign has made a once-barren city leafy.
New Delhi now has an underground commuter rail system and the air has grown more breathable since the late 1990s, when the city made taxis and buses convert from gasoline to compressed natural gas.
The city, once “very sedate,” as Dikshit said, has become “very spicy.” Restaurants, bars and nightclubs that seem lifted directly from London or New York are sprouting. The city now plays host to India Fashion Week, which attracts buyers from New York’s Saks Fifth Avenue and other top Western retailers. The area accounts for nearly a third of India’s information technology exports, second only to Bangalore.
This development trajectory - of which Dikshit is part catalyst, part beneficiary - exposes her to charges of elitism from critics who say her aspirations are divorced from working-class needs.
But Dikshit argues that a flourishing city needs pride. When she took office in 1998, she said, “I felt that we needed to do something. How can you have a capital city where people live in a despondent state of affairs, thinking that, ‘Oh, God, everything is going downhill?’ So that has to turn into hope.”
Dikshit is not, technically, a mayor, but rather the chief minister of Delhi state, the only one of India’s 29 states to cover roughly the same ground as a major urban center. While mayors occupy ceremonial posts in India, chief ministers possess real authority.
But in a country where two-thirds of the population is rural, most chief ministers need to subordinate urban improvement to rural development issues. New Delhi is different. It has become a laboratory for a new idea in this country: that a city should have its own municipal governance, rather than be ruled as part of a state.
“Cities have become megastates, or certainly city-states,” said Dikshit, draped in a sari and clutching a phone that rang sporadically with calls from advisers. As opposed to rural areas, she said, “here the aspirations, the development requirement, are very different.”
And if the unusual powers of her office have freed Dikshit to develop New Delhi, her own proclivities have led her to cast the challenge in aesthetic terms.
Her home hints at a woman who sees herself as the city’s designer. Unlike the frequently garish homes of other powerful figures in India, the 67-year-old Dikshit’s residence is modern and minimalist, with few servants and an attractive cluster of paintings - some abstract, some traditionally Indian - on the wall of her salon, where she greets dozens of visitors each day.
Dikshit’s government last year published a report describing its “unprecedented success in increasing the green cover” by more than 100 percent between 1998 and 2003. The report listed other achievements, including such campaigns as “Anti-Fire Crackers,” “Say No to Plastic Bags” and “Say No to Shining Wrapping Papers for Gifts.”
Dikshit has also sought to address New Delhi’s most difficult problem: its chronic shortages of electricity and water, a legacy of the days when state-owned utilities doled out free or cheap power, at levels of quality befitting the price. Today, the twin challenge is to diminish state control over the utilities and nudge them toward greater efficiency, while also nudging consumers toward higher prices.
“People have to learn to pay for what they use,” Dikshit said. “Unfortunately, in this country the feeling has been that what belongs to the government should be for free.” She said, however, that an exception must be made for the poor.
Among the most innovative policies of Dikshit’s government is a campaign to reinvigorate municipal democracy. The project, known as Bhagidari, the Hindi word for partnership, addresses New Delhi’s identity crisis as a capital that was built to represent a country without ever evoking a sense of ownership among the local people.
Under Bhagidari, members of citizens’ groups, from building cooperatives to trade unions, can register with the government to become semiofficial civil servants. They are given identity cards and may enter bureaucrats’ offices, where they can conduct joint problem-solving on issues like the repair of rutted avenues, the installation of street lamps on dimly lighted byways and, the report said, the “rounding up of stray monkeys and dogs.”
The government passed legislation to allow groups to track progress on their projects. And the citizens’ hankering has teeth: Bhagidari empowers them to fill out confidential performance appraisals of civil servants.
For their part, citizens’ groups take on functions mishandled by the state. They maintain parks, collect utility bills from their own neighborhoods, and collect rainwater to create a backup to the government’s highly irregular provision.
Dikshit wakes each morning to a staple rite of Indian politics: a meet-and-greet session with request-bearing citizens.
Many need hospital beds, and chief ministers can pull strings to help them jump the line. On the day of the interview, one man had come to request that his caste be deemed the equivalent of untouchable, thus entitling him to affirmative action benefits.
Dikshit listens, smiles once or twice, then abruptly rises, after each supplicant has made a well-rehearsed speech, handed over a letter and clasped hands in worshipful greeting. The ritual is unmistakably feudal: the lord meting out tidbits of justice to the underlings.
But there is nothing medieval about the lord’s being a woman. India, which still struggles to empower the millions of women of its villages and cities, has produced more ultrapowerful political matriarchs than most Western countries.
“There have been women who have come up,” Dikshit said. “But Indian women have normally had the support of family background.”
Like Sonia Gandhi, the leader of India’s governing Congress Party and a woman on whose patronage Dikshit continues to depend, she added, “I belong to a political family.”
As if to underline the point, Dikshit’s favorite rooms in the house, the sitting room and the den, are decorated with photos of her late husband.
Dikshit got her start in politics through marriage. Born in 1938 in Punjab state, she married Vinod Dikshit, a civil servant, who was the son of Uma Shankar Dikshit, a revered Indian freedom fighter and Congress Party stalwart. When the party split in 1969 and her father-in-law became a central figure, she became part of the political circus.
“Those were the days when styles of living were far more frugal than they are today,” she said. “So I acted as his peon. I acted as his telephone operator. I acted as a hostess, looking after guests. So I got very, very pulled into it.”
She spent years learning from her father-in-law. Now, she says, her notions of governance spring from within.

Copyright © 2005 The International Herald Tribune

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*· *News deemed contrary to national interest is banned
*· *Party summit decides to target ‘liberal elements’
Shanghai -Monday September 26, 2005*

Copyright The Guardian

China announced a fresh crackdown yesterday on the internet amid
further revelations of a plan by Hu Jintao, the president, to suppress dissent.

“The state bans the spreading of any news with content that is against national security and public interest,” said a statement from Xinhua, the official news agency. The announcement called for blogs and personal web pages to “be directed towards serving the people and socialism and insist on correct guidance of public opinion for maintaining national and public interests”.

The statement was just one of a series of initiatives by the government to root out politically sensitive news from domestic and foreign media.

On Thursday a Chinese journalist and former professor was given a seven-year sentence for “inciting subversion” by writing hundreds of articles for banned overseas news websites.

Last month the government tried to implement a scheme to pay journalists according to how much Communist party officials liked, or disliked, their articles. In July a political activist was given five years for posting a punk song on the internet deemed to be subversive, and in April a journalist was sentenced to 10 years for sending an email overseas about restrictions on freedom of speech.

Providing further evidence of an organised national crackdown, the New York Times reported yesterday that Mr Hu called for a “smokeless war” against “liberal elements” in China during a secret leadership meetingin May.

The government employs a cyberspace police rumoured to number 30,000 and has spent lavishly on internet filters. Journalists and human rights organisations say the “smokeless war” amounts to a transformation of the government’s tactics from violence, open harassment and the closing of
newspapers to more covert methods of maintaining control. Journalists who try write on forbidden topics are rarely attacked directly, but are discredited by charges such as corruption, sexual harassment and extramarital affairs.

They claim confiscation of notes, address books and mobile phones happen secretly beneath a facade that nothing is wrong, so as to defend the image of the party and its leaders.

“They are trying to safeguard the welfare of the regime, while simultaneously providing for the illusion of a free liberal press,” said Law Yuk-kai of the Hong Kong-based Human Rights Monitor.

“But the internet provides a new way to organise people and is therefore a mounting threat to the government.”

With a growing income gap and agitated unions, migrant workers and students, Mr Law said the government was feeling increasingly threatened by any media that provide outlets for expression of dissent. “They are in a bind. On the one hand they want to encourage economic development but on the other hand they want to strangle any political initiatives bythose not benefiting from the new China.”

While many governments prevent the free flow of controversial information by simply banning the internet altogether, China’s strategy has been one of controlled welcome - exploiting the internet’s
phenomenal potential to drive China’s its globalised economy while simultaneously suppressing its potential for freedom of expression.

The current struggle in the Chinese media began in the 1990s when the
government cut funding to various media outlets, forcing them to engage
in a balancing act between encouraging circulation [through genuine
news] and servicing the propaganda department [as most media are
required to do].

“When [former president] Jiang Zemin came to power, the propaganda
department began controlling all Chinese media,” said one high-ranking
editor of a party-run newspaper with close government connections.
“After Hu Jintao became president, there was an effort to open up. But
after about six months the central government started getting
complaints
from local officials about their inability to govern because of media
reports exposing corruption in their administrations … everything
reversed- there was a big policy change back to the way things were.”

The editor told the Guardian that the row in the party centred on the
president’s lack of authority over local leaders. Yesterday China
gambled with a goodwill gesture to pro-democracy members of Hong Kong’s
legislature, inviting them to mainland China for the first time in more
than 15 years. But the visit appeared to backfire when at least one
member of the group wore a T-shirt with a picture of tanks in Tiananmen
square, a symbol of the 1989 pro-democracy protests in which hundreds
of
students were killed.

*Background*

China has built the most sophisticated government-controlled internet
on earth, often hailed as “the Great Firewall”. With the help of western
technology firms and internet companies, China filters foreign sites,
restricts blog postings, limits online chats and censors instant
messages for the second-largest online population in the world.

While the barriers are easy to get around with a bit of
techno-wizardry, journalists, editors, internet service providers and cybercafe owners
are all under heavy pressure to abide by the rules and to self-censor
to stay in business. The experience can frustrate - thousands of sites are
blocked, emails can just disappear and even search engines will not
turn up results for certain words. Banned phrases from news sites, blogs and
instant messaging services include independence, democracy, Taiwan,
Tiananmen Square, freedom and the Dalai Lama

Posted at 11:39 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times
September 25, 2005

A contract of citizenship defines the duties of care that public officials owe to the people of a democratic society. The Constitution defines some parts of this contract, and statutes define other parts, but much of it is a tacit understanding that citizens have about what to expect from their government. Its basic term is protection: helping citizens to protect their families and possessions from forces beyond their control. Let’s not suppose this contract is uncontroversial. American politics is a furious argument about what should be in the contract and what shouldn’t be. But there is enough agreement, most of the time, about what the contract contains for America to hold together as a political community. When disasters strike, they test whether the contract is respected in a citizen’s hour of need. When the levees broke, the contract of American citizenship failed.

The most striking feature of the catastrophe is not that the contract didn’t hold. That is now too obvious to argue about. Many municipal, state and federal officials, elected and appointed, forgot the duty of care they owed to their fellow citizens. Some fled when they should have stayed at their posts. Some promised help they could not deliver. Some failed to rise to the terrible occasion. All of this is now well documented. What has not been noticed is that the people with the most articulate understanding of what the contract of American citizenship entails were the poor, abandoned, hungry people huddled in the stinking darkness of the New Orleans convention center.

“We are American,” a woman at the convention center proclaimed on television. She spoke with scathing anger, but also with astonishment that she should be required to remind Americans of such a simple fact. She - not the governor, not the mayor, not the president - understood that the catastrophe was a test of the bonds of citizenship and that the government had failed the test. This failure was perhaps most evident when, on Sept. 1, a full three days after the hurricane struck Louisiana, Washington’s top officials were asserting that they had only just learned that in the convention center were thousands of exhausted fellow citizens in the dark, at the ends of their tethers, awaiting an evacuation that had not come.

“We are American”: that single sentence was a lesson in political obligation. Black or white, rich or poor, Americans are not supposed to be strangers to one another. Having been abandoned, the people in the convention center were reduced to reminding their fellow citizens, through the medium of television, that they were not refugees in a foreign country. Citizenship ties are not humanitarian, abstract or discretionary. They are not ties of charity. In America, a citizen has a claim of right on the resources of her government when she cannot - simply cannot - help herself.

It may be astonishing that American citizens should have had to remind their fellow Americans of this, but let us not pretend we do not know the reason. They were black, and for all that poor blacks have experienced and endured in this country, they had good reason to be surprised that they were treated not as citizens but as garbage.

Let us not assume, either, that this moment of contempt is over. A week after the disaster, bodies were still floating in the fetid waters. I hope they will have been cleared by the time you read this. Duties of care, not to mention decency, cannot be less controversial than care of the dead. Yet often enough, the only people who took the care to cover corpses, to identify their names, to mark out a place of rest, were not law enforcement officials, who always seemed to have some pressing reason that it wasn’t their job, but the storm victims themselves.

Let us not be sentimental. The poor and dispossessed of New Orleans cannot afford to be sentimental. They know they live in an unjust and unfair society. They know their schools aren’t much good, that their police protection is radically deficient, that their economic opportunities are few and that their neighborhoods have been starved of hope and help.

Knowing all this, the people of New Orleans still believed that, as Americans, they were entitled to levees that would hold, an evacuation plan that would actually evacuate them and a resettlement plan that would get them back on their feet. They were entitled to this because they are Americans and because these simple things, while costly, are well within the means of the richest society on earth.

So it is not - as some commentators claimed - that the catastrophe laid bare the deep inequalities of American society. These inequalities may have been news to some, but they were not news to the displaced people in the convention center and elsewhere. What was bitter news to them was that their claims of citizenship mattered so little to the institutions charged with their protection.

There are inequalities that people endure, and there are inequalities that enrage. Neighborhoods in Los Angeles that kept quiet through poverty and discrimination erupted when Rodney King’s attackers were acquitted. Why? Because police brutality on television, combined with the blatant lack of accountability exposed by the ensuing trial, betrayed the contract that binds all Americans to their allegiances: the promise of equal protection of the laws. When government failed so dismally in New Orleans, the betrayal was of the same order: it was no longer possible to believe in the contract that binds Americans together.

Let us grant that the contract is contested ground. Liberals since Franklin D. Roosevelt have believed that being a citizen should give protection against the dangers of unemployment, old age and ill health, while conservatives have sought to curtail the contract, arguing that government programs weaken personal responsibility and hobble economic progress. Still, the idea of a contract is very basic. President Bush’s Social Security proposals got nowhere because they appeared to tamper with one of its key terms: the idea that the government will guarantee every American a secure retirement income.

What makes the failure over Katrina so unexpected is that while liberals and conservatives agreed about nothing else, they were supposed to have agreed that government should protect Americans from natural disaster. Since the Mississippi flood of 1927, and the efforts of Herbert Hoover and the Army Corps of Engineers, public authority has been charged with this duty. This was the key element of the contract that seemed to have been ripped up like a roof shingle and cast into the infernal waters of New Orleans.

This betrayal cannot be made better by charity and generosity. Americans have turned out to be - not surprisingly - very generous toward what has become the largest population of internally displaced people since the Civil War. But private benevolence cannot heal the wounds - of humiliation and abandonment - caused by government failure. Nor can exemplary performance by some agencies - the Coast Guard, for example - do that much to redeem the abject performance of others.

The failures were not just failures of performance or anticipation. They were failures of political imagination. Officials and engineers in charge of the levees reasoned like actuaries, building to a standard designed to protect only most of the people most of the time. Had they reasoned with any degree of political imagination, they might have started from the premise that there are some harms that a government must protect its people from, however unlikely they may turn out to be, whatever the cost. That is how the British reasoned when they built the hugely expensive Thames barrier, how the Dutch reasoned when they built their flood-control system. In America, a levee defends a foundational moral intuition: all lives are worth protecting and, since this is America, worth protecting at the highest standard. This principle was betrayed by the Army Corps of Engineers, by the state and local officials who knew the levees needed repair and did nothing and by Congress, which allowed the president to cut appropriations for levee renewal.

The same betrayal occurred in evacuation plans that assumed that citizens could evacuate by car. It turned out that 27 percent of city households did not own a car. Racial ignorance and contempt may explain some of this, but not all. A better explanation is that the people involved in municipal, state and federal government simply did not care enough about their own professional morality to find out the true facts. Public officials simply didn’t bother to cross the social distances that divided them from the truth of the New Orleans population. These social distances between rich and poor, between black and white are stubborn and are likely to endure, but the most basic duty of public leadership is always to know how the other half lives - and dies.

A duty to truth was failed, but so was a duty to democracy. Why weren’t ordinary New Orleans citizens consulted about the evacuation plan? The people in poor wards of the city would have picked its holes apart in a second. In the future, one simple test of an evacuation plan’s adequacy should be: Have the people who are likely to be evacuated been fully consulted on its contents?

The most terrible price of Katrina - everyone can see this - was not the destruction of lives and property, terrible though this was. The worst of it was the damage done to the ties that bind Americans together. It is very much too late for senior federal officials, from the president on down, to reknit these ties. It is just too late for the public-relations exercises that pass for leadership these days, the fine speeches from the Oval Office or other stage-managed venues. The real work of healing will be done by citizens much lower down the chain of command: the schoolteachers and superintendents of public school systems around the country who are taking in children and putting them through the healing routines of the school day; the morticians who do what they can to respect the dead; the National Guardsmen who protect the vacant city; the officials and business people who plan its rebirth. To an important degree, the future of confidence in American government will depend not on the leaders who failed their trust but on the foot-soldiers who did not and whom Americans can only hope will do the right thing now. Millions of acts of common decency and bureaucratic courage will be necessary before all Americans, and not just the storm victims, feel that they live, once again, in a political community and not in a savage and lawless swamp.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted at 1:50 AM · Comments (0)

Sunday, September 25, 2005; B01

It took two years of negotiations among teams of experts from six countries for the United States and North Korea to reach an agreement on nuclear weapons. It took one day for the accord to melt into misunderstanding and mistrust.

This comes as no surprise to me. For 27 years, I served as the State Department’s senior Korean language interpreter, and I sat in on almost every high-level U.S.-North Korea meeting for more than a decade. In 17 visits to Pyongyang and many other meetings in the United States and other nations, I listened as these two countries’ officials talked past each other, attaching different meanings and significance to the same words. This happens often enough to people speaking the same language; when they’re using languages as different as English and Korean it’s even more common.

The agreement reached a week ago in Beijing may yet turn out to be durable and useful. But the accord is a linguistic minefield, and it will take more than a week to tiptoe through its hidden meanings and obfuscations. The day after it was signed, North Korea and the United States were sparring over what they meant. Judging from my experience as an interpreter, I believe that there is as much room for mis understanding as there is for better understanding.

For example, the statement issued in Beijing defined the goal of the six-party talks as “the verifiable denuclearization of the Korean peninsula,” which could allow the Pyongyang regime to link inspections in the North to demands that South Korea, as part of the “Korean peninsula,” also be subject to verification — which I’m certain is not what Seoul had in mind. North Korea made a commitment to “abandoning all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs” — but its translation used the Korean verb pogi hada, which could be interpreted to mean leaving the weapons in place rather than dismantling them. And what exactly did the United States mean when it agreed to help North Korea obtain a nuclear energy reactor at an “appropriate time”? Somewhere between yesterday and never, no doubt.

To an expert in language, especially diplomatic language, the tone of the new agreement could be summed up as a variation of Ronald Reagan’s famous phrase from Cold War days: dis trust and verify. North Korea betrayed its anxieties by insisting that the United States promise that it would not launch any attack or invasion against it. The American negotiators betrayed their own well-founded suspicions by asking for a veiled statement of the obvious — such as the importance of observing the 1992 North-South agreement on the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, as well as the importance of abiding by the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter and recognized norms of international relations.

As an interpreter, you have to know the background to understand the words. This was clear during my first visit to the North Korean capital in 1991. (Born and raised in Seoul, I came to the United States in 1972.) I traveled there with retired Gen. Richard G. Stilwell, who was leading a delegation of nuclear weapons experts and retired military officers. Stilwell had spent many years gathering intelligence on North Korea and had led the U.S. forces stationed in the South. The meeting took place with the Americans and North Koreans sitting on opposite sides of a wide lacquer table in a huge, high-ceilinged conference room at the Supreme People’s Assembly building.

What the U.S. experts weren’t prepared for was one of the first lines from Kim Yong Nam, then foreign minister and now the chairman of the presidium of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), as North Korea is officially known. He looked at the U.S. delegation and said: “Do you see horns on my head?” North Korean leader Kim Jong Il asked South Korean President Kim Dae Jung a similarly phrased question at the outset of their historic summit in June 2000.

What’s the connection? Remember, both meetings took place before President Bush became president, before he labeled North Korea part of an “axis of evil.” But close U.S. ally South Korea had portrayed North Korea’s Communist regime as “devils.” So while some might have seen the Kims’ questions as taunts, I believed that implicit in those questions was a message: “You are wrong about us.” But that would be a matter of interpreting motives, not words alone.

The words are hard enough to decipher. They come with traditions, hang-ups and history. Often the North Koreans deliberately choose ambiguous expressions. Until they revealed their alleged possession of nuclear weapons last February, their term for “nuclear deterrent” connoted a “nuclear capability” but didn’t spell that out. It could mean nuclear weapons, or technology, or fissile material or processing facilities — or all of these. To make matters worse, the North’s interpreter repeatedly and incorrectly translated the Korean word for deterrent, okjeryok, as restraint. When pressed about the uranium enrichment program, a North Korean official said that Pyongyang was “bound to produce more powerful weapons than that.” The North Korean interpreter translated the Korean phrase mandlgiro deo itta as “entitled to.” If you’re entitled to do something, you have a right that you may or may not exercise. But the Korean phrase really means that you’re going to do it — not just that you have the option.

Considering how bluntly North Korean officials wield language in their frequent harangues, they can be extremely sensitive to language used by others even when it makes little substantive difference. In an earlier round of talks, when the Americans demanded the “complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement (CVID)” of the North’s “nuclear program,” the North Koreans strongly objected that the phrase, especially the term “irreversible,” made them seem like a “defeated nation.” The South Korean press used seven different variations of my translation into Korean and the North came up with one of its own. Without changing any substance, the Americans started using “the dismantlement of all nuclear programs in a permanent, thorough and transparent manner subject to effective verification.” After this linguistic alteration, the North Koreans became less obstinate. Somehow, “permanent” was easier for them to accept than “irreversible.”

To me, interpreting North Korea and its intentions is not merely a matter of translating words, but of understanding gestures and symbols, because Americans and North Koreans live in different worlds, whose history, culture and values have been driven further apart by the 55 years of hostility since the Korean War.

In October 2000, a 72-year-old North Korean Army vice marshal, Jo Myong Rok, second in rank in Pyongyang, became the first North Korean ever to visit the White House. The marshal arrived in Washington in a well-tailored suit, but before going to the White House, he asked for a room at the State Department, where he changed into his mustard-colored military uniform, with lines of heavy medals hanging on the jacket, and donned an impressive military hat with a thick gold band. When he walked into the Oval Office, Jo presented a sharp salute to President Bill Clinton, who looked somewhat puzzled or amused.

It was apparent to me that Vice Marshal Jo was doing this because he was carrying a message from the supreme commander of the Korean People’s Army to the commander-in-chief of the United States. The message was simple: Since the major issue at the time was North Korea’s missile program, which he characterized as a military issue, the top military commanders from both countries should get together to resolve it. The vice marshal tried to assure Clinton that North Korea’s “dear leader” would never let the American president return empty-handed from a visit to Pyongyang. Clinton, however, never went.

In contrast to the American media description of North Korea as a “Stalinist Communist state,” I have come to see it as a Confucian nationalist monarchy, based on traditional Korean values and reflecting the bitterness born of foreign invasions throughout Korean history. In Confucian society, loyalty to the ruler and respect for elders are basic tenets. The iconic stature of the late “great leader” Kim Il Sung isn’t that different from the Confucian image of a divine ruler.

Because of these tenets, it was more important than most Americans realized for Clinton to issue a statement of “sympathy for the North Korean people” when Kim Il Sung died in 1994 in the middle of U.S.-North Korean negotiations in Geneva over the nuclear issue. The U.S. delegation in Geneva had debated what to say, and I told the members that on such occasions Koreans traditionally say simply, “I am at a loss for words.” Later that day, the chief American delegate visited the North Korean mission and wrote in its condolence book, “Words cannot express the feeling of sympathy I have for the Korean people.” After a mourning period, the attitude of the North Korean negotiators was conspicuously more positive. This was something the Americans did not expect. And when Vice Marshal Jo visited Clinton, he also conveyed North Korean leader Kim Jong Il’s gratitude to the American president for issuing a statement of condolence on the death of his father six years earlier.

When Madeleine K. Albright became the first U.S. secretary of state to visit Pyongyang less than two weeks after Jo’s visit to the White House, she made a brief, quiet visit to the elder Kim’s mausoleum. Later that day, Kim Jong Il profusely thanked the secretary for that controversial gesture — which she defended in her memoir as “a diplomatic necessity” — and for Clinton’s message of sympathy. From the tone of his voice, he seemed genuinely touched. And he spent more than 10 hours with Albright, while ignoring a Chinese defense ministry delegation during our two-night stay. Recently the younger Kim said that denuclearization of the Korean peninsula was the last wish of his father; I think he really believes that carrying out his father’s will is his filial duty in the Korean tradition.

When diplomats run into serious disagreements, they often agree to use ambiguity to disguise their differences. For example, the text of the 1994 Agreed Framework stated in part: “The DPRK will engage in North/South dialogue, as this Agreed Framework will help create an atmosphere that promotes such dialogue.” The meaning depended on the interpretation of the word “as.” Caught between the South Koreans’ demand that the agreement should oblige the North to immediately engage the South, and the North Koreans’ refusal to talk to the South, the Americans sidestepped the issue and let the two Koreas interpret the word differently. To the South Koreans, “as” meant “because,” whereas the North Koreans translated it into “when.” I see a number of similar ambiguities in the latest accord.

As a rule, the North Koreans argue that in the absence of mutual trust, neither nation should act first. Their insistence on simultaneous actions provides a useful tool for meeting halfway in each step toward resolving the nuclear issue. If practiced well, it could also serve as an effective confidence building measure.

If there were something the North Koreans could choose to resolve first, it would be achieving a normal, friendly relationship of trust with the United States. After that, they believe, there will be no security threat to their regime. In Pyongyang’s view, normalization would make it possible to conclude a peace treaty with the United States. If there were something the Americans could choose to resolve first, it would be nuclear dismantlement. So in all agreements, the sequence of measures is an issue. Judging by its language, this deal will be no different.

For the isolated North Koreans, the more they learn about America, the easier it becomes for them to talk in the American way. At the same time, if U.S. officials learn more about North Korea, it will become easier to find a common vocabulary and language that means the same thing to both sides.

Author’s e-mail: tong.kim@prodigy.net

Tong Kim recently retired from the State Department, where he was the senior Korean interpreter for high-level meetings involving U.S. officials. He has joined Korea University in Seoul as a research professor.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Posted at 1:42 AM · Comments (0)

TOKYO, Sept. 25 KYODO

Asashoryu wins 6th consecutive title in playoff with Kotooshu
Mongolian yokozuna Asashoryu (R) overpowers Bulgarian sekiwake Kotooshu in a playoff at th…
Yokozuna Asashoryu overpowered Bulgarian sekiwake Kotooshu in a playoff at the Autumn Grand Sumo Tournament Sunday to win a record-tying sixth consecutive title.
Asashoryu, who suffered a defeat to komusubi Futeno on the opening day and a second defeat to Aminishiki on the 11th day, battled back to win his career 14th title and matched a 38-year-old record of sixth straight titles held by sumo legend Taiho.
”I can’t believe it. After losing two, I knew I had to fight to the last bout. I changed my attitude in the final days for the title,” Asashoryu said.
Kotooshu, who at one point led the tournament with a two-win edge over the yokozuna at 12-0 and was aiming to become the first European to capture a sumo title, never got his attack rolling as he was quickly moved over the edge in storm of slaps by the Mongolian grand champion at Tokyo’s Ryogoku Kokugikan.
It was the first time since former yokozuna Akebono and Musashimaru faced each other at the Kyushu meet in 1993 that two foreign wrestlers battled in a playoff for the title.
”I realized that I had to do my best if I wanted to win the title. I have to thank all my fans for all their support,” said Asashoryu, who will aim to become the first wrestler in history to win seven straight at the Kyushu meet in November.
With a title win in Kyushu, Asashoryu would also become the first person to ever win all six titles in a single year.
In his final regulation bout, Kotooshu put his lost from the previous day to Kisenosato behind him with a convincing victory over ozeki Chiyotaikai to book his playoff with Asashoryu while picking up his second Fighting Sprit Prize.
The sekiwake never gave Chiyotaikai (10-5) a look in as he wrapped both hands around his opponent and steamrolled him over the edge in a matter of seconds to move to 13-2.
Asashoryu was next and rocked ozeki Tochiazuma (10-5) with a shoulder to the head that knocked the ozeki flat on his back for a 13-2 record.
In the day’s first bout, Kisenosato got both hands wrapped around the belt of Wakatoba (8-7) before muscling his opponent over the edge to improve to 12-3 and claimed his first Fighting Sprit Prize.
Kisenosato, a 16th-ranked maegashira, had a mathematical chance to become the youngest wrestler to win a title at 19 years, two months, surpassing the previous record held by former yokozuna Takanohana before Kotooshu and Asashoryu set up the playoff.
Tamanoshima ensured himself of a promotion in rank by winning his 11th bout, blasting out Kotomitsuki (9-6).
In other bouts, Ama tossed down Kotoshogiku (7-8) with an arm throw right after the faceoff to improve to 9-6 while giant killer Aminishiki wrenched the arm of Russian Roho (8-7) before pulling him over the edge for a 7-8 mark.
Hakuho, nursing an injured ankle, absorbed a fierce charge from Miyabiyama (6-9) before dumping his opponent down at the edge of the ring with an arm throw to improve to 9-6.
Kokkai, a wrestler from the former Soviet republic of Georgia, finally put his back into it to win his third in a row, getting both hands wrapped around Iwakiyama (7-8) before heaving his opponent over the ridge.
Crowd favorite Takamisakari huffed and puffed in his pre-bout ritual but was blown down by Dejima (7-8) in a matter of seconds to fall to a disappointing 5-10.
==Kyodo

Posted at 12:07 AM · Comments (0)

Published: September 23 2005 Copyright The Financial Times

The speakers in the lobby of the World Bank’s headquarters in New Delhi play a plinky-plinky version of the theme tune from Chariots of Fire. It is 6pm on a Saturday evening in August and after a week of back-to-back meetings, receptions and dinners, Paul Wolfowitz has at last found a chance to escape.

The new president of the World Bank has decided he wants to visit a slum where the bank has been sponsoring a project providing computer kiosks to help children learn how to work and play online. He hasn’t told any of his security aides about the change in plan. (If you ask anyone about this kind of thing, he tells a colleague, you always get a “no”.) Wherever he has been on this trip, 20 or more vehicles have followed him - police vans, an ambulance and sometimes a fire engine. This time he wants a quieter visit. His Washington security chief understands, and after some fast and frank negotiations with the less understanding Indian police, two cars pull up to the door for Wolfowitz and his staff, followed by just three police jeeps. We speed off through Delhi’s busy streets in Wolfowitz’s car - a white Mercedes with dark bulletproof glass - our conversation punctuated by the constant honking of the horn.

Ten minutes later we are in a slum in the south of the city called Vivekananda Camp. Two television cameramen and a few photographers have been tipped off, and have beaten us here. Wolfowitz throws his jacket on to the back seat and strides off, security agents and police hurrying after him.

Is the World Bank ready for Paul Wolfowitz? Send your questions to ask@ft.com and join the debate live on MondayGo there

Most of this trip has been taken up with meetings of government leaders and World Bank officials, but there is no doubt that part of it has been designed to soften the harsh image Wolfowitz earned in his last job of deputy defense secretary, where he was a leading advocate and architect of the Iraq war.

This has occasionally led to surprising sights: after a crowd of brightly painted dancers arrived to welcome Wolfowitz to their village in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh one day earlier in the week, he suddenly jumped out of his car and started dancing with them in the street.

There is no dancing at Vivekananda Camp, where Wolfowitz is soon on a narrow path weaving through the modest houses. He puts his hands together, prayer-like at chest level, and bobs his head to people, offering them the traditional Indian greeting of “Namaste”, “I bow to you.” People cook outside on fires and sanitation is primitive - a stream of nasty-looking water runs along the path. But this is long way from being Delhi’s poorest neighbourhood. The houses are small and rickety, but, Wolfowitz points out, the roofs are well covered.

By the time he reaches the three computer terminals, built into a wall like ATM machines, he is surrounded by about 90 people, mostly children. Two of the bright yellow hatches on the computers turn out to be closed because of a power cut, a common problem here. The third one runs on batteries and Wolfowitz heads to it to inspect what it offers: games, in Hindi and English, and internet access. He tries to ask the kids what they use them for, but many can’t understand him. One teenaged boy, dressed all in white, turns out to have learned English at the nearby American School. Wolfowitz asks him to translate and turning to the crowd of children says, “Raise your hands if you do your homework.” All the hands shoot up, amid much laughter.

When the photographers ask him to pose for the camera, Wolfowitz picks up a sweet-looking little boy and hoists him up to get him in the shot. As he is saying goodbye, a camera is thrust in his face and a TV reporter, talking quickly, fires questions at him about Iraq. Wolfowitz says politely that he is here to visit the computer project, but now he has to go, and starts back down the path.

For a man who will be 62 in December, Paul Wolfowitz looks youthful. He is tall and pigeon-toed; his hair used to be dark but is now mostly grey, perhaps because of the stress of his last job. Although he has spent most of his career in government service he still has the demeanour of an academic. Ask him a question and he often pauses a long time before answering, sometimes for so long it becomes disconcerting.

In meetings, he is happy to sit and listen to others speak, but when he talks he makes incisive points and asks sharp questions. Senior bank staff who have spent time with him seem to be uniformly impressed by his intelligence. He relishes discussion and debate, and does not mind being told he is wrong - something that bank insiders say could not be said of his predecessor, James Wolfensohn. Wolfowitz is clearly very different to Wolfensohn; less charismatic but also less ego-driven.

My first visit to Wolfowitz’s office was revealing: when Wolfensohn was in it, the walls were covered with more than 100 photographs of him and world leaders. Now it is almost bare, just a couple of photographs of Wolfowitz’s son and two daughters on the window ledge. The new president says he does not plan to adorn the walls, adding with a smile that given some of the leaders he has come across in the past, you never know when you might have to take the photographs down again.

It is an open secret that President Bush gave Wolfowitz the choice of the World Bank presidency nomination or the US ambassadorship to the United Nations. For a long-time admirer of the bank with much less time for the UN, the decision was an easy one - even though his background is in security policy, not development. (The UN post, of course, went to John Bolton.)

Born in New York, Wolfowitz is the son of a Polish immigrant father, Jacob, who moved to the US as a child and became an academic mathematician. Wolfowitz seemed set to follow a similar course, majoring in mathematics and chemistry at Cornell University - where his father was a professor - before disappointing his family by heading off to do a PhD in political science, rather than mathematics, at the University of Chicago.

Wolfowitz taught briefly at Yale University, before holding a series of jobs in the Defense and State departments. He is proud of his record, as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs in the 1980s, of pushing for democracy in the Philippines during the Marcos regime and, as he put it in an interview, “helping to see Marcos out of Manila”.

Later in the 1980s, as US ambassador to Indonesia, he addressed, in very diplomatic language, the problem of the Suharto regime’s corruption.

Behind the scenes he pushed the World Bank to address the issue more directly, bank staff from the time remember. During the Clinton years he returned to academia as dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington.

The promotion of democracy has been one of the most consistent themes of his career. As a leading neoconservative, he believes in the use of US might to advance democracy abroad. Because of this, and his role in the Iraq war and its troubled aftermath, it is no secret that a large chunk of the bank’s staff was appalled when he got the job last June. (There was a similar reaction in some European finance and development ministries, but national leaders gave their backing and Wolfowitz was approved by unanimous vote at the bank’s board.)

There is an obvious comparison between Wolfowitz and Robert McNamara, the controversial Vietnam war defense secretary who resigned from the Pentagon to head the World Bank. But when I asked Wolfowitz about the comparison, he said: “I don’t know if it is fair to put that label on him - but I certainly was not running away from my old job. I would have stayed there very happily if this hadn’t come along as, you know, a more exciting opportunity.”

As for Iraq, he said: “I don’t want to get into an argument with all the people around here who might have a different view, but I still think that what the US, UK and others did for Iraq was the right thing and done for the right reasons. And hopefully it’s going to turn out the right way.” He added that wherever he had travelled recently, from Burkina Faso to Bosnia, Iraq had hardly come up at all.

And inside the World Bank, people are far more interested in what their new leader plans to do with the world’s leading development organisation. Wolfowitz has been so busy since he started at the bank that he has had relatively little time for informal discussions with senior staff. Of those he has spoken to, several said he had been so cautious that they had little idea what his plans were.

He brought two lieutenants with him: Robin Cleveland, former associate director of the Office of Management and Budget, who helped to secure funding for the war in Iraq, and Kevin Kellems, a former adviser to Wolfowitz at the Pentagon who was also a spokesman for vice-president Dick Cheney. Both are new to the bank and have little expertise in development, which has ruffled some feathers. Staff are happier with Wolfowitz’s choice of the head of his office, Letitia Obeng, a Ghanaian national with broad experience at the bank who has worked in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

It is hardly surprising that Wolfowitz should have brought in some old and trusted advisers. The World Bank group is a huge, sprawling bureaucracy, with 184 member countries, more than 10,000 employees, five separate agencies and 26 vice-presidents of one sort or another.

It is well known that Wolfowitz has not been impressed by all the vice-presidents he has met. He has spent relatively little time at the bank’s Washington headquarters, so this impression may change, but insiders expect a shake-up of the top management team.

Since Wolfowitz was appointed he has spoken regularly to Shaukat Aziz, Pakistan’s technocratic prime minister, whom Wolfowitz knew from his academic days. When he visited Aziz in Pakistan last month there was a rumour Wolfowitz wanted to appoint Aziz to a top position at the bank. Wolfowitz has dismissed such speculation, saying Aziz was too valuable in Pakistan to even consider trying to lure him away - but there are many at the bank in Washington who will not be surprised if Aziz joins at a later date.

Others who have influenced his thinking on development and the bank include Sir Nick Stern, the British academic and former World Bank chief economist who was policy director of Tony Blair’s Commission on Africa. More controversially, Wolfowitz has spoken a few times to Professor Allan Meltzer, chairman of the US Congressional Commission on reforming international financial institutions. The commission’s 2000 report criticised the bank for being overstaffed, inefficient and bureaucratic. It recommended that the bank should pull out of lending to middle-income nations (a view Wolfowitz has so far shown little sign of promoting) and focus on grants rather than loans for the poorest African countries.

Wolfowitz is modest about his knowledge of the bank, saying he has much to learn from its staff and from country visits. “For me this is an unusual opportunity to go back to graduate school,” he said at one meeting in Islamabad one night.

He is equally modest about making grand statements. Sitting in a deserted restaurant in Delhi last month, he was sceptical about the “vision thing” when I asked him what he was planning to say at this weekend’s annual World Bank meetings in Washington, an important gathering of finance and development ministers and the bank’s senior management.

”Everyone thinks it’s a time when I should lay out my vision,” he said, smiling. “I honestly find that a slightly pretentious description. But in the sense that I am a new leader, and that it is a very presidentially orientated organisation in many ways, I think it is important to lay out a common vision. A lot of it is going to be based on things I am hearing from other people. If it were my personal vision I don’t think it would take hold terribly well, so it will reflect both my sense of where we ought to go and something I think people are ready to support. Vision is a little grandiose. Setting priorities, as much as anything, I think is a big part of it.”

But what exactly are his priorities? After more than half a dozen conversations with Wolfowitz, and more with others close to him, it seems clear the new president will make sure that the bank’s main concern will remain Africa, the first continent he visited after his appointment.

Sub-Saharan Africa is unquestionably where the bank’s work is most needed. Numerically, there are more people living in abject poverty in China and India, but unlike Africa those countries have fast-growing economies, functioning states and a 20-year record on reducing poverty. Fears that the neocon hawk might try to reorientate the bank towards promoting democracy in the Middle East, and away from fighting poverty in Africa, are far-fetched.

Wolfowitz would like his legacy at the bank to be the moment when Africa shifted on to a sustainable development path, which is no small ambition. “I am not naive. It’s a huge challenge and the bank is only a small part of the answer, but if the world and the sub-continent can rise to that challenge, it would be wonderful to feel that we made a difference,” he says.

Wolfowitz sees an important role for aid, but is very sceptical of the idea that the only path to successful development is for rich countries to give poor ones enough money. Pointing to south-east Asia and China, which did not rely on financial aid, he says it is a “fallacy” to think spending money is all that is needed to reach targets such as the eight “Millennium Development Goals” that commit the international community to address a range of development challenges by 2015, from extreme poverty to access to education. Money, he says, “is a necessary but far from sufficient condition”.

As for what he calls “the development process”, he says “my feeling is that we understand about half of it, and about half of it is a mystery, almost”. He thinks it is affected by much more than strictly economic factors. “Leadership is a huge factor, both good and bad leadership, and one of the things that seems to be changing in Africa is that the ratio of good leaders to bad leaders seems to be going up significantly.”

One area in which Wolfowitz may differ from his predecessor is the central importance of economic growth in reducing poverty. James Wolfensohn was sometimes criticised for being too willing to please non-government organisations - and some within the bank - who opposed making growth the top priority. Wolfowitz has been clear from the start: “It’s just an inescapable fact you can’t make serious dents in poverty without sustained growth over a considerable period of time.”

The bank’s new action plan for Africa is laden with references to private sector-led growth in areas such as agriculture and regional trade. A recent report by the bank’s Operations Evaluation Department, an independent unit that analyses its loans and grants, said the organisation needed to refocus on promoting growth and investing in infrastructure. Spending more on health and education projects alone, for example, would not by itself reduce poverty. Wolfowitz appears to agree with the broad thrust of that report. During most of Wolfensohn’s time at the bank, there was a shift away from large-scale infrastructure projects, though at the demand of borrowing countries there had been a greater focus in the last couple of years. Wolfowitz aims to take this much further. He is committed to increasing the bank’s investment in hydropower, roads, water and telecommunications and while he says the bank must learn from mistakes of the past, he adds that it won’t cave in to protests from environmental and social activists.

Wolfowitz also wants to do more to measure the results of the bank’s loans and spending, so donor countries can see that the money it hands out is well-used. This goes hand-in-hand with his aim of building on James Wolfensohn’s efforts to decentralise bank decision-making. Sitting on a 10-seater private jet last month, as we set off from Islamabad to Lahore, Wolfowitz told me about a conversation he had with Pakistan’s prime minister Aziz, who used to be the head of Citibank for south-east Asia: “The point was he had virtually complete autonomy in deciding what loans to approve to his region. He did not take individual loans to his board or I think even to senior management. They reviewed his overall portfolio, his overall results. A corporation like that pays a lot of attention to how its managers are doing, but his point was they don’t get into individual details.”

The World Bank, he says, is a very different institution to a commercial bank, but he wants to explore ways to decentralise so that governments could get approval for loans and grants with its staff in their country, rather than having to deal with multiple layers of bureaucracy in Washington.

Wolfowitz is most passionate, and his views most distinctive, when talking about the politics of development. Speaking on the telephone earlier this month about how his thinking has developed since he started the job, he said: “I think I feel even more strongly than before that you can’t talk intelligently about development if you exclude anything that sounds political.”

One very political aspect of the job that Wolfowitz has thought about a lot is the importance of addressing corruption. He frequently talks of the good job Wolfensohn did in putting the iss