6. POTENCIAL EN ESPAÑA Y APLICACIONES TIPO EN EL ÁMBITO DE LAS TECNOLOGÍAS
6.1 DATOS PREVIOS
6.1.6 Tarifas de fuentes energéticas convencionales
The history of the lastfive decades teaches that development success is possible. Many countries have doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled their average incomes over the last half century. The percentage of the developing world’s population living on less than $1.25 per day fell from 52.2 percent in 1981 to 22.4 percent in 2008 (World Bank, 2012). Life expectancy in the developing world has risen from 40 to 65 years, and the share of newborns surviving to age 5 years has doubled. Besley and Cord (2007) document especially encouraging episodes of growth accom- panied by significant poverty reduction, including the period of the 1960s through the mid-1990s in Indonesia and the 1990s in Vietnam.
We know not only that some countries have experienced episodes of successful develop- ment, but also that many specific policies of governments and other development actors have proved successful. Significant advances in health and life expectancy have arisen out of pur- poseful efforts to eradicate smallpox and polio, promote the use of oral rehydration therapy for children with diarrheal disease, control river blindness, and prevent HIV transmission, as well as efforts to expand access to clean drinking water and sanitation. In many countries where fewer than half the children attended primary school in the 1960s, efforts to draw more children into school have achieved nearly universal primary enrollment. Rural road construction has succeeded in expanding markets, raising incomes, and improving access to services (Khandker et al., 2009). Agricultural research and extension have helped farmers in some regions double or triple crop yields and have prevented new insect infestations and crop diseases from devastating staple food crops (Gabre-Madhin and Haggblade, 2004).
Unfortunately, history also teaches that development success is not guaranteed. Average incomes in some countries have risen little, and development policies have failed in many ways.
In some of the most disturbing cases, program funds have been diverted into the pockets of corrupt bureaucrats. Reinikka and Svensson (2004) estimate that prior to major governance reforms in Uganda, only 13 percent of central government transfers to schools in fact reached the schools, the rest being captured by government officials and politicians.
Even when funds are not pocketed, they sometimes achieve little good as a result of poor policy design or inadequate implementation. Sometimes the poor are excluded from water, power, education, health, or agricultural extension services because they cannot afford connection fees or because they live in remote villages beyond the reach of major programs. Even when the poor have access to services, the quality is often very low. For example, high rates of absenteeism among teachers in developing countries can shutter schools and reduce class time for students (Chaudhury et al., 2006), and when teachers do show up, inadequate training, poor facilities, and lack of textbooks often mean that children learn little.
Box 1.2 Resources for Development Efforts
Fully quantifying all of the resources (e.g., food, cement, time, talent, computers) committed to development work each year is an impossible task, but we may begin to understand the orders of magnitude involved by quantifying the money committed to this work by key actors.One of the highest-profile sources of funds for development work is official development assistance (or foreign aid) from developed countries. The most comprehensive information regarding such assistance is collected by the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and is available at www.oecd.org/dac (see“Aid Statistics”). According to DAC statistics, in 2011 the 24 member countries of the DAC sent $94 billion through official bilateral channels. Non-DAC countries (primarily in Eastern Europe and the Middle East) accounted for another $8 billion. Donor nations also contributed another $34 billion to multilateral agencies like the World Bank. Altogether, this sums to $136 billion per year in external funding for poverty reduction and development in the developing world.
Although $136 billion is certainly a large sum of money, it would have to be stretched very thin to reach all 2.5 billion people living on less than $2 per day around the world. If it could be distributed directly to these people without having to spend any of the resources on identifying the poor or administering the programs (which we will discover in later chapters are costly and difficult tasks), ongoing funding at this level would increase their incomes by about 15 cents per day. An extra 15 cents would mean noticeable improvement for someone living on $2 a day or less, but it would fall far short of raising living standards to levels considered acceptable in developed countries.
Much poverty reduction and development work seeks not merely to prop up incomes with ongoing transfers but instead to create assets that raise incomes in longer-lasting ways. Thus it is useful to consider what would happen if all foreign aid could be invested in assets whose returns are distributed to the poor. If the $136 billion per year were invested in assets producing 10 percent per year dividends forever, and if the dividends could be costlessly and evenly distributed to the poor, then each year of funding at this level would add 1.5 cents per day to incomes on a permanent basis. Over several decades the cumulative effect might raise incomes by 50 cents per day. Though more substantial and more permanent than the effects associated with simply distrib- uting the cash, such improvements are still rather modest. We must conclude that current foreign aidflows, although of great value, remain small in the face of great challenges.
Though official foreign assistance receives a great deal of attention in international discussions of development, it is by no means the only source of development funds. International NGOs channel substantial volumes of private donations from citizens of developed countries. In its annualIndex of Global Philanthropy and Remittances, the Hudson Institute (2012) estimates that private philanthropyflows to development efforts from the United States and other OECD countries total $56 billion.
More important, developing country governments themselves raise revenues through taxation that may be put to work in a variety of activities, including poverty reduction and development efforts. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that this is a substantially larger source of funding for development efforts than foreign aid. Using data on 70 developing countries for which the relevant infor- mation is available for 2009 in the World Development Indicators Online database, wefind that government revenue (excluding foreign aid) ranges from 9 to 39 percent as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), with a GDP-weighted average of approximately 18 percent. If we apply this 18 percent to the entire GDP of the low- and middle-income countries, we estimate that government revenue in the developing countries is on the order of $2.5 trillion. Large fractions of this revenue are required for government activities that we probably would not classify as developmental (including military expenditures and government subsidies that primarily benefit the wealthy). Indeed, the fact that high-income countries collect an average of 24 percent of their higher GDPs in government revenue suggests that there are many things for governments to spend money on even outside of pressing poverty-reduction and development goals. Even if only one third of developing country government revenue is devoted to poverty-reduc- tion and development purposes, however, this provides another $800 billion per year.
Casting the net more broadly, we might include in our accounts some spending by private enterprises that, though pursuing profits, also attempt to direct their energies in socially responsible ways, by pro- viding good jobs, cheaper goods and services, or better technologies for low-income households. Even including these efforts, however, we would conclude that whereas the resources available for poverty reduction and development are sizeable enough to make a real differ- ence, they are not in surplus. Good stewardship over these scarce resources is vital.
Some programs create beneficial impacts in the short run, but their impacts fade away as tractors become idle for lack of spare parts, new irrigation systems are sabotaged as a result of conflict over the distribution of water, or roads crumble for lack of maintenance. For dismaying but insightful litanies of development failures, see Easterly (2001) and Easterly (2006).
Development policy’s blemished track record is particularly troubling, because develop- ment efforts cost money, and the funds available for such work remain profoundly limited in the face of vast needs. Box 1.2 helps readers grasp some of the magnitudes involved. To make the most of scarce resources, development actors must search for ways to avoid policy failure and increase the rate of policy success.
To make the most of scarce resources, policymakers must ensure not only that each policy is well designed and implemented but also that the scarce resources are allocated carefully across policies of different types. Recall that the goal in development is widely shared improvement in well-being. Specific policies improve the welfare of specific groups of people, while leaving other groups largely untouched and imposing costs on yet other groups. For example, agricultural research and extension efforts to increase corn yields can raise corn farmers’ incomes substan- tially and offer modest benefits to consumers who enjoy lower food prices, while reducing the incomes of wheat farmers (whose yields are unchanged but who might suffer falling crop prices). To achieve widespread improvements in well-being, policymakers must create packages of policies that together benefit all groups. This requires knowledge of how the distribution of impacts differs across policies of different types and designs.
Finally, making the most of the scarce resources available to governments and other development actors often means refraining from spending resources on activities that private individuals, firms, and communities would undertake even in the absence of intervention. To achieve greater success in complementing and encouraging private sector development activities, rather than merely duplicating or substituting for private sector accomplishments, policymakers require improved understanding of the decisions, markets and institutions that make up the socioeconomic system.
Making the most of scarce resources thus calls for good policy analysis, in which rigorous thinking and empirical research are employed in identifying needs, selecting policy approaches, making detailed policy design choices, monitoring program implementation, and evaluating policy impacts. The analytical framework and tools that economists bring to the study of development have many valuable uses in development policy analysis. More specifically, we will see that:
Economic analysis offers valuable guidance forfive important activities: (1) identifying the types of public sector intervention most likely to be complementary to the developmental activities of the private sector; (2) examining the differentiated and multidimensional impacts of specific policies; (3) examining how those impacts depend on details of design and implementation; (4) identifying ways to reduce corruption and improve policy implementation; and (5) learning from ongoing research, experimentation, monitoring, and evaluation.
Thefirst activity helps avoid spending public resources on activities that the private sector is willing and able to undertake. The second and third help to identify combinations of policies that yield improvements in well-being for many groups and to inform choices regarding the details of policy design, while the fourth activity contributes to better policy implementation. The fifth activity is vital because our understanding of socioeconomic systems and development remains highly imperfect. Even when policymakers make the best possible use of all current knowledge as they select, design, and implement policies, they sometimes fail simply because the intelligent guesses they made about how the world works were incorrect. Monitoring and evaluation allow policymakers to catch mistakes and prevent continued waste of resources. More important, research, experimentation, monitoring, and evaluation add to knowledge and improve future policy choices.