Sure, governments in the Middle East could tax their citizens more thereby catalyzing a more efficient bureaucracy, economic development, and political accountability. The first doesn’t sound so bad, the second sounds pretty good, but the third…well, lots of leaders would rather not be accountable, so they stick with inefficient bureaucracies and low levels of economic development. It’s a bad tradeoff for most people, but not those at the top. Bad governance is typically a choice, not an accident.

Chinese style.

The austerity cult ♥ human sacrifice.

Matt Yglesias points out a blindingly obvious flaw in our Afghanistan policy:

As I understand it, our policy there [Afghanistan] puts economic development at the core of our strategy. But if the US government knew how to produce development in foreign countries just because we want to see it happen, the world would be a very different place. The fact of the matter, however, is that promoting development is really hard.

I am embarrassed to admit that despite my extensive rants on Afghanistan and years of working on economic development, this point never occurred to me.

MA in Democracy and Governance student Elizabeth Cutler has a very insightful post on the constellation of forces within the USG that seek to undermine the work of USAID and their reasons for doing so at Budget Insight. She left out an important part of the problem: she blames everyone in the USG except USAID. Part of the agency’s problem is that it does a terrible job of justifying its own existence. USAID does not operate as a single agency, but is more like an umbrella organization for lots of different development projects (health, education, environment, democracy/governance, etc.). USAID has been unable to frame why it exists, so others have chosen to do so – to the detriment of USAID.

Dispatch’s dilemma.

Aid Data’s new initiative to map the flow of donor funds.