UN 63rd General Assembly Summit Got Underway Monday

Yesterday, on Monday, September 22, the 63rd UN General Assembly meetings got underway.  As an annual confab, it features a parade of speeches by heads of state and foreign ministers and the Secretary General.  This year had a couple of special items.  One was President Bush’s farewell address at the UN.  A second-US-centric event was the arrival of Governor Sarah Palin to meet with various world leaders in NY.  A third was the address by Iranian president Ahmadinejad to the General Assembly in which he announced that the American empire was near collapse.  French President Sarkozy called for those responsible for the financial crisis to be held accountable and “punished” and further called for a global credit crisis summit of world leaders.  Secretary General Ban Ki Moon expressed doubts about the “magic” of markets.

This General Assembly opening session was supposed to focus on Africa and its development needs.  The Secretary General is holding a special Thursday meeting to focus on this issue and more generally on the state of the Millennium Development Goals and their funding.  In theory, the developed countries are supposed to contribute roughly $72 billion a year to meet the official aid targets of the MDGs.  In reality, the amounts contributed are somewhere around half that amount.  The Secretary General has strongly criticized the rich world for not coming through on its pledges.

Critics, including me, think that the whole pledge deal elevates supply of capital over what can efficiently be done with it.  There are important areas where drastic and immediate increases in aid are critical today – principally in food aid, where the relevant UN agencies are widely regarded as efficient and effective.  As food prices have escalated worldwide, the need to keep price just to meet inflation increases is clear.  (Of course, reform of agricultural trade barriers and subsidies by the US and EU would make a big long term difference; US ethanol policy, putting the raw materials of food directly in competition with fuel, on the basis of economics seemingly workable only with substantial governmental subsidy, also has something to do with the price of tortillas in Mexico and corn in other places.)

With respect to much of the rest, however, the argument for simply increasing official development assistance from governments as though it were self-evident that because it exists, it will do what it is supposed to do – or even do something not harmful – is far from clear.  If there is such a thing as – per the SG – over-believing in the magic of markets, there is also, at the UN, such a thing as over-believing in Jeffrey Sachs and the idea that centrally planned five year plans out of UN headquarters can accomplish what fantastically large sums of money have so far failed to accomplish over decades and decades.  This is not counsel of despair; if I thought vast sums would do the job even minimally, I would urge it, but I think the evidence is so much the other direction that the reason it is not recognized as such by UN officialdom can only be explained by public choice theory and rent seeking – give us the money for the sake of giving us the money.  If you want to tell me that I merely find Easterly more persuasive than Sachs, well, yes.

Half a billion people are today not in poverty who were in poverty in 1990 – and the reason is overwhelmingly foreign private investment, not official aid, most of it in China.  Relief of poverty in the world can benefit from some large scale funding and  projects – in public health, such as vaccinations – but a much larger part takes place at the retail level, the grinding retail level in which it doesn’t matter how much supply you turn on, it cannot effectively used at the village level except very slowly, drip by drip by drip.  Cell phones – which can  be facilitated in part by public infrastructure, large scale investment, but which require private businesses to work effectively – will have more impact on alleviating poverty than most large scale aid enterprises with official development assistance.  And the aid projects that take place will mean very little over the longer term without stabilizing improvements in national and local governance – the gains will disappear and, especially, private investment will either evaporate or not take place.  

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The UN General Assembly meetings are being overshadowed this year almost completely by the financial crisis.  This is so today, in this year, 2008.  But I have been struck for the last couple of years by how little interest we international law professors show in the actual workings of the UN.  When was the last time you saw an announcement in a US law school of a conference on the UN as such?  Well, I don’t include me; I have long had a deep interest in the actual workings of the place, no matter how irrelevant it seemed.  Whereas the public international law professoriat seems to have deep commitments to the idea of the UN as a locus of global governance, but surprisingly little interest in what it is actually doing, how it is actually working day to day, and – in particular – nearly zero interest in anything having to do with the UN and its budget and its resources and its money.  The contrast with the intense interest shown by academics in international tribunals, their inner workings, their jurisprudence, seems to me quite instructive.  I myself – and I’m sure to sharp disagreement from our beloved readership – think that this reflects that fact that, although committed to the UN, academic observers are committed in a platonic but not actual sense – and that international tribunals are far more attractive and interesting, in part because they are interesting to lawyers, but also in part because they have a certain independence from the UN itself. I think we international professors are faintly embarrassed by the General Assembly and try not to think about it and its appendages too hard.