A Nigerian newspaper

Monocle magazine is a good source of information on the reality faced by journalists in developing countries. In its inaugural issue back in 2007, they reported the most popular radio DJ in Afghanistan (the video version of the article is here).

The latest issue (Issue 34, page 61) features Next, a Nigerian daily newspaper, launched by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dele Olojede, who "claims rivals have tried to sabotage his distribution network, forcing him to organise direct sales and subscriptions." That's Nigeria...

According to Monocle, Mr Olojede plans to turn Next into a pan-African international newspaper by 2011, targeting metropolitan middle class people on the continent.

Impact of insecticide-treated bed nets on infant mortality

I've done a bit of surveys on the impact of insecticide-treated bed nets (ITNs) on infant mortality. For the uninitiated, ITNs are known to be effective for preventing child deaths due to malaria infection. ITNs do not just protect you from mosquito bites that can transmit malaria parasite into your body. They also kill mosquitos that touch the ITNs as the bed net fabric contains insecticide. As malaria is transmitted only through mosquitos, ITNs reduce the risk of malaria infection in these two ways.

But how much do they reduce infant mortality in a village in Africa?

To identify randomized control trials of high quality on this topic, I look at the Cochrane Review (Lengeler (2004)), which identifies the list of such trials with no bias in the estimates. There are five studies looking at the impact on child mortality, and Lengeler (2004) concludes that ITNs reduce child mortality by 5.5 deaths per 1,000 children.

However, I'm interested in infant mortality (the death rate among those aged under 12 months old), not in child mortality (the death rate for children under the age of 5 years). Also, it is not clear to me whether these estimates refer to the intention-to-treat effect (the impact of distributing ITNs) or the effect of the actual use of ITNs. So I look at the original studies.

It turns out that one study looks at insecticide-treated curtains. Another looks at the impact of treating bed nets with insecticide (because the study is conducted in The Gambia, where the use of bed nets is common). The third study does not report infant mortality. So only two studies actually evaluate the impact on infant mortality. And the intervention they evaluate is actually the distribution of ITNs to a community, not the actual use of ITNs by villagers (though both studies find that the usage rate of distributed ITNs is rather high).

Binka et al. (1996) report that, in Kassena-Nankana district in Ghana, before distributing ITNs, the mortality among children 6 to 11 months old is 49.7 per 1,000 for treated villages while it is 55.1 per 1,000 for control villages. After the intervention, 73.2 for the treated and 90.3 for the control. The difference-in-difference estimate yields a reduction by 11.7 per 1,000. In addition, the authors report that the mortality for children aged 1 to 5 months is comparable between the treated and the control before the intervention (they don't report exact numbers) and that it becomes 77.4 for the treated and 100.7 for the control, implying that the impact is a reduction of 23.3 deaths per 1,000. Combining these figures, the impact on infant mortality is 35 deaths per 1,000, much higher than the effect for all the children under the age of 5 years concluded by Lengeler (2004).

The other study, Phillips-Howard et al. (2003), reports a reduction of infant mortality by 31 per 1,000 due to the distribution of ITNs in Asembo and Gem areas in western Kenya, which is surprisingly similar to what Binka et al. (1996) find. This similarity may be explained by the fact that malaria is endemic (ie. there is risk of infection throughout the year) in both study sites.

By the way, Hawley et al. (2003), another piece of paper by the same research team as Phillips-Howard et al. (2003), reports the reduction of child mortality by similar magnitude in villages without ITNs but near those villages with ITNs distributed. This finding suggests that the main mechanism through which ITNs reduce child mortality is not the protection of children (and pregnant mothers, as malaria infection during pregnancy can cause the malfunctioning of placenta and thus reduce the birth weight of newborns, which increases the risk of infant death) by bed nets but the eradication of mosquitos by insecticide.

Nigeria (continued)

A while ago, I featured some articles on Nigeria that show the country's potential both in a good way and in an ugly way. Here's another installment (for the ugly way).

A moving quote

"Don't discount Africa. The giant has woken up. You can feel it. I tell you because I travel in Africa a lot. You can see the pride in people's eyes. ... We are awake now. It is coming." ---Titus Naikuni, CEO of Kenya Airways (Monocle, Issue 03, May 2007, p.69)

Nigeria

During the past few weeks, the British media (ie. FT and The Economist) has produced revealing articles on Nigeria.

Andrew Jack of Financial Times reports Nigeria's war on fake drugs.

By the turn of the millennium, Nigerians had become among the world’s most frequent victims of fake drugs.

The Economist reports, two weeks in a row, how Nigerian politicians rig elections:

In Anambra state, most people could not vote at all. They turned up at the voting stations, but often INEC's officials [that is, electoral commission officials] simply did not arrive. When a polling station did open, usually about six hours late, the officials did not have enough materials, notably a register, to let voting begin. On a tour of a dozen voting stations in the state capital, Awka, on the afternoon of polling, your correspondent did not see a single vote being cast, just angry mobs of frustrated would-be voters saying they had been “disenfranchised”. Barely any polling stations were provided with a results-sheet, on which officials and party agents are supposed to record the number of votes cast for each party; presumably these were being filled in elsewhere. ("How to steal yet another election" The Economist, 21th April, 2007)

On the day of the presidential election money-politics could be seen in action in central Kano, the dusty, dilapidated industrial capital of the north. There, in the local government area of Fagge, the PDP had budgeted 35m naira for political “mobilisation” and the main opposition party, the All Nigerian Peoples' Party (ANPP), 40m naira. In one ward, Fagge A, the PDP, according to one of its operatives, had budgeted 594,000 naira ($4,650) for 21,000 registered voters and 35 ballot boxes. Thus each “independent” presiding officer at the polling station was given 3,000 naira and his clerk 2,000 naira. Each policeman was getting 1,000 naira. That left payments of about 200 naira ($1.57) per voter—whose votes, far from being secret, were inked with a thumb on the ballot in front of party agents. Multiple voters, who will have registered several times with sympathetic election officials, might vote ten times, at a reduced bulk rate of 100 naira—still picking up a tidy 1,000 naira each. The friendly officials are paid for a variety of services, one of which is not to scrutinise the register too closely. Hasia, for example, had just voted with the registration card of her mother, who had already voted herself. Hasia had the second of her mother's two cards. She has probably not even reached the legal voting age of 18. Her card clearly identified its owner as being 60 years old, but this had not proved a problem with the right official. ("Big men, big fraud and big trouble", The Economist, 28th April 2007)

But there are pockets of the bright side as well. The war on fake drugs starts paying off.

Recent studies suggest that the proportion of fake and unregistered medicines in Nigeria has dropped to less than 20 per cent over the past six years.

Foudeh Darwish, the Lebanese managing director of Afrab-Chem, a manufacturer of antibiotics and other drugs based in Lagos, ... shows me the plans for his new ₤2m factory set to open later this year in compliance with international quality manufacturing standards. "Two years ago, this would not have been possible," he says. The investment is a sign both of new demand within Nigeria for high-quality medicines, and a reduced threat that genuine regulated products will be undermined by fake alternatives.("Lethal Doses", FT Magazine, 7 April, 2007)

Cross Rivers, one of the 36 states of Nigeria, has a good state governor:

In the state capital, Calabar, the streets have no pot-holes. According to the state government, every village is connected to the national grid and everyone has access to clean water. ... Cross Rivers has no oil wealth. [State Governor Donald Duke] has achieved all this on a fraction of the money available to his neighbours. Instead, he has frozen official salaries, cleverly exploited existing resources and taken on debt. In partnership with private investors, he is also responsible for Tinapa, the largest retail and business development in west Africa. It contains several new giant studios to grab a large slice of the $200m-300m a year "Nollywood" film industry, which churns out, by some estimates, more films than either of its rivals in Los Angeles or Bombay.

You've never heard about Nollywood? The Economist already reported it last July:

IT ALL started by accident in 1992, when Kenneth Nnebue, a Nigerian trader based in Onitsha, was trying to sell a large stock of blank videocassettes he had bought from Taiwan. He decided that they would sell better with something recorded on them, so he shot a film called "Living in Bondage" about a man who achieves power and wealth by killing his wife in a ritualistic murder, only to repent later when she haunts him. The film sold more than 750,000 copies, and prompted legions of imitators. Nollywood, as Nigeria's film industry is known, now makes over 2,000 low-budget films a year, about two-thirds of them in English. ("Nollywood dreams", The Economist, 27th July 2006)

I'm rather impressed by Nigeria's potential both in the right and wrong directions.

Robert Mugabe

The Economist article on the Zimbabwean President this week gives you a slightly different view on Mugabe: giving lessons to staff in the government, working punishing hours, frugal, teetotal, faithful to his wife...

Democratization and Infant Mortality in sub-Saharan Africa

Five months on after its conception last March, I finally finished writing up a paper on the empirical investigation of democratization and infant mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. A quick summary is:

Infant mortality has declined since democratization in countries where a new chief executive assumes office by winning the first multiparty election. This is especially true for babies born to uneducated mothers.

Note that I do not claim that democratization has caused the decline in infant mortality, because I cannot rule out the possibility that something else drives both democratization and the survival of babies. (It could be, for example, just NGOs, as a reader of this blog commented on this post. But I wonder if NGOs can make a country-wide difference. Maybe. Maybe not.) But, for babies born to uneducated mothers, a trend in infant mortality definitely changes right after the year of democratization. Plus, the usage of piped water and flush toilet and the take-up rate of immunization and delivery assistance by health professionals seems to have expanded for uneducated mothers since democratization. So it can be democratization that drives infant mortality down.

Now I'm in the process of letting people read this paper and expecting to receive reactions and comments. If you want to join this process :-), here you can download the paper.

If you are not an economist but a political scientist or an Africanist, please have a look at sections 2, 3.2, 6, 8, and perhaps A.1 and A.2. If you are a public health researcher, a demographer, or a medical expert, please have a look at the second half of section 2, and section 7. This is because I rely on not only the previous works done by economists but also on those by political scientists, Africanists, and public health researchers. I want to know if I correctly interpret their research outputs.

Fairtrade and Cotton Farmers in Mali

An FT Magazine article last weekend investigated whether Fairtrade has improved the life of cotton farmers in Mali, a West African country.

Fairtrade works like this:

In coffee, for example, the grower of any arabica (higher-quality) coffee beans is guaranteed whichever is the higher of $1.26 per pound or five cents above the world market price, which is currently around $1 per pound. [Farmers'] cooperatives are also paid a variable "social premium" to be spent collectively on projects of communal benefit.

Does this work for Malian cotton farmers? In early June, Alan Beattie, the article author, visited Batimakana, a village in Kita - "a region that will supply cotton for M&S jeans."

Every third or fourth dwelling [which is a typical Malian hut of mud, thatch and straw] has a motorbike outside - a lifeline more than a luxury, given that the nearest medical clinic is 10 kilometers away.

The male elders of the village are swathed in robes and turbans and dignified with venerable age, several with eyes rheumy or sightless from river blindness disease.

For a kilo of raw cotton, the Fairtrade minimum price is 36 eurocents; this year conventional cotton will fetch 24 eurocents.

It lets families send children to school. It means they can buy seeds fro vegetables and ox-drawn ploughs for their fields. It also ... bought the plastic chairs that the translators and [the FT correspondent] are sitting on.

How about the effect of paying "social premium"?

[T]wo years' worth of social premium has built a concrete grain store. ... The village uses the store to prevent big swings in food prices, buying grain cheaply after harvest and releasing it gradually through the year.

In Dougourakoroni, another Fairtrade certified community in the region, the rremium has built a brick school in the village. Previously, children had to walk 7km to school, and fewer attended.

Critics argue that Fairtrade, by paying above the market price, "encourages farmers to stay in unprofitable sectors, inducing oversupply and pushing down prices for everyone else." Does it?

Since cotton is a greedy plant that strips the soil of nutrients, it has traditionally been rotated with other crops, and that has not changed.

In Batimakana, just as before, only 20 percent of the land is used for cotton.

Any co-operative growing any product anywhere in the world can sell only as much at Fairtrade prices as has been ordered from that co-operative by buyers. Cotton is an annual crop, so farmers know their demand before planting. ... If farmers produce more than contracted under a Fairtrade agreement, they can sell the rest at conventional prices, but are not guaranteed to make money from it [because all of Mali's cotton is bought by the state marketing board, which sells it on to the big cotton brokers of Europe and America and is criticised for passing less than half the export earnings on to the farmers].

It seems to be the state marketing board that hinders diversification:

[I]t does deliver seeds, pesticide and fertiliser to farmers on credit ... and collects the cotton after harvest. Malian farmers growing other crops will often also contract to grow cotton because it is their only source of fertiliser.

So everything with Fairtrade is rosy? Turn to the long-term future:

Mali is struggling to rebuild the fully integrated cotton-to-clothing industry it once had before it was blown away by Bangladesh and China. [B]ecause the batch needs to be kept separate, spinning Fairtrade lint requires a faintly bizarre and time-consuming ritual. Every machine has first to be shut down and cleared of conventional cotton from the previous run before the Fairtrade bundles are fed in. It can take several days to do the switchover, and ... some Fairtrade batches are too small to make it worthwhile.

Under-5 Mortality in sub-Saharan Africa

We often hear the number of children dying from a certain cause of death in, say, sub-Saharan Africa. I always wonder where such information comes from.

I learned that since the 1990s, there has been an effort to estimate the number of deaths by cause for different age categories across different regions of the world. It's called the Global Burdern of Disease project. Estimates for year 1990 were published in The Global Burden of Disease: A comprehensive assessment of mortality and disability from diseases, injuries, and risk factors in 1990 and projected to 2020 edited by Christopher J. L. Murray and Alan D. Lopez (Harvard University Press, 1996). Follow-up estimates for years 2000 to 2002 (for 2002 estimate, country-by-country statistics as well) are provided by the WHO website.

Regional categorization for the 2002 estimates is different from the 1990 estimates. However, this page of the WHO website offers a comparable data for the 2002 estimates.

Comparaing these two sets of estimates for sub-Saharan Africa, an interesting picture emerges. Of course, the issue of data reliability is a significant concern given that most countries in sub-Saharan Africa lacks vital event registration. Still, it's worth taking note of.

Under-5 mortality (here I simply divide the number of deaths for children under age of five by the population of such children) has declined from 42.87 deaths per 1,000 in 1990 to 39.54 in 2002. Given that the population of under-5 children went up from 94 million to 115.4 million, this should have been something. Major causes of death for children under five in 1990 were, in a descending order of importance, diarrhoea, lower respiratory infections (mainly pneumonia), malaria, measles, and perinatal conditions (e.g. low birth weight, birth asphyxia). These five causes account for nearly 80 percent of deaths of children in sub-Saharan Africa. By 2002, the order of importance has changed: malaria, lower respiratory infections, diarrhoea, perinatal conditions, HIV/AIDS, and measles. These six factors still account for nearly 80 percent of child deaths. Under-5 mortality by cause has increased only for malaria and HIV/AIDS. Diarrhoea and measles have seen a sizable decline. Mortality from lower respiratory infections and perinatal conditions has moved sideways.

People keep talking about corrupt governments and dismal conditions for well-being in sub-Saharan Africa. It seems, however, that some changes were under way during the 1990s.

Zambia and the WTO for poor countries

I think this FT magazine article by Alan Beattie today is a well-written one on the reality of an African country's bureaucracy and economy, and of the World Trade Organization for poor countries.

Some interesting excerpts:

"God," Patel [- trade minister from the impoverished southern African state of Zambia -] says... "The FT has more capacity to do trade policy than we do."

Being a minister in a desperately poor country throws up unimaginable challenges. One of Patel's first jobs under Chiluba [the former Zambian president] was as minister of sport. On his second day in office, the entire Zambian national football team died in a plane crash in Gabon, an event that stunned the footballing world. "I had never even been to a bloody football match," he says. But he pushed and cajoled and eventually got the Danish government to agree to train Zambia's new team at the national football centre outside Copenhagen. "Then the next year we got to the finals of the African Cup."

In late June this year trade ministers from the LDCs [short for least developed countries] meet in Livingstone, Zambia ... There is a short debate about including commas around the expression "inter alia". Because of the francophone African countries present, the communique is translated into French and there is a discussion about whether the correct interpretation of "market access" is "acces sur le marche" or "acces au marche". ... The first day of the conference ends early because the interpreters are only paid to work until late afternoon. Finally, towards the end of the second day, Patel takes the conference chair himself and charges through the rest of the agenda in about half an hour, cajoling and demanding, flattering the delegates by calling them "brothers and sisters", and then bulldozing the communique into coherence. A Cambodian delegate, evidently impressed by this unusual display of executive decisiveness, suggests leaving all the negotiations to Patel. He reads out Patel's personal e-mail address to the conference and implores all present to send their ideas to him and let him decide. ... Later that night in the bar his frustration is evident. "We have no analysis, no data. That is why we spend our time changing commas and arguing about translations."

[Zambia's trade minister Patel] picks me up from the hotel five minutes early, waiting impatiently in the car while I get ready. "I caught you early, huh?" He drives himself to the office, railing against the lack of a Lusaka bypass when he is held up in traffic for two minutes.

The ministry has just moved to an impressive new tower block. The building was funded by an aid package from the Chinese government, which, Patel says, offered countries in southern Africa either a new party headquarters or a football stadium. "Most countries chose the stadium."

[A] more pressing matter this morning is the need to boot out the human resources people who have taken up residence in offices down the corridor, offices [Patel's] staff are supposed to move into.

[Patel] cites a computer simulation showing that EU demands for cuts in Zambian tariffs will lose the government $15m in precious tax revenue. But Zambia's ability to do such research is limited. It has access to an online computer model developed by the World Bank, which allows it to do simulations. "But I don't have the bandwidth, so I often get cut off," Patel says.

Often, he relies on briefing notes prepared by NGOs based in rich countries, such as Oxfam. "We get criticised for allowing NGOs to dictate our policy. But if we don't have the capacity to do our own research, what can we do?"

In October, in a drab, strip-lit room in the WTO's unglamorous Geneva headquarters, 21 officials from a variety of countries - Yemen, Afghanistan, Uganda, the tiny Pacific nation of Kiribati - sit in rows taking instruction on the agreements that underlie the organisation. Twice a year - once in English, once in French - the WTO offers three- week training courses to officials from LDCs. The class is taken by Claude Trolliet, an earnest shirt-sleeved WTO employee who has been with the organisation for 10 years. ... To me, Trolliet says: "Providing assistance to developing countries was not one of the functions of the WTO when it was set up. We have had to change ourselves."

This summer British Airways cancelled its weekly freight flight from Lusaka [- the capital city of Zambia -], citing the rising cost of airline fuel as global oil prices soared. Zambia's growers, left with tonnes of rotting produce, had to scrabble around to find space on other flights or truck their goods out through South Africa.

One afternoon Ronnie Parbhoo, an old schoolfriend of Patel's, shows me round his milk-packaging plant in Livingstone. Parbhoo is one of the few remaining members of Livingstone's formerly thriving business community - as in much of southern and east Africa, this is largely ethnic Indian. ... He once owned one of Livingstone's 40 factories in a flourishing textile industry. But output collapsed under east Asian competition, aided by president Chiluba's decision, egged on by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, to slash protective tariffs rapidly in the early 1990s. So quick was the resulting implosion that most of the factory owners, disillusioned, left the country altogether. Of the 2,000 or so Indians formerly in Livingstone, about 150 are left. "The rest went to the US or Canada," Parbhoo says. "Or they are running corner shops in London." ... The industrial zone of Livingstone - now largely abandoned and overgrown, an African version of a midwestern American steel town - used to employ 10,000 workers. It now employs about 300, a third of whom work for Parbhoo.

Parbhoo sells his milk mainly to Zambians, limiting the size of his market. In theory, he could export his milk to Zimbabwe, but they don't have the hard currency to pay for it. Exporting it to Zambia's other southern African neighbours often runs foul of their hygiene rules - frequently used as a form of protectionism - and the country no longer has the government-backed testing facilities to make its own checks. It is, moreover, a long way across terrible roads to neighbouring countries, and the railway through Livingstone that crosses Zambia has been abandoned.

What is democracy?

(This post is a preliminary draft - comments are welcome. Last modified on 17th November 2005)

Political scientists and economists love to explore the relationship between democracy and socio-economic outcomes (Barro 1996, 1999; Przeworski et al. 2000; Bates et al. 2003; Glaeser and Shleifer 2005; Persson and Tabellini 2005). By democracy, however, we can mean different things. Unless we define democracy in a certain way, we are unable to develop a theory to understand the effect of democracy on, say, economic growth. It may be the case that some aspects of democracy are good for growth while others are not. Or, all aspects of democracy are complementary - a single aspect of democracy alone is not enough to ensure some outcomes; it works only if other aspects of democracy are also present.

Motivated by Levitsky and Way (2002)'s article on what they call "competitive authoritarianism", here I try to make a checklist for a country to be qualified as "democracy".

There are three stages to look at: (A) pre-election, (B) electoral process, and (C) post-election.

A: Pre-election

In the pre-election stage, the incumbent government lays the ground rule for competition for national political office (executive and legislature). A country is democratic at this stage if the following six criteria are met.

A1: Suffrage is universal - (nearly) all adults can vote.
A2: The executive is directly elected or indirectly elected by legislature.
A3: Elective legislature exists.
A4: Opposition parties are allowed to exist.
A5: No gerrymandering (ie. manipulating electoral rules and districts in favour of the ruling party) is undertaken.
A6: Press freedom is ensured.

Outright autocratic countries are disqualified at this stage - South Africa during apartheid did not satisfy A1 though it did satisfy A2-4. The military government seizing power by a coup is disqualified due to requirement A2, even if it satisfies A3 and A4 as is the case in Brazil during 1964-1985. The communist countries such as China and Cuba do not satisfy A4 while A2 and A3 may be satisfied - elections can take place without opposition such as Saddam Hussein, who claimed 100% voting share in an uncontested presidential election in 2002 (see a BBC article on it).

A1 is more subtle than it appears to be. In the United States South, black voters were de facto denied participation in elections by poll taxes and literacy tests until the 1960s. See Besley et al (2005).

Kenneth A. Bollen provides a dataset of suffrage across countries for 1950-2000. As long as you decide the threshold, you can tell whether or not A1 is satisfied in a country in a certain year with this dataset.

Acemoglu and Robinson (2005)'s theory of democratization mainly looks at A1 though the fact that in their model policies preferred by the median voter are adopted in a democracy implies that A2-A4 are implicitly taken into consideration. (If no opposition candidate is allowed to run for office, the single candidate can choose whatever policy he/she wants and gets elected.)

The minimalist way of defining democracy only looks at A2-4 (sometimes A1 as well). A good example is Przeworski et al. (2000)'s definition of democracy. As they are only concerned with the period after the Second World War, they ignore A1. But when you look back at pre-WWII periods, today's Western democracies initially didn't satisfy A1 by, for example, denying women their voting right. So Carles Boix, when he extends Przeworski (2000)'s dataset to the 19th and early 20th centuries, includes A1 as requirement for democracy.

The minimalist definition of democracy becomes problematic if you see countries such as Singapore, which satisfies A1-4 - it does satisfy A4: look at the list of political parties by Singapore-elections.com - but does not meet requirement A5 and A6. To avoid such complications, Przeworski et al (2000) come up with another requirement, which is to say power has to be alternated under the same electoral rule. This disqualifies Singapore as the same party has ruled the country ever since independence. This qualifying rule is quite successful to exclude "dodgy" democracies - Mexico and Senegal until 2000. But this is an outcome-oriented way of defining democracy. Theoretically, it's not clear whether, say, the Singaporean ruling party keeps power because of its undemocratic feature or because of its popularity among citizens. (Japan and Botswana are cases in point.) If you want to analyze the effect of democracy on political and economic outcomes, this is not appropriate to measure democracy. So I drop this requirement here.

A6 may not be appropriate either. Theoretically, press freedom is important to ensure that the incumbent's bad performance leads to electoral defeat - if voters do not know what the incumbents do, they may not want to vote them out. See Besley and Burgess (2002) and Besley and Prat (2005). So A6 is probably more appropriate to label as an institution complementing democracy, rather than a requirement for democracy. Freedom House's Press Freedom Survey provides yearly cross-country data on the degree of press freedom since 1980.

B: Electoral process

In the electoral process, the incumbents and opposition candidates compete for office given the conditions characterised by the above six aspects of pre-election. A country is called a democracy in this stage if it meets the following four criteria.

B1: Opposition candidates can freely run for office.
B2: Opposition candidates can freely conduct their electoral campaign.
B3: Voters can freely cast their ballots.
B4: Votes are neutrally counted.

Here what Levitsky and Way (2002) call competitive authoritarianism kicks in. It satisfies A1-A6 and B3-B4 more or less but it doesn't meet B1 and B2. B1 can be violated if the government arrests opposition politicians. B2 can be violated if the government denies opposition parties access to media.

B3 is related to the issue of secret balloting. Even in Western countries the secret ballots were introduced quite recently. See Baland and Robinson (2004).

B3 is also violated if voters are physically prevented from voting, as seen in Sri Lanka's 2005 election (in this case it's a rebel group, not the government, who prevented voters from voting, though).

The violation of B4 is what we call electoral fraud. The World Bank's Database of Political Institutions provides cross-country data (since 1975) on this (see variable FRAUD). Levitsky and Way (2002) point out that competitive authoritarianism often breaks down when it resorts to the violation of B4 - Marcos in the Phillipines and Milosevic in Serbia and Montenegro are cases in point. Ukraine's "Orange Revolution" can be included in this case though the incumbent himself didn't run.

C: Post-election

In the post-election stage, even the government elected in elections satisfying all the above conditions can become non-democratic if either of the following conditions is violated.

C1: The executive is checked and balanced by legislature and judiciary.
C2: Non-elective veto players do not intervene politics.

C1 is violated if a democratically elected president disbands legislature - such as Marcos in the Phillipines and Fujimori in Peru - or if the executive fires constitutional court judges after their ruling against the government. POLITY IV's "Executive Constraint" variable (named XCONST or EXCONST) measures this aspect of democracy, and according to North and Weingast (1989) - "Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in 17th Century England," Journal of Economic History, vol.49, pp.803-32 - this is an important factor for secure property rights.

C2 is violated if the military or some religious authority intervenes politics. Examples of the former case are Thailand until the early 1990s and Turkey while Iran is a typical example of the latter.

An Application - Zimbabwe since 2000 -

With this list in hand, this article by The Economist magazine on Zimbabwe's parliamentary elections in 2005 is much easier to understand.

(Note that MDC is the main opposition party in Zimbabwe, and ZANU is the ruling party led by President Robert Mugabe.)

This country satisfies conditions A1-A4. A1 may not be satisfied as

"the 3m-odd Zimbabweans, most of them very likely MDC backers, who have been driven into exile by economic collapse or government repression, are barred from postal voting."

(But it wasn't until 2000 that Japanese citizens living abroad were allowed to vote, either.)

But Zimbabwe violates almost all other criteria.

"Since last time, constituency boundaries have been gerrymandered. A handful of MDC-held seats in populous urban areas have been abolished and new constituencies demarcated in rural areas where land-hungry peasants are friendlier to ZANU. Some urban seats have been merged with neighbouring rural ones, where voters are more pliable and ballot boxes in remote parts more easily stuffed."

This is a violation of A5.

Zimbabwe's most independent newspapers, notably the Daily News, remain closed, and ZANU virtually monopolises radio broadcasts.

This is a violation of A6.

Human Rights Watch, a New York-based group, reported less violence than before but said that intimidation and partisan laws give ZANU a huge advantage. It enumerates dozens of recent cases of MDC people being beaten, kidnapped and harassed by police and ZANU thugs.

B1 seems violated as well.

During the last general election, thugs and veterans of the independence war were paid to kill opposition campaigners... Now, because he wants to avoid shocking observers from South Africa (even though he is letting in only those he thinks most sympathetic), he is adopting subtler rigging techniques.

B2 was violated in the previous election but to a lesser degree in 2005 as

the MDC and Mr Tsvangirai are being given a few minutes of air time on the state television news (followed, of course, by an hour or so of Mr Mugabe and other ZANU leaders).

In the 2002 presidential election, B3 was violated:

Two years later, in 2002, the MDC's leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, a trade unionist, would surely have unseated Mr Mugabe in a presidential election, had the police not beaten up opposition voters, blocked people from reaching polling stations...

In 2005, the situation remains the same as

villagers are being told that ZANU agents will know, by looking through the transparent new boxes, who has voted for the MDC.

In the 2000 general election, B4 was violated:

The MDC lodged complaints about alleged vote-rigging in 37 constituencies which ZANU was adjudged to have won; but the courts, heavily influenced by the president and his friends, have failed in the past five years to deal with a single such case.

In 2005, the situation remains the same:

Of a sample group of 500 voters, barely half were listed correctly. Nearly a fifth of those named were dead; officials ensure that such "ghosts" are loyal ZANU voters.

V&A Friday Late - Africa

This month's Friday Late at V&A features Africa, including Fashion In Motion (V&A's free catwalk show) by three African designers.

On the way from the School to V&A I felt a bit sick. Maybe I caught cold as the temparature in London was much lower than in Italy this week. But as soon as I watched West African drums and dance performance (by a group called Kaago) taking place as part of tonight's friday late opening event, I got upbeat. The V&A Cafe served African dishes tonight. I had Cameroon vegetable soup and Tanzanian coconut milk curry. The Cameroon soup had lots of pumpkins in it. Not too bad - certainly better than English soup. The Tanzanian curry was marvelous, making me feel like going to Tanzania.

And Fashion In Motion - the main attraction of tonight's Friday Late. (See pictures at the V&A website). The designers featured were Xuly Bet, Joel Andrianomearisoa, and Hassan Hajjaj - all Africans. The most interesting - I believe this was a consensus among the viewers - was the one by Hajjaj, a Moroccan designer. All the models wore a colourful burka made of Bedouin textile mixed with European one (a football player's t-shirt, for example). They appeared on the catwalk dancing and dancing - in Arabic style - instead of model-walking. The background music began with Arabic-flavoured dancable tunes and gradually turned into Sean Paul's Gimme Da Light - not the original one but the remixed version featuring Busta Rhymes. Crazy.

Somali cuisine

My Singaporean friend Linus loves trying obscure ethnic restaurants in London. I like to join his exploration. In the past he discovered the Ethiopian restaurant Menelik on Caledonian Road (see 14th November 2004) and the Turkish Bursa Inegol Koftecisi in Hackney (see 2nd April 2005).

Today, it's a Somali restaurant in Mile End Road: Tayo Restaurant. Everyone but us in the restaurant is Somali people, a good sign for authenticity.

When I arrived at the restaurant, Linus already had a spaghetti. Oh, yes, Italians colonised Somalia in the early 20th century. But, acoording to Linus, the taste is more of Indian. Yeah, East African coasts have a sizable population of South Asians because Muslim traders came to East Africa during the times of Islamic empires.

I don't know the name of what I ordered, something like meat and vegetable stew. It tasted like a Jamaican meal. Well, both countries have black people...

Accompanied with the stew was Somali bread, looking like Ethiopia's ingera (sour crepe). But it tasted different and good!

We noticed all Somali customers were easting bananas with the stew or other meals. Next time we should order bananas as well to have a proper Somali lunch.

The problem with such obscure ethnic restaurants is it is difficult to take girls there. Linus does take his girlfriends and enjoy seeing how they react. He's so mean. :)

Next door to the restaurant is a Somali clothes shop, where Linus got the incense and the decorated stand on which you burn incense with charcoal for the Ethiopian coffee ceremony. (Google "Ethiopian coffee ceremony, and you'll find its popularity!)

A replica Darfur hut, built by refugees from Darfur, western Sudan, in the front garden of the Museum of Childhood. Building this hut, say the Sudanese refugees, reminded them of their happy moments in Darfur.

Congo

This week's The Economist magazine features a special report on Congo (no subscription required). The following story in the article is quite intriguing.

Veronique, an office worker, was separated from her daughter by the war. When peace broke out, she booked an aeroplane ticket for her (penniless) girl to rejoin her. But before the daughter could board the plane, she was detained. Her yellow fever vaccination card had been stamped by rebel health authorities, and so was invalid, the officials tut-tutted. Alas, she had no money for a bribe.

But Veronique was able to send her the equivalent of cash by mobile telephone. She bought $20 worth of telephone cards. These give you a code number which you key into your phone and thereby "recharge" it with pre-paid airtime. Veronique called the obstructive officials and gave them her code numbers to recharge their own mobile phones. It took only minutes to send her bribe across the country?faster than a bank transfer, which would in any case have been impossible, since there is no proper banking system.