Archive for April 23rd, 2005
Number of People Learning English to Double — English to Come Close to Universal Language
David Graddol with the UK’s British Council recently published a report on the status of English, reporting that the number of people worldwide learning English will double to almost two billion over the next decade as English becomes more pervasive throughout the world.
English is already the closest thing to a universal language, with an estimated 25 percent of the world’s population speaking English to some level of competence. And the number of people learning English is about to rise dramatically.
According to Graddol’s report, about 1 billion people today are learning English throughout the world, and that number will grow to 2 billion over the next decade. By 2020, half the world could speak English.
By the end of the century, English will likely vie with Chinese, Spanish and Arabic for dominance as a near-universal language.
Of course this could, ironically, leave native English speakers out in the cold since so few native English speakers learn other languages. In a press release announcing the release of his study, Graddol said,
The fact that the world is learning English is not particularly good news for native speakers who cannot also speak anther language. The world is rapidly becoming multi-lingual and English is only one of the languages people in other countries are learning.
The biggest loser in the linguistics war is apparently French, which is losing ground to English and German in areas that used to be heavily French-speaking.
Frankly, I’m waiting for the big Latin resurgence to sweep the world. Now there’s a language.
Sources:
English ‘world language’ forecast. The BBC, Sean Coughlan, December 9, 2004.
Two billion people to learn English. British Council, Press Release, December 9, 2004.
Tags: Language
Locust Swarms Diminished, But Effects Remain for West Africa
2004 saw the worst locust swarms in West Africa in 15 years. Toward the end of the year, the swarms began to become less ever as internationals efforts to control began to have their effect, but in their wake the locusts left problems that many West African nations will have to deal with for years to come.
Mauritania was the worst hit by the 2004 locust plague, with much of the country’s crops for the year lost to the insects and lower-than-expected rainfall. The World Food Program estimated earlier this year that 60 percent of Mauritanians will not have enough to eat without emergency aid due to the locust swarms. It is trying to raise $31 million to fund food aid and other projects in Mauritania in 2005 and 2006.
World Food Program director for Mauritania, Sory Ouane, told The BBC,
Entire harvests where people have invested their money, time and toil for so long, are simply gone. We must act now. The right assistance now for the people of Mauritania will go a long way — not only to save lives today but also to help people avoid falling into a cycle of food crises that could last for years to come.
Coming up with aid might prove difficult. The WFP reported that almost all aid to Africa disappeared as donor nations focused their aid attention on the nations ravaged by December’s tsunami.
Sources:
Appeal for locust-hit Mauritania. The BBC, January 17, 2005.
Living With Locusts - The Bitter Irony Of Mauritania’s Food Crisis. Press Release, World Food Program, March 7, 2005.
Crops Cold Comfort For Hungry Refugees. Reuters, February 3, 2005.
Africa Fights Locust Plagues. Brian Handwerk, National Geographic Channel, January 7, 2005.
Tags: Famine, Locusts, Mauritania, World Food Program
Burundi Introduces Tax to Cope With Famine
In January, Burundi imposed a special tax of 8 percent on the salary of ministers and lawmakers and a 2 percent tax on lower-level civil servants in an effort to raise money to forestall famine in northeastern Burundi.
More than 650,000 people faced severe food shortages in the Burundi provinces of Muyinga and Kirundo due to drought. At least 100 people were reported to have died since November 2004 due to the food shortages.
In some parts of those two provinces, there have been effectively no crops due to the drought since April 2004. Additionally, disease apparently wiped out the normally drought-resistant cassava crop. According to the BBC, many people in the region are crossing into neighboring Rwanda for work and then bringing back food to feed their families.
Providing enough food to forestall more deaths could cost upward of $50 million.
Sources:
Burundi approves new famine tax. The BBC, January 13, 2005.
Burundi battles with food shortages. The BBC, January 19, 2005.
Plague Outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo
At least 61 people died in February during an outbreak of the pneumonic plauge in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
About 350 people who worked in a mine in the northern Oriental province were infected with the disesae earlier this year, with at least 61 of them ultimately succumbing to the disease.
The pneumonic plague is the rarest and most deadly of the three types of plague. Unlike bubonic and septicimic plague, the pneumonic form of the disease can be passed from person to person through infected droplets transmitted by coughing or sneezing.
According to the World Health Organization, it is almost always fatal if not treated, but responds well to antibiotics. Unfortunately, the Democratic Republic of Congo is still a relatively chaotic place after the end of its four-year civil war in 2002, and more than 2,000 people who worked at the mine quickly left and dispersed after the outbreak of the disease became widely known.
Plague, of course, used to be a major worldwide killer, famously wiping out a significant proportion of the European population in the late medieval period. The World Health Organization reports that in 2003 there were only about 2,000 cases of the disease worldwide, but almost all of those occurred in Africa.
Sources:
Plague outbreak kills 60 in Congo. The BBC, February 18, 2005.
DR Congo plague outbreak spreads. The BBC, February 23, 2005.
Plague Outbreak in Eastern Congo. Cynthia Kirk, Voice of America, March 2, 2005.
Deadly Plague Outbreak Feared in Congo . Craig Timberg, Washington Post, February 18, 2005.
Locust invasions on West Africa. IRIN News, December 2004.
Tags: Congo, Democratic Republic of the, Plague, World Health Organization
British Chancellor of the Exchequer Argues for Large-Scale Debt Relief for Africa
British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown made waves in January with his announcement that Great Britain would seek large scale debt relief for poverty-stricken African nations. Brown said that ultimately his government hoped to negotiation 100 percent debt relief for such nations.
On a trip to Africa, Brown signed a debt relief deal with Tanzania in which the UK agreed to pay 10 percent of Tanzania’s repayment debts to the World Bank and the Africa Development Bank. The annual payments on Tanzania’s debt amounts to about 3.5 million pounds.
In exchange, Tanzania agreed to use the money it would have spent servicing its debt on health, education and poverty reduction for its people.
The BBC quoted Brown as saying,
We make this offer unilaterally, but we are now asking other countries to join us. Our wish is to have 100% debt relief and we hope that America, Japan, France and other European countries will follow great Britain in this effort. We hope that we are in a position to get all other countries to sing up to a new package of debt relief.
. . .
What we offer Tanzania today we offer to the whole developing world tomorrow. Although there is no international agreement yet, Britain will relieve those countries still under the burden of this debt by paying our share — 10 percent — of their payments to the World Bank and African Development bank in their stead.
Later in his trip, Brown announced that Great Britain was canceling 80 million pounds in debt that Mozambique owes the UK, and would also pay 10 percent of Mozambique’s debt as well. In all, Great Britain plans to reach the same deal with 70 developing countries at a cost to itself of 1 billion pounds annually.
Not everyone, however, thinks that debt relief is the ultimate solution to poverty in the developing world. Former UK international development secretary Clare Short warned that although the debt relief was a good start, it should not be seen as a “mystical solution” to poverty. The BBC quoted short Short as noting that relieving debt in this case is simply a roundabout way to giving foreign aid, and will not solve the problem of “failed states” such as Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
According to Short,
Debt relief and aid alone without really strong action to end conflict, arms supply, start building order, the basic institutions of a state, leave the poor outside the whole development system.
Short also noted that there are very poor countries that don’t have significant debt, and that if the World Bank or other institutions began writing off developing country debt, there would be less money available to give to other countries that may need it.
It’s kind of odd given the notable lack of success over the past 30 years to see Great Britain suddenly reach the conclusion that throwing money at developing world poverty is the way to solve the problem. Certainly, the UK actions are likely to create short term improvements as many of the aid programs of the 60s, 70s, and 80s did, but making those short term benefits lead to long-term transformation is going to be a lot trickier.
Sources:
Brown’s Pound 1bn Africa debt pledge. The BBC, January 14, 2005.
Brown wipes Pound 80 m Mozambique debt. The BBC, January 15, 2005.
Tags: Debt Relief, Gordon Brown, Mozambique, Tanzania, United Kingdom
Boutros Boutros Ghali Predicts Regional Water Wars
In an interview with the BBC, former United Nations Secretary Boutros Boutros Ghali predicted that conflicts would soon arise between countries in the Nile basin over rights to water that flows through the Nile.
Egypt has long been the largest user of water from the Nile, but countries upstream are coming closer to more intensively using that water, which Boutros Ghali predicts will lead to conflict between Egypt and countries such as Ethiopia, Tanzania and Kenya.
Boutros Ghali noted that Egypt’s population has more than tripled over the last 50 years and is still growing, putting heavy demand on Nile water resources. Boutros Ghali told the BBC,
The security of Egypt is related to the relation between Egypt and Ethiopia, Sudan, Kenya and other African countries. The real problem is that we need an additional quantity of water and we will not have an additional quantity of water unless we find an a agreement with the upstream countries which also need water and have not used Nile water until now.
But the BBC interview failed to mention a major overriding problem with water in the Middle East and Africa — it is almost universally mismanaged, since it relies on bureaucracies setting water targets and policies rather than letting markets dictate the true cost of water.
In Egypt, for example, 85 percent of water goes to agriculture, and agricultural water use is micromanaged to the point where government committees plan out a year in advanced which crops will be allowed to grow where and how water will be allocated among them. Not surprisingly the result is large-scale inefficiency and misallocation of water resources.
Mismanagement of water is almost universal, even in countries such as the United States which don’t yet have severe water problems. But places like the Middle East and Northern African simply cannot afford to protect industries or individuals from the true cost and scarcity of water. Unfortunately, doing so is likely to prove very politically unpopular, but one can always hope that developing countries might prefer transparent markets in water to conflicts between states that may lead to larger problems, while leaving the underlying problem uncorrected.
Source:
Ex-UN chief warns of water wars. Mike Thompson, The BBC, February 2, 2005.
Tags: Boutros Boutros Ghali, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan, United Nations, Water
Ethiopia Still Requires Food Aid, But Situation Is Improving
Its amazing what peace can actually do. In Ethiopia, crop production in 2004 was 24 percent higher than in the 2003, and 21 percent higher than the average of the previous five years according to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Program.
Ethiopia is not yet food self-sufficient, however, but it is slowly edging to that point. In 2004, for example, Ethiopia required 965,000 tons of food to help prevent hunger among 7 million people who lacked enough food. This year it will only require about 387,500 tons of food to aid 2.2 million people who are at risk of not having enough food.
In part, that food aid is needed due to drought in the eastern and southern parts of the country. But in the northern and western country — with Ethiopia’s war with Eritrea over for the moment — farmers were able to concentrate on improving yields with better seeds and fertilizer.
Source:
Ethiopia’s crop production up 24%. The BBC, February 2, 2005.
Tags: Eritrea, Ethiopia, Famine, Food and Agriculture Organization, World Food Program
ANC Attacks Anti-Corruption Investigators
The African National Congress in February stepped up its public war of words with an anti-corruption unit — dubbed The Scorpions — designed to ferret out abuse of power in the South African state.
The Scorpions, whom are modeled on the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations, have been focusing on a large travel-related scandal in which Members of Parliament are accused inflating their travel expenses to scam upwards of $2 million.
Rather than getting to the bottom of that scandal, however, the ANC has predictably chosen to attack the investigators.
ANC chief whip Mbulelo Goniwe, for example, accused the anti-corruption unit of timing its announcements to harm the ANC, noting that The Scorpions had released a press release about the extent of the travel scandal on the same day that Thabo Mbeki delivered his State of the Nation address,
I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I think it’s a planned, desperate kind of act of vengeance to really undermine parliament and create this impression that members of parliaments are by definition cowboys and crooks.
The ANC has even taken to accusing members of the anti-corruption unit of having been spies for the apartheid-era government.
Mbeki himself promised a thorough investigation, not of corruption but of the anti-corruption task force, in February.
Of course the winds were taken out of the whole “we’re being persecuted” claim when five ANC Members of Parliament plead guilty to fraudulent billing of their travel expenses. Presumably, they were framed or were apartheid spies working with The Scorpions all along to discredit the ANC.
Sources:
Mbeki to probe elite crime unit. The BBC, February 14, 2005.
ANC’s anger over cowboy ’smears’. The BBC, February 4, 2005.
ANC to act against convicted MPs. iAfrica.Com, March 18, 2005.
Tags: Corruption, South Africa, Thabo Mbeki
How Will the Human Race Survive Low Birth Rates?
Writing for TechCentralStation.Com, Pavel Kohout asks “where have all the children gone?” specifically in Europe where birth rates have fallen through the floor. Pavel ends up blaming everything from pay-as-you-go government-run retirement programs, heavy taxation that disproportionately effects younger people, and an increasingly secular culture. Oddly, what it all comes down to is this — young people have to be given an incentive to have children. Without that incentive, they simply don’t (at least enough of them choose not to that it has brought birth rates down far below replacement level in many European countries).
This is correct, in my opinion, but it represents a pretty radical shift in thinking. When doomsayers were writing about the horrors of overpopulation in the 1960s and 1970s they offered a slightly different version of human reproduction. On their model, human beings were simply another animal that followed the same sort of population dynamic models that animals such as deer did. Inevitably, they maintained, human beings would do what every other animal does and convert additional resources into additional offspring. The richer we got, the more offspring we’d have in a loop that would ultimately lead to the sort of population crash that animals such as deer experience.
But a funny thing happened along the way. After reaching a certain level of societal wealth, many people choose to severely limit the number of children they have or forego having children at all.
This, of course, culminated with an event in the 1960s that must have seemed very bizarre from the biological reductionist model. Effective, safe chemical birth control was introduced and in wealthy societies became ubiquitous. In the United States, birth control is so common that government experts became worried when a report on birth control use found that in 2002, of women who had had sex three months prior to a study of their birth control habits, 7.2 percent had not used any form of birth control.
Or, to put it another way, 92.8 percent of sexually active women were intentionally reducing their risk of becoming pregnant. This is an extremely odd behavior if you look at humanity purely through a biological model. Do members of any other species go to such lengths to reduce their fertility and lower their odds of propagating their genes?
Now, however, some like Kohout worry that we’ve gone too far. As he writes,
In the so-called “New Europe”, the situation is even gloomier. According to UN projections, Latvia will lose 44 percent of its population by 2050 as a result of demographic trends. In Estonia, the population is expected to shrink by 52 percent, in Bulgaria 36 percent, in Ukraine 35 percent, and in Russia 30 percent. In comparison with these figures, the projected population decline in Italy (22 percent), the Czech Republic (17 percent), Poland (15 percent) or Slovakia (8 percent) looks like a small decrease. France and Germany will lose relatively little population, and the population of the United Kingdom will even see a slight growth — thanks to immigrants.
But what real options are there to prevent this?
Kohout argues that the pay-as-you-go retirement systems common throughout Europe create a negative incentive to have children. In previous generations, he argues, couples would have had children in part to ensure their own financial survival when they were too old to work. That may or may not be true, but its hard to see how to get away from that now. After all the knock on government-run pay-as-you-go social security systems is that they underperform. If they are eliminated they will simply be replaced with non-government schemes that, if anything, are likely to be more efficient. And even if they are not immediately, at some point a given society is going to become wealthy enough that economic fortunes in old age can be moreorless assured with private means. Short of prohibitive taxes on people over 50, its hard to see how an alternate regime could be created.
Similarly, Kohout argues that the European welfare state disproportionately affects the young, who have relatively less income and wealth, and so acts as a disincentive to have children. Couples who are barely making it or relying on public assistance are, presumably, less likely to have children who might represent a further drain on their limited resources. Frankly, though, its just as likely that additional disposable income from lower taxes would simply go to additional consumption. After all, there are certainly many couples who could afford another child if they simply forgone buying that late model SUV or similar luxuries, but who find they can be fulfilled having a small number of children, or none at all, and still enjoy the fruits of the sort of consumption levels that citizens of Western nations enjoy.
Finally, Kohout cites cultural and social issues, but that’s a losing cause as well. Basically, Kohout notes the obvious that societies that are very religious are producing many more offspring than societies that are very secular. Of course many of those relatively religious societies, such as in the Middle East, perceive their culture as threatened by the secularism that Western culture and economic success are spreading across the globe. Besides, its hard to see how one could reinstill non-secular values to the extent they existed in the past in now-secularized countries.
Certainly its possible to envision possible future cultural changes. Perhaps children born to relatively small families will react against that and grow up to have large families. Perhaps at some point per capita income in developed countries will reach the point where the trend will swing around and couples will begin having more children simply because the opportunity cost of each additional child suddenly becomes relatively low.
Or, more likely, we’ll do what we’ve always done — adapt. I suspect the same human beings who could do the unheard of thing from a natural selection standpoint and voluntarily limit their own fertility will also come up with creative solutions and ways to deal with an increasingly older population and an age structure unlike anything every experienced before in history. For the past several thousand years people have been saying “this situation is unique and will prove a disaster,” and yet we keep chugging along, finding ways to respond and adapt to whatever challenges face us.
My prediction — 50 years from now we’ll have figured out how to adapt to the coming demographic changes, only to have people wringing their hands in learned articles and books about the next supposedly insurmountable challenge.
Source:
Where Have All The Children Gone. Pavel Kohout, TechCentralStation.Com, January 27, 2005.
Tags: Uncategorized
Surprise — Free Trade Works Out In The End
Despite Adam Smith’s definitive explanation of how free trade could benefit both parties engaging in trade, pretty much every society is skeptical of free trade and that other country stealing our jobs. So, today, we have the specter of some of the richest nations in the world appalled at the thought of having to compete with some of the poorest nations, and all too happy to condemn the developing world to poverty by closing off markets.
Surprisingly there isn’t actually a lot of research looking at how free trade affects industrialized countries, but Virginia Postrel published an article in the New York Times in January that explored just this topic.
She reported on an academic study of the effects of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement. The study, by Daniel Trefler of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.
Trefler’s study focused on the effects that liberalizing tariffs between the two countries had. Postrel writes,
Before the agreement went into effect in 1989, more than one in four Canadian industries were, in fact, protected by tariffs of more than 10 percent. Those industries included not only businesses known for their protectionism, notably apparel makers, but manufacturers of a wide range of products, from beer and pretzels to coffins, plastic pipes and paper bags.
Before the agreement, imports from the United States faced an average tariff of 8.1 percent and an effective tariff of 16 percent. The effective rate included import taxes on the final product and tariffs plaid on raw materials. Someone importing a chair could face a direct tariff on furniture, for example, but could also pay indirect tariffs on wood and upholstery fabric.
At the very beginning of the free trade agreement, those industries that were the most heavily protected took big hits as imports from the United States became even cheaper. According to Trefler, such industries, saw employment declines of as much as 12 percent, and the free trade agreement as a whole reduced employment by 5 percent in industries that had previously been protected by tariffs.
But, over the long run, the Canadian economy regained those jobs and has one of the healthier industrial bases in the developed world. According to Trefler,
Within 10 years, the lost employment was made up by employment gains in other parts of manufacturing. . . The average effect of the U.S. tariff cuts on Canadian employment was thus a wash: the employment losses by less-productive firms offset the employment gains by more productive firms.
And rather than force Canadian wages into a downward spiral, as had been predicted by opponents of the free trade agreement, Canadian wages increased by 3 percent over the eight years studied. A small increase to be sure, but not the predicted decline.
So what did Canadians get out of the free trade agreement if employment was a net wash and wages increased just slightly? It got a big productivity boost. Postrel writes,
The big story is that lowering tariffs set off a productivity boom.
Formerly sheltered Canadian companies began to compete with and compare themselves with more-efficient American businesses. Some went under, but others significantly improved operations.
The productivity gains were huge. In the formerly sheltered industries most affected by the tariff cuts, labor productivity jumped 15 percent, at least half from closing inefficient plants. “This translates into an enormous compound annual growth rate of 1.9 percent,” he [Trefler] wrote.
But closing plants is not the whole story, or even half of it. Among export-oriented industries, which expanded after the agreement, data from individual plants show an increase in labor productivity of 14 percent. Manufacturing productivity as a whole jumped 6 percent.
Free trade — its good for you. Even you folks in the industrial world. So loosen up those protectionist tariffs and quotas already, and give the developing world a fair chance.
Source:
What happened when two countries liberalized trade? Pain, then gain. Virginia Postrel, The New York Times, January 27, 2005.
Tags: Canada, Free Trade, United States