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The less you know | War of Ideas.

People who hold extreme views on complex policy issues tend not to have thought all that hard about the ramifications of those policies. That’s the argument behind a recent paper published in Psychological Science by Philip Fernbach of the London School of Business, Todd Rogers of Harvard’s Kennedy School, Craig Fox of UCLA, and Steven Sloman of Brown.

An email I received yesterday has the following highlights:

Updated AidData Database: AidData

New China Aid Database: china.aiddata.org

However, Deborah Brautigam has some very, very important critiques of this database: “Rubbery Numbers on Chinese Aid”. For instance, she comments one of AidData’s papers based on their new data:

Table 2 in the paper provides a good example of the problems. It contains 20 Chinese “megadeals” totaling over US$38 billion. But only 6 of these 20 projects — less than a third — reflect actual deals (Ghana $3 bn CDB credit; Equatorial Guinea $2 bn credit; Angola Phase 1 $1.5 bn, CDB loan to Angola for agriculture $1.2 bn; Cameroon Memve’ele Dam $674 million; Nigeria light rail $673 million). That’s around $9 billion.

That said, I appreciate what AidData is trying to do here. Hopefully, they clean some of this up. My own sense is that each iteration of their general database gets better.

Here is their email:

Dear Colleague:

My name is Brad Parks. I am the Co-Executive Director of AidData, a research and innovation lab that tracks more than $5.5 trillion dollars from 90 donor agencies, creates decision support tools for development finance institutions, undertakes cutting-edge research on aid distribution and impact, and oversees efforts to geocode and crowdsource aid information.

Given some of your previous work, I thought you might be interested in a new dataset that AidData will soon release. At 4PM Eastern Standard Time on April 29th, at an event hosted by the Center for Global Development (CGD), AidData will release a dataset that tracks the known universe of Chinese official development finance flows to Africa from 2000 to 2011. The dataset relies on an innovative media-based data collection (MBDC) methodology, which has helped uncover nearly 1,700 Chinese-backed projects amounting to over $75 billion in official commitments. Our hope is that that publication of the data will provide a stronger empirical foundation for analyzing the nature, distribution, and impact of China’s overseas development finance activities in Africa. Along with the methodology and the dataset, several AidData and CGD staff and faculty affiliates are releasing a CGD Working Paper entitled China’s Development Finance to Africa: A Media-Based Approach to Data Collection.

Additionally, in the next 24 hours, we will launch a live, interactive database platform at china.aiddata.org that is accessible to journalists, researchers, policymakers, development practitioners, and the general public. The online interface not only makes it possible to filter, manipulate, and visualize the data, but also provides tools that enable users to vet and help improve the data. To enhance the accuracy of project-level data, the china.aiddata.org platform allows users to provide additional information about specific projects, such as media reports, documents, videos, and photographs, as well as suggest new projects not previously identified.

Please feel free to spread the word to colleagues who might be interested in this work. Also, if you would like to do something interesting with the data and blog your findings on The First Tranche (http://blog.aiddata.org/), let me know. We’d like to get as many people as possible to use — and potentially help us improve — the data.

Finally, if you are in the DC area on Monday afternoon and you are interested in attending the event at CGD, please register here.  It starts at 4PM. I hope to see you there.

Best,
Brad

Brad Parks
Executive Director, AidData
The College of William and Mary
bcpark@wm.edu; bparks@aiddata.org

The opinion: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/10-1491_8n59.pdf

Commentary:

• Scotus:Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum : SCOTUSblog.
• Opinio Juris has a range of responses.

Selectivity bias? Seems so.

Methods issue? Seems so.

Problem with Excel? Definitely.

Would be critical of them myself, but it has me wanting to double check the dataset I’m currently working on….

by

“Oil, war, and the future of Iraq”

Ben Van Heuvelen

Wednesday April 17, 2013

12.00-1.00    PAC 001

 
Ben Van Heuvelen is the managing editor of the Iraq Oil Report. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, and Salon. He writes about Iraq, oil, and the geopolitics of energy; American foreign policy, politics and culture; and religion. He was formerly a research fellow at the New America Foundation.

“The Causes and Consequences of Civil War in Central America“


Fabrice Lehoucq
Associate Professor of Political Science,
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Thursday, April 11, 2013

4:15 p.m.     PAC 002

Professor Fabrice Lehoucq will speak today, Thursday, April 11, 2013, on “Causes and Consequences of Civil War in Central America.” The talk is at 4:15 PM in Public Affairs Center 002. It is co-sponsored by the Government Department and the Latin American Studies Program.

Dr. Fabrice Lehoucq, associate professor of political science at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, holds a PhD from Duke University. From 2001 to 2007 he taught at CIDE (Center for Research and Teaching in Economics) in Mexico City. In 2000-2001 he taught at Wesleyan. He is currently a visiting fellow at Kellogg Institute of International Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Professor Lehoucq is the author of The Politics of Modern Central America: Civil War, Democratization, and Underdevelopment (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Stuffing the Ballot Box: Fraud, Reform, and Democratization in Costa Rica  (with Ivan Molnar)  (Cambridge University Press, 2002). He has been a consultant for the Bertelsmann Transformation Index, the Carter Center, the Inter-American Development Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the World Bank.

Co-sponsored by Government and Latin American Studies Program

However, at 6.1%, Africa recorded the fastest export growth of any region, rebounding from an 8.5% slump in 2011. Africa’s imports also grew faster than those of any other region at 11.3%, making it the only region with double-digit growth in either exports or imports.