May 19, 2011
NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof does not have a very good track record in identifying effective ways to help poor people in the developing world. (He was a big promoter of Greg Mortenson, the best-selling author of Three Cups of Tea, whose aid project now appears to be largely a fraud.) His column today indicates that his track record is not about to improve.
He urges people who want to help the world’s poor to study economics and points to useful results that economists have uncovered. While the results he mentions are intriguing, Kristof somehow manages to ignore all the harm that economists have done in the developing world.
For example, the economists at the International Monetary Fund had routinely imposed structural adjustment programs that required that parents pay fees for their children to attend primary school. These agreement also often required fees for the provision of basic health services. This practice kept millions of children out of school and denied them basic preventive health care, since even small fees were unaffordable to many poor parents.
The practice was not changed voluntarily by the economists at the IMF. Rather it was a change that was forced on the institution by activists who were able to use their influence in Congress to require that the IMF stop making these fees a condition of getting loans.
At present, virtually all economists are making a point of not noticing the efforts of the United States and other wealthy countries to raise the price of medicine to people in the developing world by imposing patent protection. All the “free-trade” agreements that the United States has negotiated with developing countries have imposed stronger patent protection or other monopolistic restrictions (e.g. data exclusivity for tests used to get drugs approved) that typically raise the price of drugs by several thousand percent above their free market price. The TRIPS provisions of the WTO (which were drafted by the U.S. pharmaceutical industry) also were intended to have this effect.
While any economist (and most non-economists) should possess the ability to recognize the potential harm that these provisions can imply for the world’s poor, very few have tried to call attention to these protectionist measures. It is worth noting that very powerful forces, most notably the pharmaceutical industry and the Gates Foundation, stand behind these sorts of measures. That could explain the reluctance of economists to apply economics to these issues.
Contrary to what Mr. Kristof suggests, the biggest obstacle to improving the lot of the poor in the developing world is probably not a lack of knowledge of economics, but rather the efforts of the powerful from preventing the teachings from economics from being applied in situations where it would hurt their interests.
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