Reconstruction of sustainable education in Kenya

Conference paper presented at the 1st African Conference on Sustainable Tourism in Strathmore University, Kenya.Education in developing countries is facing problems at all levels: At the primary level, despite gains in enrolment, the quality is appallingly low. In East Africa, some 20-30 percent of students in class 6 pupils, could not read at the class 2 level. Not surprising since in these countries, teachers in public primary schools are absent 25 percent of the time. When present, they are in-class teaching only 20 percent of the time. At the secondary level, the performance of students from the East Africa and North Africa can not interpret simple English questions and international tests such TOEFL is significantly below the developing country average. At the tertiary level, universities are chronically underfunded and not training students for jobs that the market is demanding. All of these problems have a common root. Education is largely a private good. Most, if not all, the benefits of education accrue to the individual in terms of their being able to earn a higher wage as a result of being educated. I say "largely" a private good because we believe that there are also externalities associated with education that society as a whole benefits from having a literate and numerate population. Unfortunately, the empirical evidence of these externalities is rather thin. (Most of the people who believe in the externality are university professors. Even the empirical evidence suggests that the externality does not dwarf the private benefit from education. In short, education is more like food and clothing than like street lighting and national defence

DECENTRALIZATION IN UGANDA

The theory of fiscal federalism provides several reasons to expect better public service delivery if government is decentralized. Demand for public services is expected to vary across jurisdictions, and local government officials are expected to match supply of public services with demand more effectively than if public services were centrally provided. Households are expected to have higher participation rates in elections and to vote for better reasons (the candidates' experience, agenda or political affiliation, rather than bribery or the candidates' race, religion etc.) at the local level, and to have better access to information about local affairs than about national politics. Finally, mobility across jurisdictions is expected to induce local governments to be more efficient. We review the decentralization process in Uganda and provide evidence on all these mechanisms. There turns out to be little support for the relevance of these hypotheses to Uganda

Orphans and other vulnerable children : what role for social protection ?

Recent estimates have provided unprecedented numbers of orphans, and vulnerable children, either brought about because of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, or carriers themselves of HIV infections, a relentless growth which has precipitated a multifaceted care burden, that will too, grow for the next twenty years. This report records the proceedings of the Conference"Orphans and Other Vulnerable Children", which sought to promote awareness of the extent of this crisis, and, to probe the role of social protection in implementing a balanced response. The social protection framework for working with orphans, and vulnerable children shaped the conference agenda. Provision of appropriate risk management instruments is crucial for lasting poverty reduction, while programs to reduce the vulnerability of orphans, and other children, should play an integral role in any national development strategy, in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Building community capacity will constitute the centerpiece of any feasible response. Within a realistic framework, programs must spread, and scale up, to address the vast, and growing need.Street Children,Youth and Governance,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Children and Youth,Primary Education

Counting Chickens when they Hatch: Timing and the Effects of Aid on Growth

Recent research yields widely divergent estimates of the cross-country relationship between foreign aid receipts and economic growth. We re-analyse data from the three most influential published aid-growth studies, strictly conserving their regression specifications, with sensible assumptions about the timing of aid effects and without questionable instruments. All three research designs show that increases in aid have been followed on average by increases in investment and growth. The most plausible explanation is that aid causes some degree of growth in recipient countries, although the magnitude of this relationship is modest, varies greatly across recipients and diminishes at high levels of aid. Economists have spent decades debating, without resolution, the cross-country relationship between foreign aid receipts and economic growth. Some find that aid robustly causes positive economic growth on average. Others cannot distinguish the average effect from zero. Still others find an effect only in certain countries, such as those with good policies or governance. Wearied readers of this literature would be right to wonder what produces diverse findings from apparently the same aid and growth data. Here, we show that two traits of previous research help to explain why different studies reach different conclusions. Both traits relate to how these studies treat the timing of causal relationships between aid and growth. First, the most cited research has focused on measuring the effect of aggregate aid on contemporaneous growth, while many aid-funded projects can take a long time to influence growth. Funding for a new road might affect economic activity in short order, funding for a vaccination campaign might only affect growth decades later and humanitarian assistance may never affect growth. Second, because current growth is likely to affect current aid, these studies require a strategy to disentangle correlation from causation. They have tended to rely on instrumental variables but the instruments that have been used are of questionable validity and strength. When these issues are addressed, the divergence in empirical findings is greatly reduced. We show this by stepwise altering the research design of the three most influential papers in the aid and growth literature. We hold all else constant: we begin b

The Role of Trade Policy in Climate Mitigation: Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM)

In this paper, we explore the dual goals of CBAM – to level the playing field for the EU and to encourage decarbonization in countries with high CO2 emissions. To do so, we consider the effects of carbon taxes and carbon tariffs. Carbon tariffs are differentiated by exporting country and are based on carbon emitted per unit of output. We consider the following scenarios: all regions introduce a carbon tax of $75 per ton – this is the first best outcome when the policy objective is to reduce global carbon emissions. Countries also increase tax revenue collected so experience a “double dividend” and may choose to reduce other taxes. Next, we consider a carbon tax in developed countries and a carbon tariff against imports of commodities with high CO2 per unit of output – fertilizer, iron & steel, aluminum, cement, and electricity – from all countries without a carbon tax. Finally, we consider a carbon tax with different tax rates by country income levels, as suggested in a recent IMF report on carbon pricing. For the analysis, we use a comparative static multi-region, multi-sector computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. Data are from GTAP v10, 2014, aggregated to focus on major polluting regions such as India, China, and SACU, and sectors subject to a CBAM tariff: iron & steel, aluminum, cement, fertilizers, and electricity. We use GTAP’s satellite energy accounts data which record the CO2 emissions associated with each energy commodity and using agent. Production behavior includes incentives to substitute away from energy inputs as prices change. Preliminary results suggest carbon taxes are effective at reducing CO2 emissions and generating tax revenue. CBAM provides some assistance in reducing leakage in countries with a carbon tax. However, countries punished by CBAM tariffs can divert exports to other regions which do not impose CBAM tariffs, so the impact of CBAM on decarbonizing is limited

The Role of Trade Policy in Climate Mitigation: Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM)

In this paper, we explore the dual goals of CBAM – to level the playing field for the EU and to encourage decarbonization in countries with high CO2 emissions. To do so, we consider the effects of carbon taxes and carbon tariffs. Carbon tariffs are differentiated by exporting country and are based on carbon emitted per unit of output. We consider the following scenarios: all regions introduce a carbon tax of $75 per ton – this is the first best outcome when the policy objective is to reduce global carbon emissions. Countries also increase tax revenue collected so experience a “double dividend” and may choose to reduce other taxes. Next, we consider a carbon tax in developed countries and a carbon tariff against imports of commodities with high CO2 per unit of output – fertilizer, iron & steel, aluminum, cement, and electricity – from all countries without a carbon tax. Finally, we consider a carbon tax with different tax rates by country income levels, as suggested in a recent IMF report on carbon pricing. For the analysis, we use a comparative static multi-region, multi-sector computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. Data are from GTAP v10, 2014, aggregated to focus on major polluting regions such as India, China, and SACU, and sectors subject to a CBAM tariff: iron & steel, aluminum, cement, fertilizers, and electricity. We use GTAP’s satellite energy accounts data which record the CO2 emissions associated with each energy commodity and using agent. Production behavior includes incentives to substitute away from energy inputs as prices change. Preliminary results suggest carbon taxes are effective at reducing CO2 emissions and generating tax revenue. CBAM provides some assistance in reducing leakage in countries with a carbon tax. However, countries punished by CBAM tariffs can divert exports to other regions which do not impose CBAM tariffs, so the impact of CBAM on decarbonizing is limited