Critical errors
From Jeffrey D. Sachs
Sir: Tim Congdon’s review of my book The End of Poverty (Books, 7 May) is repeatedly incorrect. Here is a sampling of his errors.
‘But the blunt truth is that malaria, one of the health scourges of sub-Saharan Africa, was coming under control in the final decades of colonial rule.’ This is wrong. While there was some dip in the mortality rate in Africa due to the introduction of chloroquine and other anti-malarials, and while the British colonial governments did exercise some malaria control in African cities and a handful of high-value economic sites (mines, plantations), Africa’s malaria burden remained massive and vastly higher than in other parts of the developing world.
‘He is so ignorant of the basic historical record that he gives the start of the British Raj as 1600.’ This is completely unfair. The book makes perfectly plain that there are two phases of British involvement in India, the first from the start of the East India Company at the beginning of the 17th century till 1857, and the second from 1858, when legal authority was formally transferred from the East India Company to the Crown, until India’s independence in 1947.
‘Some of the comments on Africa are astonishing. What is one to make of the proposition that “Africa lacks navigable waterways with access to the ocean for easy transport and trade”? ... Sorry Professor Sachs, the problem here really is governance, not geography.’ Mr Congdon should realise that there is an enormous difference between a river being navigable within interior stretches and being navigable with access to the ocean and therefore to international trade. It is, of course, the latter that I stress in the book.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica online shows plainly that the Congo is not ocean-navigable: ‘These cataracts render the Congo unnavigable between the seaport of Matadi, at the head of the Congo estuary, and Malebo (Stanley) Pool, a lake-like expansion of the river.... ’ The same is true of the Niger river: only about 10 per cent of the river length is ocean-navigable.
‘Moreover, a repeated finding in development economics is that economic growth is not correlated with the level of aid per head of population.’ Mr Congdon apparently does not realise that most analyses of aid and economic growth are deeply flawed because they lump together emergency and humanitarian aid (which, arriving at times of crisis, is negatively correlated with growth) and aid for investments that stimulate long-term growth (such as support for health and education). In a recent paper, for example, Clemens, Radelet and Bhavnani find that when aid is subdivided into its components, there is a positive relationship between economic growth and the kind of aid that should indeed stimulate growth (including budget and balance of payments support, investments in infrastructure, and aid for productive sectors such as agriculture and industry). My recommendations are about aid as investment.
Your readers are poorly served by Mr Congdon’s review. Fortunately, much of the UK government and public are in the forefront of the fight against extreme poverty in Africa and elsewhere.
Jeffrey D. Sachs
Director of the Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York
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