 You probably have some questions to defend, Elina? So what are the three countries where the IA doesn't work? I'll tell you which the three countries are. One is the Comoros, that's really important, right? That's just a very special case, I mean an extremely small country. But then there are two countries which are important, Ghana and Tanzania. And we have studied those two and we are right almost, we adjusted the brink of coming up with why is it that you cannot with the standard time series model find it. That is because in the Tanzanian case, because President Nierere did not understand macroeconomics. Unfortunately, he was only concerned about nation building, which was a good thing, but he did not understand that when his exchange rate kept going up and up and up and became overvalued, that completely screwed his economy. That's not in itself news. I mean Ben Wendul, who gave the presentation this morning, I mean he was in the 1980s, he was the key advisor or a professor at the University of Dias Alam, who was making exactly this point. But it's the first time that we've been able to show that when you account for that fact in a time series analysis, then you have the explanation. And from around 1987, Tanzania is like the rest. So in other words, the reason why you don't find it yet in the data is that first period. And that had nothing to do with whether aid works or not. That had something to do with good old President Nierere, who had a different agenda. And that really was not because of aid. If you wanted to blame aid anything in that context, it was maybe that it kept him going a little bit longer than he otherwise would have been able to. And then you're saying, oh, but does that mean that aid, to some extent, that's because we gave him the benefit of the doubt. We actually supported his nation-building project, right? The other country, Ghana, that is simply because the 1980s in Ghana are really characterized by pretty big swings. Well, you have all seen the pictures of leaders getting executed on the beach and so on. So I mean, this was just such an incredibly swinging period that that simply does not, I mean, it doesn't give you anything when you put it into the data. It's just, you can't get it, quite frankly. Again, from around 1987 onwards, Ghana is the standard story. So, yeah. Yeah, I don't know who, do I just, please, okay. And maybe you can say something about the definition of aid and the perceived self-interest of the downloaded countries. Sure, sure. First of all, when we use aid in these types of analysis, we typically use DAX figures. And that's essentially because that's the only place where you over many years have collected systematically information on aid that goes from the DAX and also some other countries to developing countries. And it's the only sort of systematic database that's available. That database has a number of deficiencies when you get down to details. One of the reasons why you will not find very many studies of the impact of disaggregated aid. So the impact of budget support, the impact of different types of aid is because then the database becomes quite weak. But we do have numbers on the total sum. So that's why some of us tend just to focus on the total. Because that's a number that we have over the years. There is another database under construction by something called aid data, but they are looking purely at microdata. So they're purely looking at individual projects. And one of the reasons why the DAX database is important and interesting is because it gives this macro story or this gives this macro. Because again, you can do as many studies as you want at micro. And I used to do that in the 1980s and 1990s. And every time I came up with a new story, I was just told, oh, but it doesn't work in aggregate anyway. So you're just wasting your time. Now in terms of the interest of the donors, there are plenty of studies to show a few things. First of all, that relatively more aid does go to relatively more poor countries. So to say that the level of poverty has no impact on aid giving is wrong. More aid does go to poorer countries, relatively speaking. And that's actually one of the, sorry, if I can just make a parenthesis, this is exactly one of the reasons why this attribution problem is so complicated. Because when poor countries get richer, then what happens to the aid? Then the aid goes down. So when you just look at the plot, then it looks as if the richer the country is, the less aid you have, ah, so the less aid you have, the better you are. But that's actually analytically complicated to separate out. Parenthesis finished. When it comes then to other arguments for why donors give aid, oh, there's absolutely no question that these motives, they're not pure. There are in established academic literature. It's shown that there is the so-called Egypt and Israel factor. We analytically tend to try to handle it by what we call a dummy. In other words, you simply put in an effect to try to capture the impact that these two countries are so special. Why? Well, they've gotten so much bloody aid from the US over so many years, right? Now that's where the Afghanistan and so on factor kicks in now. It's also well established that you give more aid to your former colonies. It's also well established that you give more aid to countries where you have more commercial interest. So all of that is absolutely, you know, that's not in doubt. It's not like pure and simple. But at the same time, while I call myself a development economist and I'm probably more development economist, I tend to think of resources, of savings and investment and so on, like things that are important. I mean, I'm not saying it's important in any simple way, but I do know from what I have studied over the years that in order to grow and develop, you need savings and you need investments and these savings can come either from domestically or from internationally. And it's bloody hard to save in a very poor country. So, well, so that sort of... But one should not have illusions. And there are also aid administrations that are influencing the aid and those motives are not always nice and clear and simple. But at the end of the day, I mean, if I were to be sort of a bit brutal, if money actually arrives in Mozambique and over 25 years actually keeps that country hanging together, helps build infrastructure, helps put kids in school, helps vaccinate kids, helps build dwells, helps get the government administration to function minimally, do I really care exactly what drives that? Well, if you talk about the effect in the media, if you would call it investment money for, in my case, Dutch companies, sounds very different than when you call it aid. You have totally different discussions about the same thing. Yeah, sure, no. But that may be one of the ways to phrase it. I mean, I don't know. I mean, can we come up with a different... I tend not to speak about aid. I tend to speak about development cooperation. But I mean, I've sort of been forced into this boxing kind of... Yeah. You raised up interesting question because how we should call this? Because over the decades, as far as I remember, there have been different styles of doing the development cooperation or helping the poorest countries. And in Finland, we made the modern process for a while. Now we are supporting different classes from all countries. How do you see these kind of trends and how do they affect that? What seems to be working? Well, all evidence that I have access to is suggesting that in general, it's very hard to separate out a very strong difference between budget support and project aid. Because essentially, it's like when you're in your garden. And then there you have a shovel and you have a spade. You use the spade for certain purposes and you use your shovel for other purposes. I mean, these different tools, they're used for different purposes. And they have different sort of effects, yes, but when you're talking about the overall picture, when do you give budget support? When you give budget support, when you are in countries where you want that country to build up its own auditing institutions, is then you need to sort of get into, you can call it a training process, if you wish, that you have to give a block of money for that institution to learn how to do that, to manage that, to audit it, to follow it. But you can also have project aid in complicated, in Guinea-Bissau. I mean, of course, nobody would ever even dream of giving budget support to Guinea-Bissau because in Guinea-Bissau, the central administration doesn't work. So in Guinea-Bissau, what do you do? And then you try to go in with specific project activities, with specific so-called interventions where you either build a road or you try to disarm some, you know, I mean, where at least you can sort of keep that type of control. So in my view, I mean, I have never really seen any sort of really convincing evidence where you can distinguish clearly between these different types of laws. Yeah, please. So you mentioned Mozambique and that if the aid keeps it hanging in there for 20 years, that's a good thing. But what do you say to criticisms that come from the developing countries where you frequently hear them saying that aid keeps them sort of, say, sort of addicted to aid so they don't do anything themselves to change. So for example, if they get aid for science, they don't bother to invest their own money into research. So what do you say, I mean, do you have any evidence in that? How many cigarettes do you have to smoke a day to become addicted? How many cigarettes? I mean, no, to become really addicted and have a problem, or for that matter, how many rum and coax do you need per day to become addicted? I mean, two, five, ten? Try to think about what I said before about the size of the aid. Do you really genuinely believe that on average, three and a half dollars per person per year, and in when it really goes high, 25 dollars, do you really think that that is sort of leading to that addiction? I have to say that I just can't, I mean, I just can't make the calculus square. I mean, I certainly understand, and I illustrated that with a Tanzania example, that there have been specific examples where this happened, absolutely. But in general, in general, aid pulls out when these things happen. Aid was pulled out in the 1980s, because countries were not quite sort of doing what they were supposed to do. So that sort of addiction thing, I mean, for me to get really addicted, I need a bottle of rum every day for a while, and the money is just not big enough to buy that bottle of rum a day for a long time. Yes, I hope you don't mind if I disagree with you on what you just said. When you say the media doesn't cover aid or aid, it's because in the media we know from experience that what people want to hear is not a long list of statistics, but a story with a human content. They want to know about their fellow human beings. So in fact, my perception of aid has always been that it stacks money from ordinary people, mostly in the West, but also Japan and a few other such places. And it's supposed to have a positive impact, again, on ordinary people, in places like Africa, where people are so much poor. I've never heard a convincing case that it's supposed to have a macroeconomic effect, positive or negative. It's a response to a perception of need, and I wish to address that need. So to that extent, addiction is actually much easier than you'd imagine, because that $25 per person per year is not spread through the millions of people. It's usually focused on specific projects. And if people see a project spring up from nowhere, like say in Northeastern Kenya, which is very dry, norad or cedar or whoever come in and put a series of watching points for the camel herders or the goat herders or the cattle herders, if those wells are dry because they're not being properly looked after, because these are nomadic people. They move all over the place. They don't stay in one place. Of course, they don't say what can we do for ourselves. They say, okay, so that was a negligence. When are the French coming to dig a few wells here? Because the psychology is one of help comes from the outside. So I'm not saying I'm sympathetic to those who criticize aid and say it shouldn't be there, but the fact is that if I receive help from no apparent reason, from people who are not asking me to give them anything back, I begin to have a view of the world which is full of good people who if you only ask them nicely, they'll give you a thing. And that's no different from a woman I saw as I was walking from the earlier conference. This one sitting on the side of the road with a cup in her hand. If she sits there for four days and no one gives her money, she'll go away. If every day two or three kind people give her money, she will continue sitting there. So it's a matter of psychology, not statistics. There are lots of things in what you're saying. Let me try and see whether I can give a comment. The first thing is that I do believe that the macro story is important because it certainly is not brought up when down by tomorrow you're standing here and speaking. People then take it in. When the economist is using the story, it's aid down the rat hole. I mean, so there must be something out there which is also happening at that macro level. I do understand the issue about that you need the human stories, but they are there. If you look behind the statistics, I mean just take for example these various reports that are now being prepared because of the post 2015 development agenda. If you actually dig behind those numbers, they're human beings. And you are seeing actually the poverty numbers have decreased very substantially compared to what it otherwise would have looked. And those are human beings. If you're looking at educational standards, I mean have you actually checked how many boys and girls are actually now actually going to school and that actually girls are almost at the same rate as boys in Africa? I'm not then trying to say everything is good. It's not. There is a lot still to be achieved. But compared to 15 years ago, it is. And there are human, I mean, there are stories there to be told. Now, when you then are talking about when aid sometimes and it does sometimes do that if they go in and they haven't done proper preparatory work. But a lot of aid is not just something that drops down from heaven. It is actually very often associated with a whole range of preparatory processes and you would say conditionalities. And there's nothing in what I have said which has any implications for what I consider the best way of that relationship. I've actually put in writing that I personally find that aid should be considered a contractual relationship in general. Now, then you have a problem. What do you then do when you're having a country where it's very difficult to have a contractual relationship because there's no government? What do you do? I mean, then it's a little bit sort of difficult to do. I believe that they can still do something sensible. Does that mean that that wasn't an Norwegian project up where in some that sort of got somebody to think, well, I think that Africa has a general problem that there is unfortunately still a tendency for people to expect that they are entitled to get a share. And if one of your family members is doing very well like Beno Ndoulou, who is now central bank governor in Tanzania, then he says, well, my cousins, they're still expecting that they can get their share of my salary. But that's not the fault of aid. Excuse me. I mean, that's another set of mechanisms. That's another set of history. That's another set of entitlement expectations that are built up over long historical processes. I hope you see that I am trying to respond, but that it can be sometimes a bit difficult to say yes or no. I'll just add on to the point that my colleague Beno. It's all fine that aid works on several levels, and that's not a question here, I think. But because you had posed the question in the beginning and you were provocative in your approach, I wish to address that particular thing that you said on how journalists don't report on the positive side. But I think the fact that economists use language that's very detached from the audiences that we write for and use so much data and use academic writing to support their points, it's really hard for journalists to actually sit down, filter through all that information and come up with a good story. Now, we're not saying that the stories don't exist. There's good stories about aid and there's really good stories to be told locally about the impacts of aid on the economy and on different areas of the country. But the fact remains, economists are really hard to interview. Economists are hard to access, especially locally. I'm from the Pacific, and in my country, there's only three qualified economists. So when I want to write about aid, if I don't get the data online, I have to find an economist to try and translate this data to terms that my readers would understand. But even talking to an economist is really hard because they still speak in a language that is very different and detached to those that my audience would understand. So there's several layers there. That's the reason why we don't necessarily write positive stories about aid, apart from the fact that it's better to write a story that is more towards the angle that will actually make a difference. Writing negative stories per se on aid actually improves aid in the country. For instance, if aid funding is mismanaged and I've written about it, it means that future aid that comes into the country is better managed and more transparent. So therefore there's a lot to be said for stories that do cover the other aspects of aid. But in defense of journalists, I just want to say that it's data. It's a data issue. I'm sure there's data out there. I'm positive there is. I've seen it. But I don't have the time to sit down for hours, read through your academic papers, go through your numbers, and then localize the story. So if you can present it to me better. So you want the economists to do your work? No, you see, I understand what you're saying. I mean, clearly there is a communication issue and that I recognize. It's absolutely clear and I completely... One of the reasons that we are trying to do this work, one of the reasons that I'm here rather than writing another academic paper is because I like to communicate about it. And I am trying to speak relatively directly and communicate the best I can. And I have not even put one single formula up there today. I've not even put one... So that is, of course, because I share this and I do understand. I mean, I'm one of the people who are flunking students for their exams when they don't speak in clear language, right? So I understand what you're saying, but I obviously was referring more to information-rich contexts. And I can assure you that in the north, in the developed countries, there is a lot of information available which the journalist could pick up, which is not being picked up. And that was the one I was referring more specifically to. I think it's fair to say that there are, of course, also information poorer, more constrained situation, absolutely. But it is, for me, a little bit of a paradox why, for example, Björn Lumböck, who says that the world has absolutely no problem with environmental change, can go on being cited in all of the nice places, whereas all the academic evidence is piling up. I mean, that's another illustration of the same thing. And it's a little bit that which I'm reacting towards. I do recognize that lots of economists, they speak with wool in their mouth and they're very hard to understand. I don't understand them many times. But then I insist that I need to understand. Then maybe you could push them, kick them, say that they won't get in the news if they don't become clear.