IRC photo.

Tomorrow CSDS will host a workshop on leading research on the social impacts of development interventions. Raul and I will give a presentation on the impact evaluation we help Macartan Humphreys with in Eastern Congo. In brief, that project is a large community- driven reconstruction project implemented by the IRC and Care International. There will be lots of IQ points in the crowd and we have almost two hours (we present 45 minutes and then we have more than one hour for discussion), so we prepared well to get most out of it. While preparing I came across this picture (I did not make this picture - I haven't seen roads this bad yet):

Respect for the IRC, and all those other organizations doing good work in difficult circumstances!

China in Africa.

Tazara line (train Tanzania - Zambia)

“As soon as we have problems, we ask someone else to take care of them for us,” Isaac continued. “We ask the Europeans. We ask the Americans. We ask the Chinese. We will run this train into the ground, and then we will tell the Chinese we need another one. This is not development.” I thought of the wreckage by the tracks. In China, there is no such thing as metallic waste. Armies of migrant workers scour the countryside with hammers and chisels, collecting and selling every scrap to the insatiable smelters that feed the country’s industries. Here, by contrast, was a land without industry.

This is Columbia Professor Howard French in a recent article in The Atlantic [1] in which he discusses the infrastructure projects currently being undertaken in Africa by the Chinese. Does it promise the transformation of the continent, or merely its exploitation? He ends with the following, less-then-optimistic paragraph:

I [Howard French] asked him [a Congolese lawyer in Lubumbashi] if the arrival of the Chinese was a new and great opportunity for the continent, as some have said. “The problem is not who is the latest buyer of our commodities,” he replied. “The problem is to determine what is Africa’s place in the future of the global economy, and up to now, we have seen very little that is new. China is taking the place of the West: they take our raw materials and they sell finished goods to the world What Africans are getting in exchange, whether it is roads or schools or finished goods, doesn’t really matter. We remain under the same old schema: our cobalt goes off to China in the form of dusty ore and returns here in the form of expensive batteries.”

[1] Howard W. French. 2010. The Next Empire. The Atlantic. May 2010.

CSDS/ASC miniconference, and Latent Social Spaces.

Last Saturday was great. The Applied Statistics Center and the Center for the Study of Development Strategies held a miniconference at Columbia University for those who had received summer research grants. Eleven people presented their projects' research designs. Topics ranged from the long-term impact of the Peruvian civil war on local level institutions to evaluating the impact of education on HIV/AIDS on sexual behavior. Together with Neelan, I presented our network project in Eastern Congo. Faculty was present, everybody had to read all the project descriptions in advance, and everybody was assigned as a discussant to at least one presentation; we had many long and lively discussions. From seven onwards we had dinner at Macartan's place to continue the discussions in a more informal setting. It was really nice to have people from political science, economics and statistics discussing similar topics together - we do not do this often enough.

Latent Space Models and Aggregate Relations Data

I was discussant for Tyler McCormick's project called "How many X’s do you know?". Tyler is is a PhD Candidate in the statistics department and works together with Tian Zheng. The project builds on Peter Hoff's 2005 seminal article on Latent Space Models [1].

Aggregate relations data

It is often difficult to obtain information about a sensitive group; HIV/AIDS-infected people, people that have been raped, etc. One could ask in a survey "Are you a member of X?" - where X is the sensitive group - and then add up all the people that say 'yes'. However, it is unlikely that people tell the you truth. One can get around this problem by asking "How many members of X do you know?". The answers to these questions is so-called aggregate relations data.

Homophily and diadic interdependence

However, people are more likely to know 'similar' people - something that is called homophily. For example, if X is "Rose" - a common name among older women - and people are more likely to know individuals of the same age it is likely that older people know more people called "Rose" than younger people. If I want to estimate the size of a respondents network based on this information I would over (under) -estimate the network size of older (younger) respondents.

This complicates research on networks. The figure below gives 2 possible network structures among three people. The dotted line is a link that could be formed. On the left hand side we have that T is - for example - friends with N and P (the solid lines), while on the right hand side this is not the case. Consequently, it is more likely that N and P become friends in the structure on the left then on the right.

In other words, whether N and P form a link is dependents on how N and P are connected with a third person. This is the defining characteristic of networks and is called "diadic interdependence".

It is also highly problematic. For example, let's say we want to run a logit or probit regression where the dependent variable is whether person i and j form a link. Whether a link is formed dependents on whether i and j have links with other people (how they are connected in the network). The problem is that one can't just control for that as those other links are dependent variables in their own right. The problem is similar to autocorrelation in time series models.

Latent social space

A solution to this is to bring structure to the error term by making use of a so-called latent network space. In brief, all people have a position in an unobserved d-dimensional social space that gives us information about the underlying social structure. Actors with closer positions in the latent space are more likely to have interactions. For example, let's say that we have a two dimensional space and there is a polygon for the group of people called "Rose" - the size and shape of the polygon dependent on the group's variance over the two dimensions. Then an older person is more closely located to the "Rose"-polygon than than younger people.

Thus by combining the ideas of latent network spaces and aggregate relational data one can get rid of diadic interdependence and obtain information about a sensitive group such as: 1) the size of HIV/AIDS-infected people in society, 2) whom to approach if one wants to find a HIV/AIDS-infected person (who is most likely to know one), and 3) how homogeneous is the group of HIV/AIDS-infected people.

Very interesting stuff!

[1] Peter D Hoff. 2005. Bilinear Mixed-Effects Models for Dyadic Data. Journal of the American Statistical Association. 100, 286-295.

Tropical Gangsters.

I just finished the book "Tropical Gansters" [1] by Robert Klitgaard; an academic and a policy advisor to developing country governments on economic strategy and institutional reform. The book is about his 1986-1988 experiences in Equatorial Guinea when he was an economist/administrator of a (for the country's size) enormous economic rehabilitation project funded by the World Bank. He worked (or at least tried to work) with a team of ministers to design a structural adjustment program, reform sectoral strategies, and undertake rehabilitation projects (see his CV for more information).

What struck me most in this book is how next to (of course) economic issues, especially politics - the process by which groups of people make collective decisions - is important for economic development. Klitgaard candidly writes about the difficulties he faces while (trying to) work because of coups attempts, the replacement of ministers at the whim of the president, and the importance of traditional leaders - in the President's home town of Mongomo - for national politics. Interesting as this is exactly why after studying economics I am now at Columbia. All in all, nice book and an informative read.

[1] Robert Klitgaard. 1991. Tropical Gangsters. One Man's Experience With Development and Decadence in Deepest Africa. New York: Basic Books.

Dubaifrika.

Last June reclamation and construction work began for La Cite du Fleuve; a huge Dubai-like city that is to be built in... the Congo river. Jason Stearns recently had a post on this. According to the plan, La Cite du Fleuve will span 375 hectares, include 10,000 apartments, 10,000 offices, 2,000 shops, 15 diplomatic missions, 3 hotels, 2 churches, 1 university, 3 day care centers and a shopping mall. It will take 8 years to build. The project is financed by Mukwa Investments via Hawkwood Properties, a Lusaka based company that serves US and European investors. Here are two pictures after doing a bit of google-ing:

I was first planning to post my following, very constructive reaction and leave it at that: WTF!

While I am still of that same opinion, this project also reminded me of a recent TED talk by Stanford economist Paul Romer. In brief Romer's idea to help countries break out of poverty is the creation of "charter cities". The latter are city-scale administrative zones governed by a coalition of nations. On his website he discusses three cases: (1) Canada develops a Hong Kong in Cuba, (2) Indonesians flock to a manufacturing hub in Australia, and (3) states in India compete for the chance to build a charter city. What about a fourth one: (4) La Cite du Fleuve? Watch the TED talk or check out the website on Charter Cities.

Hattip to Caroline (the hub of CSDS) for the blog's title.

Post Hamptons.

So I am back from a weekend in the Hamptons; more specifically we were from Friday to Sunday in East Hampton; a village located in a beautiful area on New York's Long Island with much nature and close to the beach. It is also known as the "Playground of the Rich" where people with money helicopter in from New York for a weekend.

Two things made me think of Eastern Congo while in the Hamptons. First, there were a lot of 4x4s and wooden houses. In contrast to the Congo, however, the 4x4s were not owned by development agencies, and the median price of a house in the Hamptons is several million dollars; with a large number of them topping the tens of millions of dollars. Second, I noticed how upset I was with how Hamptonites spend their money: the excessively large houses; the large number of expensive cars standing in the driveways; the over-representation of shops like Ralph Lauren and Tiffany Jewelry Shop in city center; etc.

Probably what upset me most is that it struck me only now again that the difference between us living here and people living in Africa is so large. When I came back from fieldwork last summer I wrote a post using the words "what a fucked up world" when discussing the difference between my living standards here in New York and those I had in Africa. However, over the last months my life in New York has become 'normal' again; I order a bottle of wine when I like, I go to the cinema whenever I want, and I spend almost 100 dollars on a weekend in the Hamptons without thinking.

This sucks. Two things, though. First, when I came back last time from fieldwork I asked some colleagues (with much more field experience) whether they also had difficulties coming back from conflict-torn, poor regions into a city where it is normal to pay hundreds of dollars for a handbag. They said "yes". However, they also said that this feeling lessens over time. People seem to adapt quickly to new environments was their experience - the Hamptons made this clear for me. In addition, I can see how from an emotional point of view this is probably also a good thing. Second, I am happy, though, to go back to Africa soon. I miss it.

Me looking towards mom and dad (the Netherlands).

Hamptons.

It's 320am and I just came back from Columbia; I arrived this morning at the department at 545am. Yet another 20+ hour work day; since Sunday my days have been like this. Anybody said something about a 36-hour work week? ;). The amazing thing of being here is that at 3am there are still students walking around on campus and the main library is populated. Also, I am currently eating a before-bed-time snack; a freshly-cut, sliced-meat sandwich - something I got in one of the many supermarkets still open. I love this city!

It's not all work, though. Tomorrow, with some fellow PhD students, I'll be heading for a weekend to the Hamptons on Long Island where we hired a small house next to the beach. We have beer, steaks, a football (read: a proper ball to play soccer) and I also took Robert Klitgaard's "Tropical Gangsters" [1] with me. Great weekend ahead!

[1] Robert Klitgaard. 1991. Tropical Gangsters: One Man's Experience With Development And Decadence In Deepest Africa. New York: Basic Books.