Here’s your Saturday Morning Reading…
1. The Post-2015 Development Goals Need to Address Migration—And It Looks Like They Just Might | Center For Global Development
“Migration is by far the most profitable investment available to many of the world’s poor, and the money that migrants send to developing countries dwarfs all foreign aid.”
Current drafts of the Post-2015 Development Goals include some ideas that may help: “reduce to less than 3% the transaction costs of migrant remittances and eliminate remittance corridors with costs higher than 5%.” However, this progress is vulnerable and ignore the potential of migration to reduce inequality ‘amongst the people of the world’.
2. Why saying ‘seven out of ten fastest growing economies are in Africa’ carries no real meaning | African Arguments – Morten Jerven
“In reality this is both a far less accurate and much less impressive statistic than it sounds. More generally, narratives on African economic development tend to be loosely connected to facts, and instead are driven more by hype.”
Africa statistics guru Morten Jerven points to many caveats to this much-quoted statistic, including that they are based on optimistic forecasts, exclude many other countries and generally shoddy statistics in many African countries.
3. Generations of over-ambition? | Emergent Economics
In defence of grand ambitions:
“World poverty has tumbled dramatically in the last century. Without goals to aspire to, without leaders setting targets, surely poverty reduction would have been a lot less. In my mind it’s probably despite the increasing domination of markets that poverty’s fallen, not because of it.”
4. Why I Want To Pursue A Career In Development Research | Development Intern – Florence Avery
An honest post from someone starting out a career in development examining their motivations for their next career move.
“All this paints a very bleak picture for the aspiring development intern. Which is what drew me to research. Having completed my degree at a research-intensive university, and (despite the procrastination) actually quite enjoying academia, this is an area of development which I could actually apply my skills to, whether that is by pursuing further study with potential to proceed to PhD, or aspiring to work at a think tank or as a policy advisor to an NGO or a foreign government.”