Para completar mis dos comentarios previos sobre las ideas de William Easterly sobre economía del desarrollo (básicamente una crítica a la planificación centralizada de la ayuda y una defensa de su uso en el apoyo a los emprendedores locales), es muy recomendable el texto de una conferencia (pdf) que impartió recientemente en el Asian Development Bank. De nuevo Easterly critica, apoyándose en evidencias empíricas, las aproximaciones top-down y defiende modelos de uso de la ayuda basados en la experimentación bottom-up basada en mercados.
El blog del Globalisation Institute referencia este documento (William Easterly: bottom-up, market-based experimentation is the right approach for aid):
Seventeen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there is only one major area of the world in which central planning is still seen as a way to achieve prosperity - countries that receive foreign aid. Behind the Aid Wall that divides poor countries from rich, the aid community is awash in plans, strategies, and frameworks to meet the very real needs of the world's poor. These exercises only make sense in a central planning mentality in which the answer to the tragedies of poverty is a large bureaucratic apparatus to dictate quantities of different development goods and services by administrative fiat. The planning mindset is in turn linked to previously discredited theories, such as that poverty is due to a "poverty trap," which can only be alleviated by a large inflow of aid from rich country to poor country governments to fill a "financing gap" for poor countries. The aid inflow is of course administered by this same planning apparatus.
This is bad news for the world's poor, as historically poverty has never been ended by central planners. It is only ended by "searchers", both economic and political, who explore solutions by trial and error, have a way to get feedback on the ones that work, and then expand the ones that work, all of this in an unplanned, spontaneous way. Examples of searchers are firms in private markets and democratically accountable politicians...
The current aid system is not working partly because the rich countries don't care enough about making aid work for the poor, and are willing to settle for grand utopian Plans that don't work. It is partly because nobody is actually held accountable for making THIS intervention work in THIS place at THIS time. My suggestions here could be ludicrously misguided; they should be subject to skeptical examination and ex-post evaluation just like everything else... It is strange that aid agencies talk so much these days about "good governance" in the aid recipient countries without worrying about "good governance" of their own aid projects.
