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November 2017

Weekly wire: The global forum

Roxanne Bauer's picture

These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.

McKinsey & Company
Global banking-industry performance has been lackluster. Now comes the hard part: the rise of nonbanking platform companies targeting the most profitable parts of the banking value chain.
 
International Organization for Migration
Crossing the Mediterranean to Europe is “by far the world's deadliest” journey for migrants, with at least 33,761 reported to have died or gone missing between 2000 and 2017, a United Nations report finds. The report, released Friday from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), notes the highest number of fatalities, at 5,096, was recorded in 2016, when the short and relatively less dangerous route from Turkey to Greece was shut, following the European Union-Turkey deal.
 

State of Haryana’s Initiatives for Development of Horticulture in India

Abhilaksh Likhi's picture
Birmingham University, United Kingdom was the venue for a workshop from 16 to 17th November 2017 on “Post-Harvest Losses in Horticulture Crops and the Importance of Clean Cold Chain Development in India”. The UK workshop followed the study tour and conference in India, earlier this year, organized by Birmingham University's Energy Institute in collaboration with India’s National Centre for Cold Chain Development (NCCD) and UK'S Science and Innovation Network.

The objective of the workshop was to co-design the implementation of frameworks for the provision of clean and sustainable post-harvest food cold chain. The latter is defined in the report  "India's Third Agricultural Revolution- Doubling Farmers' Income through Clean Cold Chains" as an integrated and seamless network of refrigerated and temperature controlled pack houses, distribution hubs and vehicles used to maintain the safety, quality and quantity of food while moving it swiftly from farm gate to consumption centre. Such facilities, the report highlights, ought to be attractive to end users, civil society, government, policy makers and industry to ensure impact, legacy, and scalability.
 



In the above context, intensive brainstorming was facilitated in the workshop by academics, experts, and industry leaders with senior officials fromthe government of Haryana, Punjab, and Andhra Pradesh. The aim was understanding the barriers in the cold value chain from the first mile (farm) to the last mile (consumer) in accessing markets by small and marginal farmers. The aim was also to explore how improved and clean cooling technologies can be appropriately designed to enable such small and marginal farmers to avail opportunities for reaching markets with their horticultural produce, without loss of time so that their income is enhanced. Lastly, the workshop focused on the need for and role of area clusters and farmer producer organizations to drive such a supply chain with skilled manpower and innovative financing/ business models.
 

What kind of evidence might persuade people to change their minds on refugees?

Duncan Green's picture

Oxfam Humanitarian Policy Adviser Ed Cairns reflects on using evidence to influence the treatment of refugees.

Who thinks that governments decide what to do on refugees after carefully considering the evidence? Not many, I suspect. So it was an interesting to be asked to talk about that at the  ‘Evidence for Influencing’conference Duncan wrote about last week.

When I think what influences refugee policy, I’m reminded of a meeting I had in Whitehall on Friday 4 September, two days after the three-year-old Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, had drowned.  Oxfam and other NGOs had been invited in to talk about refugees. The UK officials found out what their policy was by watching Prime Minister David Cameron on their phones, as he overturned the UK’s refusal to resettle thousands of Syrians in a press conference in Lisbon.  Even then, he and his officials refused to promise how many Syrians would be allowed. By Monday, that line had crumbled as well, and a promise of 20,000 by 2020 was announced.

The evidence of course had shown that children and other refugees had been tragically drowning in the Mediterranean for months. But it was the sheer human emotion, the public interest, and no doubt Cameron’s own compassion that made the change. Evidence and the evidence-informed discussion between officials and NGOs had nothing to do with it. More important was that a single image of a drowned boy spread to 20 million screens within 12 hours as #refugeeswelcome began trending worldwide. As research by the Visual Social Media Lab at the University of Sheffield set out, “a single image transformed the debate”.

Cairns 2


Two years later, a new Observatory of Public Attitudes to Migration has just been launched by the Florence-based Migration Policy Centreand its partners, including IPSOS Mori in the UK.  It aims to be the ‘go-to centre for researchers and practitioners’, and has sobering news for anyone who thinks that evidence has a huge influence on this issue.  Anti-migrant views, it shows, are far more driven by the values of tradition, conformity and security, and within the UK in particular, according to an IPSOS Mori study, by a distrust of experts, alongside suspicion of diversity, human rights and “political correctness”.

Weekly wire: The global forum

Roxanne Bauer's picture

These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.

Global Financial Development Report 2017/2018: Bankers without Borders
World Bank
Successful international integration has underpinned most experiences of rapid growth, shared prosperity, and reduced poverty. Perhaps no sector of the economy better illustrates the potential benefits--but also the perils--of deeper integration than banking. International banking may contribute to faster growth in two important ways: first, by making available much needed capital, expertise, and new technologies; and second, by enabling risk-sharing and diversification.  But international banking is not without risks. The global financial crisis vividly demonstrated how international banks can transmit shocks across the globe. The Global Financial Development Report 2017/2018 brings to bear new evidence on the debate on the benefits and costs of international banks, particularly for developing countries. It provides evidence-based policy guidance on a range of issues that developing countries face. Countries that are open to international banking can benefit from global flows of funds, knowledge, and opportunity, but the regulatory challenges are complex and, at times, daunting.
 
A Familiar Face: Violence in the lives of children and adolescents
UNICEF
This report presents the most current data on four specific forms of violence – violent discipline and exposure to domestic abuse during early childhood; violence at school; violent deaths among adolescents; and sexual violence in childhood and adolescence. The statistics reveal that children experience violence across all stages of childhood, in diverse settings, and often at the hands of the trusted individuals with whom they interact daily. The report concludes with specific national actions and strategies that UNICEF has embraced to prevent and respond to violence against children.
 

Why We Should Care About Bad Data

Stefaan Verhulst's picture

At a time of open and big data, data-led and evidence-based policy making has great potential to improve problem solving but will have limited, if not harmful, effects if the underlying components are riddled with bad data.

Why should we care about bad data? What do we mean by bad data? And what are the determining factors contributing to bad data that if understood and addressed could prevent or tackle bad data? These questions were the subject of my short presentation during a recent webinar on  Bad Data: The Hobgoblin of Effective Government, hosted by the American Society for Public Administration and moderated by Richard Greene (Partner, Barrett and Greene Inc.). Other panelists included Ben Ward (Manager, Information Technology Audits Unit, California State Auditor’s Office) and Katherine Barrett (Partner, Barrett and Greene Inc.). The webinar was a follow-up to the excellent Special Issue of Governing on Bad Data written by Richard andKatherine.

Bad data occurs across the Data Value Chain

Bad Data and The Data Value Chain developed by Stefaan Verhulst, The GovLab.

‘Mechanism mapping’ for policy design

Suvojit Chattopadhyay's picture

Photo by Paulien OsseI just finished reading a recent working paper by Martin Williams, titled “External validity and policy adaptation: From impact evaluation to policy design”.

In this paper, Martin tackles the question – how will a policymaker apply evidence available to them to design a policy/programme that will fix a particular problem at hand? He first takes us through the ways in which we think of this currently – primarily by attempts to strengthen the external validity of evaluations – and points out the limitations of these approaches. The central critique is that most of this thinking puts the evaluators/researchers at the centre and tries to devise ways in which the evidence generated by their research can be generalised beyond their specific study samples. This is at odds with what a policymaker (in this paper, a public official in a given country) needs in order to make decisions about how to use evidence from elsewhere to design a policy/programme for their specific context.

The answer, Martin suggests, is ‘mechanism mapping’ – a five-step process where the public official lays out:

Ranking the world’s megacities is a wake-up call for women’s rights

Monique Villa's picture
Cities are becoming monsters. Look at the world’s biggest megacities. 38 million people live in Tokyo! Try to take a taxi and find the house of a friend in Japan’s capital. You need luck. Six billion people will live in cities by 2045.

Cities are the new states; today, many of the world’s 31 megacities have larger populations and economies than individual nations.

For many people, these big urban centers represent the land of opportunity, offering better chances of employment, increased access to education and health services, social mobility.  For many others it’s a daily struggle for survival. In all big cities, the inequality between rich and poor has become gigantic and the divide seems only to grow.

We conducted a poll to investigate one aspect: how do women perceive their life in the world’s megacities? We chose women because they are the real economic accelerators, re-investing 90% of their salary into their families. When a woman thrives, her immediate community thrives with her.

Throughout June and July, we asked 380 gender experts in the 19 countries hosting the world’s biggest megacities to identify in which they thought women fared best and worst. The findings were eye-opening. They returned a truly compelling snapshot of the wider issues faced by women: from sexual violence, to security, to access to reproductive rights, from the risks of harmful cultural practices, to the lack of access to economic opportunities.

London was voted the world’s most female-friendly metropolis, thanks to its provision of free healthcare and access to economic resources such as education and financial services.  Tokyo and Paris came second and third.

But when we look at what concerned women most, the poll offers proper food for thought. In London, for example, experts cited the gender pay gap (a recent study by the Chartered Management Institute and XpertHR found on average, women earned £12,000 less than their male counterparts, while just 26% of director-led roles are filled by women as opposed to 74% by men) as well as extortionate childcare costs, as two of the major issues facing women today.
 

Weekly wire: The global forum

Roxanne Bauer's picture
These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.
 

Doing Business 2018 : Reforming to Create Jobs
World Bank Development Economics
Fifteen in a series of annual reports comparing business regulation in 190 economies, Doing Business 2018 measures aspects of regulation affecting 10 areas of everyday business activity: • Starting a business • Dealing with construction permits • Getting electricity • Registering property • Getting credit • Protecting minority investors • Paying taxes • Trading across borders • Enforcing contracts • Resolving insolvency These areas are included in the distance to frontier score and ease of doing business ranking. Doing Business also measures features of labor market regulation, which is not included in these two measures. The report updates all indicators as of June 1, 2017, ranks economies on their overall “ease of doing business”, and analyzes reforms to business regulation – identifying which economies are strengthening their business environment the most. Doing Business illustrates how reforms in business regulations are being used to analyze economic outcomes for domestic entrepreneurs and for the wider economy. It is a flagship product produced in partnership by the World Bank Group that garners worldwide attention on regulatory barriers to entrepreneurship. More than 137 economies have used the Doing Business indicators to shape reform agendas and monitor improvements on the ground. In addition, the Doing Business data has generated over 2,182 articles in peer-reviewed academic journals since its inception.
 
Navigating the digital future: The disruption of capital projects
McKinsey & Company
Productivity in the construction sector has stagnated for decades, with the average capital project reaching completion 20 months behind schedule and 80 percent over budget. Some overruns result from increased project complexity and scale, but another factor also looms large: all stakeholders in the capital-projects ecosystem—project owners, contractors, and subcontractors—have resisted adopting digital tools and platforms. These include advanced analytics, automation, robotics, 5-D building information modeling (BIM), and online document-management or data-collection systems. Meanwhile, companies in sectors ranging from government to manufacturing have significantly reduced costs and schedules by aggressively pursuing digital solutions.

Campaign Art: What Does Freedom for Girls Mean to You?

Sari P.S Dallal's picture

People, Spaces, Deliberation bloggers present exceptional campaign art from all over the world. These examples are meant to inspire.

October 11 has been marked as the International Day of the Girl by the United Nations since 2012. The aims are to highlight and address the needs and challenges girls face, while promoting girls' empowerment and the fulfillment of their human rights.

For this year’s Day of the Girl, the #FreedomForGirls campaign was launched in partnership between Project Everyone, UNICEF, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This campaign sheds further light on the United Nations’ Global Goals, which included a commitment to achieve gender equality and empowering all women and girls by 2030. The UN along with its agencies and programs, believe that none of the 17 goals can be realized without empowering the largest generation of adolescent girls the world has ever seen.

Freedom - International Day of the Girl