March 28, 2024

It’s the Economy: Is It Nuts to Give to the Poor Without Strings Attached?

A month earlier, Omondi told me, a couple of strangers showed up in his village, and explained that they worked for a charity, GiveDirectly, that gave money to poor people without any preconditions. They had chosen this area, they said, because it was among the most impoverished they could find — most people grew vegetables on small plots, lived in dirt-floored houses and worked sporadically at informal jobs. The poorest people in the village, the strangers explained, would be eligible to receive $1,000, about a year’s income for a family, spread over two payments. Not surprisingly, many villagers were incredulous. Some thought a politician was trying to buy their votes; others presumed it was some sort of trick. “My friends didn’t believe it at all,” Omondi said. “They told me, ‘They will come for it one day.’ ”

A charity that gives away money, as opposed to, say, offering agricultural training or medicine, does seem a bit unusual. That’s partly because governments and philanthropists have emphasized solving long-term economic problems rather than urgent needs. But in the past decade it has become increasingly common to give money right to the very poor. After Mexico’s economic crisis in the mid-1990s, Santiago Levy, a government economist, proposed getting rid of subsidies for milk, tortillas and other staples, and replacing them with a program that just gave money to the very poor, as long as they sent their children to school and took them for regular health checkups.

Cabinet ministers worried that parents might use the money to buy alcohol and cigarettes rather than milk and tortillas, and that sending cash might lead to a rise in domestic violence as families fought over what to do with the money. So Levy commissioned studies that compared spending habits between the towns that received money and similar villages that didn’t. The results were promising; researchers found that children in the cash program were more likely to stay in school, families were less likely to get sick and people ate a more healthful diet. Recipients also didn’t tend to blow the money on booze or cigarettes, and many even invested a chunk of what they received. Today, more than six million Mexican families get cash transfers.

Dozens of countries imitated Mexico’s example and their results inspired the founders of GiveDirectly, a handful of graduate students at Harvard and M.I.T., who were studying the economics of various developing countries. They chose to situate the charity in Kenya because it was a poor country with a well-developed system for sending money to anyone with a cheap cellphone. But they also planned to differentiate their charity; whereas most of the government programs give people money for as long as they qualify, GiveDirectly offers people a one-time grant, spread over the course of several months, and without any requirements.

“I’m hopeful about GiveDirectly’s model, but what they’re doing is very different from what some of the research has suggested is really working,” Chris Blattman, an economist who teaches at Columbia and who studies cash transfers, told me. “They’re just giving away money with no strings. It’s just manna falling onto your mobile phone.” An outside group is studying GiveDirectly’s impact; final results are expected later this year.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/is-it-nuts-to-give-to-the-poor-without-strings-attached.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

BBC Chairman Says Network Needs Radical Overhaul

“Does the BBC need a thorough structural overhaul? Of course it does,” the chairman of the BBC Trust, Chris Patten, said on “The Andrew Marr Show,” the BBC’s flagship Sunday morning talk show, after the resignation of the broadcaster’s chief executive.

But although Mr. Patten has said that the BBC’s handling of the scandal was marked by “unacceptably shoddy journalism,” he pushed back on the Marr show against suggestions that the crisis could lead to a dismantling of the BBC as it now exists, with 23,000 employees, a $6 billion annual budget and a dominant role in British broadcasting.

Mr. Patten, 68, a former Conservative cabinet minister who gained a reputation for feisty independence when he was Britain’s last colonial governor in Hong Kong, said critics of the BBC should not lose sight of its reputation at home and abroad for trustworthy journalism.

“The BBC is and has been hugely respected around the world,” he said. “But we have to earn that. If the BBC loses that, then it is over.”

Public confidence in the broadcaster has slumped further in opinion polls in the wake of its coverage of a scandal involving allegations of abuses by a senior politician at a children’s home in Wales in the 1970s and ’80s. But the British public would not support breaking up the BBC, Mr. Patten said, adding, “The BBC is one of the things that has come to define and reflect Britishness, and we shouldn’t lose that.”

Barely 12 hours earlier, Mr. Patten stood outside the BBC’s new billion-dollar London headquarters with George Entwistle, the departing director general, as Mr. Entwistle announced his resignation, after only eight weeks in the post, to atone for his failings in dealing with what he called “the exceptional events of the past few weeks.”

Mr. Entwistle’s resignation was prompted by outrage over a Nov. 2 report on “Newsnight,” a current affairs program, that wrongly implicated a former Conservative Party politician in the scandal. Responding to reports that the “Newsnight” segment was broadcast without some basic fact-checking that would have exculpated the 70-year-old retired politician it implicated, Alistair McAlpine, Mr. Entwistle said it reflected “unacceptable journalistic standards” and never should have been broadcast.

That episode, which Mr. McAlpine’s lawyers have said would be the subject of a defamation lawsuit, compounded the problems facing the network since revelations last month about a longtime BBC television host, Jimmy Savile, who died at 84 in 2011. Mr. Savile was suspected of having sexually abused as many as 300 young people over decades in the BBC’s studios and in children’s homes and hospitals where he gained ready access as a campaigner for children’s charities.

The BBC has been accused of covering up the Savile matter by canceling a “Newsnight” report on the accusations against him last December and going ahead with several Christmas specials that paid tribute to Mr. Savile.

The producer of “Newsnight” told his staff members that the Savile investigation was not adequately substantiated by their reporting, but at least one “Newsnight” staff member noted that the producer said that he had come under pressure on the issue from BBC managers. At that time, Mr. Entwistle was in charge of all the BBC’s television productions and was seeking to succeed Mark Thompson, who stepped down in September after eight years as director general. Mr. Entwistle has said that he was not informed beforehand of the nature of the “Newsnight” investigation or the reasons for its cancellation.

On Monday, Mr. Thompson will begin his new post as president and chief executive of The New York Times Company. He has said he knew nothing beforehand about the “Newsnight” investigation of Mr. Savile or the decision to scrap it — not even that it involved allegations of pedophilia — and that he had never met Mr. Savile. But Mr. Thompson has said that he is willing to answer any questions put to him by a parliamentary inquiry or a raft of other investigations now under way.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/world/europe/bbc-shaken-by-bungled-report-needs-radical-overhaul-its-chairman-says.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

IHT Rendezvous: Ask About the Greek Elections

Greeks will return to the polls on Sunday, June 17, amid growing doubts about the euro’s viability in its current form, worries that Greece won’t be able pay its bills next month, and rising speculation about how the country would go about leaving the euro and starting to print its own currency.

As one politician put it in a television debate between extreme right and left politicians that dissolved into a physical altercation on Thursday, Greece is facing more than an economic crisis, it is facing “a crisis of democracy.” (Ilias Kasidiaris of the far-right Golden Dawn party, who threw water at and slapped his opponents is reportedly being sought by police.)

Last month’s election brought Mr. Kasidiaris and other extreme politicians into Parliament, but ended in a stalemate when no party was able to form a government. Politicians on the extremes who opposed the terms of Greece’s €130 bailout won more votes than the center-right and center-left parties that have dominated Greek politics for decades and had back the deal.

As the world waits to see how Greek votes, in an election that has been called a referendum on Greece remaining in the euro, what do you want to know about Greece and the vote?

Leave your questions in the comments area below and Niki Kitsantonis will answer them in a future post on Rendezvous.

Article source: http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/07/ask-about-the-greek-elections/?partner=rss&emc=rss