Remarks by Professor Paul Collier
Professor of Economics, Oxford University Economics Department
Director, Centre for the Study of African Economies
Professorial Fellow of St Antony’s College
October 5, 2008
2020 Vision: Setting a Long-Term Agenda for Global Media Development
[David Hoffman, President of Internews Network and Chair of the Global Forum for Media Development, co-hosted the Salzburg event.]
Lord Mark Malloch Brown, Minister of State for Africa, Asia, and the UN, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, London
We have been talking here a lot here this weekend about how we can better muster official government resources to take do more immediate development in order to reach the unmapped parts of the world and the more complex societies etc... And we’ve also been thinking a lot on non-traditional sources of finance to make this area more addressable and bankable. But, I think everybody feels that the missing piece here, which you are so well placed to contribute to, is your thinking about both the case for why this matters and why, in a sense, media is not some sort of abstract thing but is in many ways critical for any strategy for bringing the bottom billion into the mainstream of the global economy. I will not talk much more at this point, but will turn the floor over to you.
Paul Collier
Thanks very much Mark.
Why does this matter? At the heart of the difficulties that the bottom billion have faced has been a failure of accountability – accountability of government. Of course, in the best of circumstances even with an accountable government doing its best, a lot of these countries have genuine difficulties. So, I don’t want to place all blame on the lack of accountability, though the lack of accountability is, I think, really important in explaining past failures.
Now, getting accountability is partly a matter of the institutions of democratic process, like elections, and in most countries of the bottom billion those formal institutions are now there though they do not generally perform very well. Elections work to discipline governments in two dimensions, honesty and effective policies, both of which are very important. But, they only work if life is breathed into those institutions, and the process of breathing life into those institutions is basically having an informed and organized society. A free and active media delivers both of those. It informs the society and it helps the society to organize around things that really matter. So, the media does not itself build the organizations, but it lowers the cost of organization. Partly it does that by allowing people to become aware that they all have access to similar information and that they all know similar things, thus making the coordination problem much lower, and, partly by highlighting what are the key issues are around which people should organize. Now, in the bottom billion I want to emphasize these two different aspects of accountability of government: honesty and good policy. Those are important but they are rather different. On the role of honesty, the relative importance of the media in making government honest is, I think, much greater in societies of the bottom billion than it is in developed societies. The very simple reason for that is that the formal institutions that trying to keep a government honest work less well in these societies. Power is more concentrated around the presidency of the elite. And so formal and the judicial institutions are less good at keeping governments honest. So they need to be strengthened by the media. The Media has a more important role.
In terms of good policy the media is absolutely critical, and it plays a difficult role. It’s difficult because the policy agenda for these countries is distinctive – its distinctive one from another – but it is also distinctive from agendas in developed countries. For example, both the commodity booms and the food crisis have created a very distinctive policy agenda in the societies of the bottom billion. They cannot learn what the key things for the government to do are from looking at our societies. There are not good external role models for them. They have to work it out for themselves. If the government happens to get it right, it has to sell those ideas to the population, and if the government does not happen to get it right – which it probably won’t – then somebody in the broader society has to be articulating, critiquing, and proposing alternative views – educating the government. For example, the commodity booms are a huge opportunity but they are also a huge temptation. The temptation is to throw a consumption party, which is great at the time. That’s what economists think of as economic populism. So in all these societies there are going to be huge pressures for populism – for the sort of snake oil remedies to problems. And so it is the responsibility of an informed media to get beyond that, to get beyond populism. It is hard because of course the population is less educated. And so you have a rather tough set of issues and a rather uneducated audience. So the skills, the journalistic skills for the media, are distinctive. It’s how to get a sometimes fairly sophisticated message over to an audience that lacks education.
All that is the role and then the challenge is that there is not much market for it. A typical society in the bottom billion is much smaller so you don’t have the same scale of economies. I was recently interviewed by a journalist from The Economic Times of India. He interviewed me at the Copenhagen consensus meeting. So he came from India to attend this meeting. And I was really impressed that Indian society was being informed about the deliberations of the Copenhagen consensus – a bunch of economists working on a set of policy issues. So I asked him what the circulation was of The Economic Times of India, and he said that the circulation was 1.2 million. Now, if you do the same ratio of population and think of The Economic Times of Zambia you would have a circulation of ten thousand. Not only would The Economic Times of Zambia not be able to afford to send a journalist to Copenhagen, but there is not an Economic Times of Zambia, a circulation of ten thousand just would not support such a newspaper. So, the typical society of the bottom billion lacks the scale to have a good quality conventional media, and by good quality I mean something like The Economic Times of India which is specialist and yet able to be mass.
Now what is the answer to that? I do not know but let me suggest it. I think that the answer is that the sorts of media that are going to be important in the society of the bottom billion are rather different. Above all there going to be radio. Because radio is cheap, it reaches a mass audience, it does not depend upon literacy, and we have seen the power, not just of radio but of slum radio. Think of Rwanda and the slum radio of Mille Collines. That power is the power to get people even on the streets, and so I would start by saying slum radio is where the action is going to be and the challenge is to get a good quality of news, coverage, and analysis into slum radio while not throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Slum radio has still got to be able to reach its audience. And that seems to me to call for a very high quality of journalism, but quality not in the sense of how you write for the Financial Times but how do you tailor the message for the audience you have got to reach. Now that is to things started and it’s now your turn to throw things back to me.
Mark Malloch Brown
Let me just say to you and to challenge you a bit on building that kind of informed media. Your definition of an informed media is one that shares your economic prescription and that is very, very difficult. You know, if you look at the British media or the American media, and the columns of the most highbrow bits of it, the New York Times or London Times, there is plenty of economic populism in its pages and often very little effort to explain complex government trade offs and policies. So how much more difficult are these challenges and this audience through these communication vehicles. It is absolutely the right goal, but can you train journalists who are able to reduce economic prescriptions to sound bites for radio which the inhabitants of the slums of Rwanda are willing to listen to. So any thoughts you have on how we do that would be important. And secondly you stress radio, and in that I think you are right, but of course there is the issue of whether this extraordinary growth in cell phone usage in the bottom billion market and a much slower growth, but still significant growth, in internet usage and the various ways of distributing the internet, and whether those will over time catch up with radio as serious distribution channels.
Paul Collier
It is certainly not the case that there is a received economic wisdom and that has to be distilled to a population. There is a range of healthy disagreement out of which a new consensus comes out. But it is important to have buffers on the range of the policies that any society can enter. What an informed media does, in an almost unnoticed sort of way, it places buffers on the range of policies that are considered sensible. In Britain and Europe think about trade policy has evolved over the last century. In response to the recession following the Wall Street crash, all western governments went into really heavy trade protectionism. Which was disastrous, but it happened. We are probably going into another recession, and there will be protectionist pressures coming up from below, and I think to a large extent they will now be resisted, because societies just better now understand what a fools game that is. And so those are the sort of implicit buffers that are being placed on the range of policy thanks to having more informed societies.
To my mind, for many societies of the bottom billion the single most important question of the moment is whether they use the commodity boom revenues for some investment or whether these revenues will all be spent on consumption. Some of it should be spent on consumption, but a large chunk of it – on the order of half let’s say – should go into investment so that these booms, that are that are now looking all too temporary, can be harnessed for sustained development. Now, ordinary people in the bottom billion are perfectly capable of understanding that issue. Why? Because they live their daily lives, lives full of economic shocks, and they understand the business of coping with shocks and taking opportunities when they are around. So these are not issues that are beyond the grasp of ordinary people. But they are issues where populist politicians will be awfully tempted to squander. I’ve not following the Ghanaian election at all closely, but clearly there is a temptation for politicians in that election, especially in that late state of the election, to promise the earth and the moon. Ghana has discovered oil, and if we are not careful the politicians would have promised the revenues several times over in terms of commitments to higher recurrent expenditure. And so it’s healthy for the media to be able to say: “Hey that isn’t sensible, that is not wise. We have an opportunity to get ourselves decisively out of polity with these assets that are assets not just for ourselves but for our children, and in depleting these assets we better replace them with some other assets.” So it’s a message that’s possible to communicate.
On the second point, I think at the moment it is first and foremost it is radio. I think cell phones are very exciting, but how many information you can get over cell phones is a question. Cell phones are great for organization. If you want to get a mass NGO going and you get people organized, cell phones are pretty good. Getting an informed message out I think is much harder. The problem with the internet at the moment is just sheer access. Hopefully that will change. It actually requires some quite big infrastructure investments as more and more global material really requires broadband to download. We run and I direct a research center on Africa which has a website, and it looks like a really boring website. I keep grumbling to my IT-officer, “Why is our website so boring?” And he says because anything that makes it look attractive makes it impossible to download in Africa. And there is the trade off at the moment – most websites are not geared to the thought of Africa. So we actually have to face the infrastructure requirements of broadband and we need some billionaires who are willing to step up to that plate on that plate on it.
Jaime Abello Banfi, CEO, Ibero-American New Journalism Foundation
You just said that the key point in strengthening of an independent media is accountability. I agree with you, but at least in Latin America we have a big problem in that that accountability is also the main argument against the media. Media in our countries have been accused of lack of accountability, lack of transparency, and being part the major political power structure. For instance, the UNDP conducted an interesting study about democracy in Latin America two or three years ago and found that that the majority of people surveyed thought that the media in Latin America act more like an actor of the power system than an independent service to benefit the majority of the people. I think this is a fundamental contradiction and I would like to know your position about that problem.
James Dean, Head of Policy Development, BBC World Service Trust
Hi Paul. I thought that was fantastic. I am head of policy development at the BBC World Trust, and I just want to get a bit more into this whole issue of market failure within the media.
What you are saying is that there is a critical role of the media to play in bottom billion countries. They have a public good role, and the market can not sustain that role on its own. So there is a market failure. And on top of that I would argue that there are a whole set of arguably increasing disincentives for the media to play this investigative journalism and accountability role and maybe an increasing set of incentives for it not to do so and to instead go after the advertising dollar and the consumer dollar, and so on.
And I suppose the question is twofold. First of all, to what extend is there a serious economic analysis of the media in relation to the public good role it plays in bottom billion countries, and where the market failures are in relation to that. If we have a clearer idea of that, then organizations like those around this table can better organize their work. And the second is what you are pointing to now, and what you have argued for quite some time. But, one of the things we are struggling with around this table is that the whole area of media development and media support, and even the identification of what precisely the problem is, is so poorly structured within the development system and the aid architecture that it is all really quite chaotic and there is no real locus of serious debate and action, as well as a real lack of strategic coherence to our efforts. Why do you think this is given the arguments that you are making about the media’s centrality to affect economic development in bottom billion countries?
Paul Collier
I think I might start with that second question and then turn to the accountability of the media. Let’s just think where the development discussion has gotten to. The fall of the Soviet Union enabled what had already been realized, I think, which was that the heart of the economic failure was a political failure. So, the fall of the Soviet Union enabled the spread of an institution of accountability which was elections. That was the big thing that was rolled out across the bottom billion after the fall of the Soviet Union: Elections.
And the rationale for elections was not just that they were decorative, it was that they were functional and that they were critical in achieving the accountability of government to citizens, and once you got accountability of government to citizens, you get better development performance across a wide range. So that was the theory, and it was not a stupid theory. But it was wrong. And it was wrong because there was overreliance to elections relative to everything else. And I think that this is now fairly widely accepted. This is not an occasion to advertise my next book, but let me say that in February I have a book coming out which basically argues just that – that we have over relied on elections and that the quality of elections depends both upon the conduct of elections and underlying that is the ability of citizens to be informed. If you have an uninformed citizenry, elections just won’t work. So I think this is where the international development community has gotten to, and as it were, the time is ripe to make the argument that what we have reached with that analysis is to say: “yes, there is a public good role for informing citizens. Elections are a public good.” But they are sort of supplied, and what it took to supply elections was the fall of the Soviet Union. That created momentum for spreading elections, and now it is recognized that that only works if we complement elections with an informed society. How do we get that? Well, that is the public good role of the media. Have we got these media? No, because there is a public good role and there is no finance to that public good role. Indeed far from there being finance for it, there is actually a hostile environment to it because governments have realized that they can evade accountability while still having elections as long as they muzzle the press or buy the press.
And this comes to the second point which about the accountability of the media, because a bad government can contaminate the press in various ways. One way is simply to muzzle it, and of course another way is to buy it. Now in that environment citizens encounter a double layer of difficulty. They are starved of information and they don’t even know how much trust to place in information sources that are available to them. And some of those information sources will indeed be highly contaminated. Now, I would just like to suggest that there might be a role for international verification here. I am very keen quite generally on international verification, international standards, and voluntary roles supported by international verification processes in whole range of areas. I just speculate, and I just throw open to you really, whether the is a role for this sort of thing in the domain of the media and whether getting some more clear, high profile international standards both at the level of government as a whole but also at the level of individual media, and creating a verification process which assesses and rates media. There are various in which you can rate media, but getting some rating system, even if it is voluntary and non-governmental, can provide yardstick competition – nobody wants to be rated badly, so you get peer pressure – and can also enable citizens to try and sort out sheep from goats, which within their own societies they cannot do because even the information from within the society that says “you can trust this media source” is not trustworthy, or is not regarded as trustworthy. And so we need something external to the society that people can trust. And I think there is actually quite a lot of trust in international civil society. And so something that comes out of international civil society and provides a rating service for media, may very well be a very useful way forward. We have seen it in other areas and we have seen it have quite dramatic effects, I think.
There is a value of the press and there is the value of an informed society. There is some work going on, some of it my own and a lot of it other peoples, on whether you can qualify the benefits to media freedom in terms of better economic performance or better policy. And also whether you can also in some way show that the quality of economic performance and of economic policies depends upon the level of education and the level of knowledge of the citizenry. I don’t think this has been by any means nailed yet. I think it is a doable research agenda and it is probably an agenda that within the next 2 or 3 years will probably see a lot of progress. So it is worth watching to see what is coming. I think it is pretty clear what the answers will be. I mean, just think, some of these famous phrases, for example when Britain extended the franchise and one of the government ministries famously said: ‘Now must we educate our masters.’ Having people vote without education is just damn dangerous. And so you have to raise education standards. It seems to me unexceptionable that there will be a payoff to an informed citizenry in a democracy. How ever else is a democracy expected to work?
This isn’t the issue of how do you get a good quality journalism on economic issues in a society where there is no market for economic journalism, or a very limited market, because to a large extend in that case you just will not get the profession of economic journalism. And that seems to me the heart of the problem in a lot off these societies – that the market for that profession is just too small to support economists becoming journalists or journalists becoming economists. So in some way we need to lower the cost of either journalists acquiring some greater competence in handling economic issues or of economists gaining some greater competence in reaching out to a larger audience. Probably the sensible thing is to try both. I know for example that the World Bank Institute has tried to do a lot of training of journalists – that is it started from the end and worked from the profession of economic journalists and tried to improve their understanding of economic issues. So that is one approach. I have been trying to take the other approach because there are several hundred economists in Africa, usually based at universities or think tanks, and many of them come together twice a year in Nairobi in an organization called the African Economic Research Consortium, which is a twenty year old institution that has tried to build and retain economic capacity in Africa’s universities and think tanks. There is a real problem that each time you get good people they hemorrhage to the United States, or to South Africa, or to the international institutions. So the AERC has done a really good job of trying to retain skilled African economist on the continent. But they do not know how to communicate with ordinary people and there has been no incentive for them to do so. And so in teaming up with Reuters on a little initiative we have been trying to bring journalistic skills to African economists.
I am delighted that the BBC World Service is represented at this meeting because, fortuitously, not only does this meeting of African economist does take place in Nairobi every six months, but of course the BBC World Service has a big office in Nairobi from which it broadcasts to Africa. And so my idea is to pull in some of the world’s top financial journalists, people like Martin Wolf, who I happen to have known for a long time, and to try to get him, with his prestige and skills, to show African economists how they can shape an issue and present it in a media friendly way. And as I said, to my mind the key medium is radio. So my whole idea is to get the top performing economists at the AERC at each meeting to do a little competition and present and eventually persuade the BBC World Service to broadcast that on the Africa Service, and from that gradually build up a list of African economists in Africa that can be contacted for comments. I should just close by saying I got this idea because I was contacted by the BBC World Service while I was in Nairobi to ask “will you comment on some latest economic event in Nigeria.” The BBC World Service is always trying me to comment on things. And I was surrounded by Nigerian economists, so I said to BBC World Service: “How about I get a Nigerian economist to phone you back in 20 minutes?” BBC World Service was happy about that. And then I went to my Nigerian friends and said: “Here is your chance.” And to be honest they looked like frightened rabbits. And then I though about it and I didn’t blame them. It has taken me a long time to basically learn how to confront a microphone and speak into it, essentially in sound bites. They did not have that skill, and they knew they didn’t. Giving them that confidence and that skill is part of the training. So to conclude we need to work from both ends. We need an initiative to give African journalists greater competence in handling economic issues and African economists greater competence in handling an audience.
Thank you. I better just close by saying there is a really good case for public money to go into this effort. Public effort went into spreading elections, and we now recognize that they did not work. Not because they were not the right idea of accountability, but they were not enough. What makes elections work? An informed society. How do we get one? The public good aspects of the media. Is that public good aspect adequately supplied at the moment? No it isn’t. Is there money available to supply it? Yes there is. We just need an architecture to match money with need. Thank you.
