Fresh water for the residents of the Majengo slums on Kenya's coast has come on tap as part of a UN-Habitat rehabilitation project. Credit: UN-Habitat/Kirsten Milhahn

By Branko Milanović
NEW YORK, Jun 15 2021 (IPS)

Is Africa marginalised in contemporary economics and politics, and in contemporary economic and political research?

Impressions gathered over the years and a bit of evidence (much more could be assembled) indicate that it is. I would distinguish three types of marginalisation: objective, objectified and subjective marginalisation.

Caused by poverty

Africa is not at the forefront of the new economic and social issues which arise in the advanced economies. Nor does it have the funds to maintain numerous intellectuals who create ‘theories’ and an ‘intellectual climate’. Objectively, both problems are caused by poverty.

It is not by accident that economics developed in north-western Europe. Modern capitalism, financial crises, problems of displacement of labour by capital, the use of fiscal and monetary policy to wage wars and so on were first encountered there.

This continues to the present day — albeit Modern Monetary Theory, outsourcing, artificial intelligence and the like have taken the place of Adam Smith’s discussion of the ‘invisible hand’ or David Ricardo’s disquisition on the role of machinery. None of these cutting-edge issues is present in less-developed countries.

Poor countries are thus attractive as a field of research — but nothing more.

Poorer countries also lack resources to maintain the intellectual class which could promote ‘their’ (domestic) issues and they thus become mere consumers of the ideas produced in the rich countries.

Branko Milanović

At times it is reversed — as when such topics as industrialisation, central planning, land reform, saving and accumulation came to play an important role in economics. But this was exceptional and we are back to the ‘normal’ division of intellectual labour between rich and poor countries.

Ethical concerns

By objectified marginalisation I mean that, while Africa does not autonomously generate topics to be studied, it is often used as a ‘research field’ for themes defined by the north to be examined.

These topics may or may not however have much to do with African countries and may or may not have any real effect on the ground in Africa.

Consider randomised controlled trials. RCTs have long been plagued by ethical concerns (as well as questionable replicability). These arise because poorer countries and poor people implicated in them do not have much agency — or often even full understanding of what is happening and what they are supposed to do.

They are unable to shape projects or participate meaningfully.

Moreover, poor people’s participation is cheap since, when compensated, the amounts received are a fraction of what would need to be paid in rich countries for similar participation (assuming that such projects would ethically pass muster there).

Poor countries are thus attractive as a field of research — but nothing more.

Last year a project in Kenya randomly turned off water to households in default on their fees — to find out how they would react and at what point lack of water would force them to pay the municipality.

One could not imagine a similar project in which, say, households in New York or Paris, late in the payment of some city dues, would be treated in the same manner.

I have seen how foreign-funded non-governmental organisations (NGOs) used to determine, and still frequently do, the research agenda in eastern Europe.

Often such projects have very little domestic ownership — even if on paper it might appear different. Northern consultants (who need such projects to write scientific papers or justify their fees) have huge power over local academics and communities.

They hold the purse strings: if one academic refuses to participate, another will easily be found.

This does not necessitate outright corruption, but incentives (fees, travel, co-authorship) are flashed in front of local counterparts. The economist Angus Deaton recently declared: ‘Using poor people to build a professional CV should not be accepted.’

Self-induced

These problems are not unique to Africa — they are experienced by all less-developed countries. I have seen how foreign-funded non-governmental organisations used to determine, and still frequently do, the research agenda in eastern Europe — until some of these countries became richer, their academic community stronger and more self-confident.

But African countries have contributed to their marginalisation by not having developed stronger academic and political counterparts. Such subjective marginalisation is self-induced.

For instance, the reaction in 1998 of the academic community and policy-makers in South Korea to an austerity programme imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) highlighted the lack of reaction of intellectual communities in many African countries when exposed to even tougher IMF programmes.

South Korean academics went on the offensive, using extensive connections with their counterparts in the United States, and the west generally, to push back on IMF proposals. Outside of South Africa, I am not aware of anything similar in over half a century of African countries’ relations with the IMF.

If one puts the three causes of marginalisation together, they clearly flow from structural impotence to potential influence.

The self-marginalisation is even more puzzling because it cannot be put down to lack of knowledge of the world’s dominant language. The elites in all African countries are perfectly fluent in English and French — many in both.

By contrast, many eastern Europeans and some Asians are unfamiliar with English, which cuts them off from the most up-to-date research — even from mundane knowledge of whom to contact and how.

Early successes

If one puts the three causes of marginalisation together, they clearly flow from structural impotence to potential influence. There is nothing to be done about ‘objective’ marginalisation short of Africa growing faster, getting richer and thus provoking more interest — success always leads to interest — and in the process becoming financially able to shape the agenda.

This is what China has done. ‘Objectified’ marginalisation would similarly largely take care of itself with greater wealth, even if it might take longer to overturn.

It is in the subjective marginalisation where governments could reap some early successes: it requires spending a higher share of gross domestic product on research, creating much better universities and think tanks, and attracting foreign researchers who, if they were to live longer in African countries (not just visit for a fortnight), would no longer see African issues as a good way to publish a paper but would fully participate in academic life.

In addition, it requires building much stronger ties between the domestic research community and government. Then African countries could take more initiative and exercise more ownership when it comes to policy advice proffered from the global north.

This article is a joint publication by Social Europe and IPS-Journal.

Branko Milanović is a visiting professor at the City University of New York. Prior to that, he was, among other things, senior economist of the research department at the World Bank. For his book Global Inequality. A New Approach for the Age of Globalization he won the Hans-Matthöfer-Prize awarded by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Most recently he published Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World.

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Rio de Janeiro’s iconic Christ the Redeemer was illuminated in the names of victims lost to COVID-19 in an online ceremony called “For Every Life” that paid tribute to the 60,000 victims lost in Brazil and 500,000 lost worldwide. About 87,000 Brazilians heard messages of hope and solidarity combined with music and prayer in a live broadcast over social media. It recognized the losses of families and selfless work of healthcare workers and others helping the country through the pandemic. July 2020. Credit: UNIC Rio

By Branko Milanović
NEW YORK, Dec 11 2020 (IPS)

The current pandemic is probably the first global event in the history of the human race. By ‘global’ I mean it has affected almost everybody, regardless of country of residence or social class.

If, in a couple of years — when hopefully it is over and we are alive — we meet friends from any corner of the world, we shall all have the same stories to share: fear, tedium, isolation, lost jobs and wages, lockdowns, government restrictions and face masks. No other event comes close.

Wars, even world wars, were limited: people in Switzerland, let alone in New Zealand, did not have meaningful war stories to share with those from Poland, Yugoslavia, Germany or Japan. And in the past 75 years wars were local.

Many young people might have protested against the Vietnam war but most experienced none of its effects. People were outraged at the siege of Sarajevo, bombardment of Gaza or Iraq ‘shock and awe’.

But for 99.9 per cent of mankind that outrage did not change their daily routine one bit: they still got up early to go to school or work, laughed with colleagues, maybe went out for a drink and ended up at a karaoke bar. They had no stories to share with the residents of Sarajevo, Gaza or Baghdad — nothing in common.

Even football — and its fanatical supporters tell themselves world events mimic football — cannot compete. The last World Cup final was watched by 1.1 billion people, about one out of every six people in the world. There were still many who ignored its existence and could not care less which team won or lost.

Into the history books

Covid-19 will enter the history books as the first truly global event also thanks to our technological development: not only are we able to communicate across the globe but we can follow, in real time, what is happening practically everywhere.

Since infection, disease and possible incapacitation and death threaten all of us, even people who otherwise have not had much interest in news check their smartphones for updates on deaths, infection rates, vaccines or new therapies.

Covid-19 seems itself to have been designed for that role. Although its deadliness increases with age, its effects are sufficiently uncertain that even much younger and healthier populations are not left entirely carefree. Had Covid-19 been less random, it would have been less feared.

This global event is however also an odd event. It requires that people do not interact physically with each other. It thus brings out another, new dimension. Our first global event will have been the one where we never met face-to-face in real time with other people who lived through it.

Covid-19 probably made us leapfrog about a decade in realising the possibilities of decoupling work from physical presence in the workplace.

On reflection, however, this makes perfect sense. To be global, the event has to be experienced more or less equally by everyone at the same time. Limited by physical contact or presence, however, we cannot reach many people, simply because there is no possibility for each of us to meet thousands, still less hundreds of thousands, of others.

So, the first global human event, ironically, had to be an event devoid of human contact and physical touch — it had to be experienced virtually.

This is also why this pandemic is different from that of a century ago. Information could not then be easily transmitted nor shared. By the time people in India were dying of Spanish flu, Europe was recovering and was ignorant of, or indifferent to, deaths in India. But India too hardly heard of the deaths in Europe until the pandemic invaded it.

Globalising labour

What will remain, other than people’s reminiscences, of this global event? There are only a few things that we can say with any certainty.

The pandemic will have accelerated globalisation in the second factor of production—labour. (The first factor, capital, is already globalised, thanks to the opening of national capital accounts and the technical ability to move vast amounts of money around the world and to build factories and offices anywhere.)

Covid-19 probably made us leapfrog about a decade in realising the possibilities of decoupling work from physical presence in the workplace. Although in many activities we may, after the pandemic is over, go back to sharing physical offices, working in factory halls and so on, in many others we shall not.

This will not have an effect only on people working from home—the change will be much more profound. A global labour market will come into existence without the need for migration.

In some segments of the world economy (such as call centres or software design), that market already exists. But it will become much more common. The pandemic will be a giant leap forward for ‘mobility’ of labour — a peculiar mobility, that is, where individual workers will stay put at their places of residence but work in ‘offices’ or ‘factories’ miles away.

People who worry that globalisation might go backwards will be surprised. Due to the trade war between the United States and China, global value chains and trade might suffer a temporary setback. But in terms of labour mobility or, more exactly, labour competition — which is extraordinarily important — it will move forward.

Source: This article is a joint publication by Social Europe and International Politics and Society (IPS)-Journal published by the International Political Analysis Unit of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Hiroshimastrasse 28, D-10785 Berlin

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