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SAGA
B16 MVR Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
(607) 255-8931
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saga@cornell.edu

SAGA PROGRESS REPORT (12/05-12/06) &
UPCOMING WORKPLAN (11/06-11/07)


IV. POLICY OUTREACH

The SAGA team believes that there are many channels through which high quality policy oriented research can flow into policy dialogue and have policy impact. Although we can cite examples of direct input to policy makers and the policy process, we believe that our greatest contribution to policy outreach is an indirect one, fostering a culture of evidence-based policy making in Africa.

IV.1. SAGA Website

We have observed a steady growth in web hits to the SAGA website in the past year. In the period January-October, 2006, the SAGA website registered 455,031 hits. In this same period, there were 122,985 downloads of SAGA publications (PDF files). This growth is evident when comparing these numbers to the same period for previous years: for January-October 2004, there were a total number of hits of 62,116, increasing nearly fourfold to 269,260 hits for the same period of 2005, and then growing by nearly 70% to the 2006 level. The number of downloads of SAGA publications increased nearly threefold for the same ten-month period of 2004 (24,339) as compared to 2005 (65,936), then nearly doubling to the current level of downloads. The average number of hits/day for 2004 was 276, increasing to 876 per day in 2005, and in the first ten months of 2006, the average was 1499 hits per day. See Appendix VII for a summary of website statistics for 2006.

IV.2. Conferences, Workshops and Related Publications

We are also actively engaged in organizing and hosting policy-oriented conferences and workshops. Examples include:

From Ghana
  • Over the past twelve months, editing has been completed on a special issue of the African Development Review, edited by Ernest Aryeetey, Ravi Kanbur and John Page, “Shared Growth in Africa,” emerging from the Shared Growth conference held in Accra. The issue was published December 2006. See http://www.blackwellsynergy.com/toc/afdr/18/3

  • The papers in this special issue use a range of methodologies: institutional analysis, qualitative surveys and interviews, inequality and poverty decomposition techniques, econometric analysis of enterprise and household surveys, econometric time series analysis of sectoral and macroeconomic data, and simulation analysis of computable models. Between them, they show the vitality of current research on growth and poverty reduction in Africa by scholars in Africa and outside. They also show that shared growth can be analyzed rigorously, and that analysis can be directed towards key policy issues.
From Kenya
  • Over the course of the past project year, we worked closely with a subset of SAGA collaborators to substantially revise papers presented at the February 2005 policy workshop held in Nairobi for publication in an edited volume entitled Decentralization And The Social Economics of Development: Lessons From Kenya, co-edited by Christopher B. Barrett, Andrew G. Mude and John M. Omiti. We have recruited a couple of other closely related papers by Kenyan authors to help fill in blanks and flesh out key themes. Together, the chapters illuminate different aspects of the process, potential and pitfalls of decentralization in an attempt to offer a broad understanding of the key issues as well as the challenges and opportunities that must be considered for the design of a coherent, inclusive and effective program of decentralization to advance rural development objectives.

    The volume’s publisher, CABI, has previously published two edited volumes by Barrett, and has outstanding distribution networks in Africa (from a regional office in Nairobi). The expectation is to have the final publication contract agreed and the full, final manuscript delivered to the publisher by the end of December 2006, and the published volume in circulation by September 2007.

  • SAGA co-hosted a major policy research conference, on “Pastoralism and Poverty Reduction in East Africa,” June 27-28, 2006, in Nairobi. It was co-organized by the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, co-sponsored by Kenya’s Office of the President’s Arid Lands Resources Management Program (ALRMP) and the World Bank. (See http://www.saga.cornell.edu/saga/ilri0606/pastconf.html). A copy of the conference agenda and a participants list are included in Appendix VIII. The conference was extremely successful, drawing mid-level and senior policymakers from all countries in the region, all the major donor organizations operation in east Africa, and many NGOs, as well as researchers and representatives of pastoralist communities. The event drew local and international (e.g., People’s Daily Online, China) press attention and extremely favorable comments by participants, who were twice as many as expected. We produced a set of policy briefs that summarized each of the papers in nontechnical terms for lay readers (available online at http://www.ilri.org/research/ContentDetail.asp?SID=2&CID=516&CCID=3, along with complete papers). Revision of papers, commissioning of supplementary papers, and editing of SAGA-Kenya papers into the volume entitled Decentralization and the Social Economics of Development: Lessons from Rural Kenya, co-edited by Christopher B. Barrett, Andrew G. Mude and John M. Omiti.
From South Africa
  • The volume Poverty and Policy in Post Apartheid South Africa, edited by Haroon Bhorat and Ravi Kanbur, was published in September 2006:
    http://www.hsrcpress.ac.za/full_title_info.asp?id=2178.

    The volume finds that five clear trends have emerged in the analysis of welfare shifts in the post-apartheid period. These are firstly, an increase in both absolute and relative income poverty, when using the standard measures of poverty. Secondly, there has been an increase in income inequality, which is notably being catalyzed by a rise in the share of within-group inequality. Thirdly, despite some employment growth, the rapid expansion of the labor force has resulted in increased unemployment rates irrespective of the definition used. Fourthly, a large and swift fiscal resource shift has engendered widened access to assets and basic services to poor households. These aggregate trends are fairly consistent across race and gender with the shifts amongst the African population predictably influencing many of the results. One important, relatively new dimension, to emerge from the above broad trends, has been the declining share of rural poverty as a consequence of increased migration and urbanization. Fifthly and finally, these changes in poverty and well-being in the post-1994 period have occurred within, and have influenced and had been influenced by, an environment of tepid economic growth rates.

    The constraints on growth identified above, speak to the menu of policy options available to government. While ensuring that a conducive environment to realize higher growth is critical, this should not marginalize the issues of income vulnerability. In this context, it is the nature of growth, together with growth itself, that is crucial, and the results on the dissipating impact of inequality on economic growth is a key result. Given South Africa's severe income vulnerability, the growth-poverty-inequality nexus retains a particular relevance for the future.

  • In the past 12 months work has also gone on to produce a special issue of the Journal of African Economies, based on papers selected from presentations at the DPRU/TIPS/Cornell conference in Cape Town. The special issue, “Poverty, Trade and Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa,” edited by Haroon Bhorat, Stephen Hanival and Ravi Kanbur, came out in December 2006. (See http://jae.oxfordjournals.org/content/vol15/issue4/index.dtl).

    The current global environment poses both a threat and an opportunity for Africa. Taking advantage of the openings afforded by trade and investment, while managing the risks and focusing on benefits for the poorest, is the central African challenge in economic policy making. The policies needed to manage this challenge will be both macro and micro in nature and, especially, the macro-micro linkage will be crucial. The past and current disappointments with macro-level policies are gradually being understood by analysts in terms of insufficient linkage to the micro-level realities of African economy and society. At the same time, there is a realization that micro-level policies are bound to fail if implemented in an unstable macro- or global-level environment.

    The eight papers in this special issue between them cover poverty, growth and trade. The first four papers focus on growth and its impact on poverty. The second set of four papers covers trade and its impact on efficiency, growth, and labor markets. The opening paper constitutes a significant statement by the current Chief Economist for Africa at the World Bank. In his paper, “Strategies for Pro-Poor Growth: Pro-Poor, Pro-Growth or Both?,” John Page puts forward his concept of shared growth, which he defines as combining a focus on using all of the public policy means available to create and sustain growth, with actions in education, health, rural development, and micro and small enterprise development, for example, designed to equip the poor to participate in and benefit from growth. In particular, he emphasizes three key areas of public policy for advancing growth managing natural resource revenues, pushing agricultural exports, and deepening regional integration, the last two of which link up with the trade theme of this special issue.

    The overall conclusion drawn from the eight papers in the special issue, apart from the obvious vitality of macro- and micro-economic research on Africa, is the importance of understanding and appreciating the huge diversity of Africa, and the fact that countryspecific, sector-specific, and policy-specific analysis is needed in order to understand the complex relationships between poverty, growth, and trade in the region.

Next steps

SAGA will be co-hosting a conference on “Bottom-Up Interventions and Economic Growth in Africa,” in Nairobi in May 2007. This conference is motivated by the observation that while macro level policy reforms in Africa has addressed many of the economic distortions, its payoff in terms of growth and poverty reduction has been disappointing, to say the least. One reason for this may be that Africa is faced with many constraints to growth at the micro and meso levels. If this is the case, then addressing these constraints along with macro level reforms is likely to benefit poverty reduction and growth directly. Addressing these constraints, especially those faced by the poor, will improve the well being of the poor and also have positive feedback effects on the well being of the non-poor and growth generally. The objective of this conference, therefore, is to explore the feedback effects of a range of specific bottom up interventions on growth in general. The interventions considered might include those in health, education, community development, safety nets, and gender equity, among others. A key feature of these interventions is that they operate in the first instance at the micro and meso levels, but they also have macro level consequences for economic growth. The conference will discuss theoretical, empirical, and policy oriented papers that investigate these feedback effects in rigorous manner.


IV.3. Direct Engagement of Policy Makers

A third pillar of our outreach efforts to affect policy is a variety of more targeted efforts at engaging in policy-makers directly dialogue. Examples include:

From South Africa
  • Government officials have been active participants in and uses of a wide range of SAGA activities and output. This has included various dissemination conferences and synthesis publications. In his foreword to the 2006 SAGA book, Poverty and Policy in Post Apartheid South Africa, edited by Haroon Bhorat and Ravi Kanbur, Alan Hirsch, Chief Director for Economics in the Presidency, says “This volume assembles twelve essays by top researchers who ask how well South Africa has addressed these challenges...What is key is that the quality of the research underlying the essays is sound. [The Editors] have ensured that the quality of evidence presented is such that readers will learn a great deal about the most important South African challenges, and begin to form their own opinions.”

  • In addition, we have worked hard to involve key international institutions that are critical to the current policy dialogue in our work. John Page, the Chief Economist for the Africa region, for example, puts forward his concept of shared growth for South Africa in the special SAGA sponsored issue, “Poverty, Trade and Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa,” edited by Haroon Bhorat, Stephen Hanival and Ravi Kanbur, that came out in December 2006. (See http://jae.oxfordjournals.org/content/vol15/issue4/index.dtl). He defines it as combining a focus on using all of the public policy means available to create and sustain growth, with actions in education, health, rural development, and micro and small enterprise development, for example, designed to equip the poor to participate in and benefit from growth. In particular, he emphasizes three key areas of public policy for advancing growth, managing natural resource revenues, pushing agricultural exports, and deepening regional integration, the last two of which link up with the trade theme of this special issue.
From Madagascar

SAGA has been working with the DGs INSTAT on generating statistics for the Prime Minister’s office that accurately capture changes in living conditions in Madagascar over the past five years, with a particular focus on the evolution of infant and child mortality, and the relative success of regional development programs.


From Kenya

The June policy conference on “Pastoralism and Poverty Reduction in East Africa,” was organized by the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, co-sponsored by Kenya’s Office of the President’s Arid Lands Resources Management Program (ALRMP), and the World Bank. It included a range of senior and mid-ranking policymakers from Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Regular contact has ensued with some of them, especially the Kenyan team, which has expressed considerable interest in drawing out the practical applications of some of the findings reported at the conference.


From Uganda

In response to the Ministry of Finance, Planning, and Economic Development’s (MOFPED) Poverty Research Guide, which indicates areas of research that the Ministry views as critical for Uganda’s Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP), SAGA has been sponsoring and helping organize a research competition to provide input into government’s poverty alleviation strategy.


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