Incentives for development

After 43 years and $568 billion (in 2003 dollars) in foreign aid to the continent, Africa remains trapped in economic stagnation. Moreover, after $568 billion, donor officials apparently still have not gotten around to furnishing those 12-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. With all the political and popular support for such ambitious programs, why then do comprehensive packages almost always fail to accomplish much good...?....

The biggest problem is that the rich people paying the bills do not share the same goals as the poor people they are trying to help. The wealthy have weak incentives to get the right amount of the right thing to those who need it; the poor are in no position to complain if they don’t. William Easterly, The Utopian Nightmare, Foreign Policy, Sept/Oct 2005

Exactly. I have been seen saying for years that our social and environmental problems are caused by perverse incentives. The big financial rewards in today's world are for those who can cater to the whims of the rich, by which I mean those who constitute much of the population of the developed countries and a tiny minority of those in the poor countries. One example: only 1 percent of all new medicines brought to market by multinational pharmaceutical companies between 1975 and 1997 were designed specifically to treat the tropical diseases plaguing the third world. In numbers, that means thirteen out of 1,223 medications. This is not a problem of lack of ingenuity or even compassion. It is a problem of incentives.

Social Policy Bonds would rejig the incentives on offer. Not blindly, so as to favour one set of people over the others, but in accordance with the wishes of those who put up the funds to redeem the bonds. The current mismatch has more to do with lack of transparency and deliberate deception than the wishes of those who put up the cash. Governments pay out hundreds of billions of dollars annually in explicit and indirect subsidies to (for instance) large agribusiness corporates, multinational energy companies, and arms manufacturers. If consumers and taxpayers were told explicitly that they were subsidising these bodies they would, I am certain, do so with less enthusiasm. Under the current system, this whole system of corporate welfare is fudged. Under a Social Policy Bond regime, the first thing taxpayers and government would decide would be: what are our goals? All spending decisions, all programmes, projects and initiatives, all institutional establishments and structures, would be subordinated to these goals.

A mirror image, in other words, of the current setup.