Articles — Jeffrey Sachs
Jeffrey Sachs writes a regular column for Project Syndicate, an international association of quality newspapers. To read all of Jeff’s columns for Project Syndicate, click here.An Interview with Jeffrey Sachs
by Stephen Bernhut
One could easily argue that development economist Jeffrey Sachs knows how to pick his spots – Poland, Bolivia, and the former Soviet Union, and projects – global poverty reduction, poor countries’ debt reduction, and disease control. But if Mr. Sachs has indeed picked his spots and projects he has certainly earned the right to do so. While an economist at Harvard University for more than 20 years and director of the school’s Center for International Development, Mr. Sachs served as an economic advisor to the governments of Bolivia, Poland and the Soviet Union, in the process helping to right their economies and implement economic reforms. He has also been a consultant to the IMF, World Bank, OECD, and the chairman of the Commission on Macroeconics and Health of the World Health Organization. Today, he is Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is also co-chairman of the Advisory Board of The Global Competitiveness Report.While Mr. Sachs has done most of his work in the public sphere he has done so with one, overriding intention – to improve the public good, namely to ameliorate the lives of poor people around the world. He is currently the Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan on a group of poverty alleviation initiatives, the Millennium Development Goals. In his latest book, The End of Poverty (Penguin, 2005), Mr. Sachs describes how the Millennium Project hopes to reduce extreme poverty, disease and hunger by 2015 (part of the UN's Global Compact, of which Ivey is a member). I began the interview by asking Mr. Sachs about some of the ideas he discusses in the book.
Ivey Business Journal: In The End of Poverty, you write that "clinical economics," as you call it, is one solution to leading people out of the poverty trap. Describe clinical economics?
Jeffrey Sachs: Clinical economics means doing economic development with the same precision and attention to science -- and I'd also add ethical standards -- as does the practice of good clinical medicine. Having been married to a clinical pediatrician now for 27 years, I’ve observed the essence of good clinical medicine, which is of course having a rigorous science base and then being able to provide a good differential diagnosis, as the doctors call it, to any particular patient and the patient's conditions.
Jeffrey Sachs's $200 Billion Dream
by Nina Munk
Jeffrey Sachs—visionary economist, savior of Bolivia, Poland, and other struggling nations, adviser to the U.N. and movie stars—won't settle for less than the global eradication of extreme poverty. And he hasn't got a second to waste.In the respected opinion of Jeffrey David Sachs—distinguished Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development at Columbia University, director of the Earth Institute, and special adviser to the secretary-general of the United Nations—the problem of extreme poverty can be solved. In fact, the problem can be solved "easily." "We have enough on the planet to make sure, easily, that people aren't dying of their poverty. That's the basic truth," he tells me firmly, without a doubt.
Making Development Less Risky
Innovative forms of insurance could unshackle a green revolution in Africa and other poor nations
By Jeffrey D. Sachs
Life at the bottom of the world's income distribution is massively risky. Households lack basic buffers-saving accounts, health insurance, water tanks, diversified income sources and so on-against droughts, pests and other hazards. The bodies of the poor often lack enough nutrients to rebuff diseases. Even modest shocks, such as a temporary dry spell or a routine infection, can be devastating.These risks have knock-on effects. To take one prime example, the expected economic return on the use of fertilizer use very high in Africa, yet impoverished farmers cannot obtain it on credit, because of the potential for a catastrophic loss in the event of a crop failure. Their households cannot bear the risk of a loan, and so-with no access to better agricultural inputs--they remain destitute.
Managing risk is therefore important not only for smoothing out the well-being of these farmers over the good and the bad years, but also for enabling their escape from extreme poverty. If the risks facing poor farm households can be reduced, their creditworthiness can be increased. And increased creditworthiness permits them to invest in higher-yield activities, including higher value-added farming.
How I'd fix the World Bank
Advice for the new chief: Roll up your sleeves and plant some seeds. What hungry Africa needs is action, not ideology, says Fortune's guest columnist Jeffrey Sachs.
by Jeffrey Sachs
NEW YORK (Fortune Magazine) -- The scandal-ridden departure of Paul Wolfowitz from the World Bank doesn't end its crisis. The trouble runs deeper.It goes to the core of the bank's mission to cut extreme poverty, hunger, and disease. In the earth's poverty hot spot, sub-Saharan Africa, the bank's approach is failing.
Just when the world has ramped up its verbal commitments to fight Africa's misery, the world's confidence in the bank is at low ebb. Despite endless talk, countless "missions" by bank staffers, and expensive studies, the bank has accomplished little in Africa for 20 years. Africans know it, and so do the bank's financial backers in the U.S. and Europe.
Africa will be the bank's test under incoming President Robert Zoellick. If it fails there, not only Africa but the bank will be in mortal peril.
World leaders have given Zoellick and his team a clear assignment: to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, a set of targets for cutting poverty, disease, and hunger by the year 2015.
The Democratization of Aid
by Jeffrey D. Sachs
The outpouring of aid in response to the Indian Ocean tsunami brought hope to a troubled world. In the face of an immense tragedy, working class families around the world opened their wallets to the disaster’s victims. Former US President Bill Clinton called this response a "democratization of development assistance," in which individuals lend their help not only through their governments but also through their own efforts.But, while more than 200,000 people perished in the tsunami disaster, an equivalent number of children die each month of malaria in Africa, a disaster I call a "silent tsunami." Africa’s silent tsunami of malaria, however, is actually largely avoidable and controllable.
A New Year's Resolution
by Jeffrey D. Sachs
It is time for New Year's resolutions, and this year's are obvious. When the millennium opened, world leaders pledged to seek peace, the end of poverty, and a cleaner environment. Since then, the world has seen countless acts of violence, terrorism, famine, and environmental degradation. In 2005, we can begin to change direction.Knowledge, scientific advance, travel, and global communications give us many opportunities to find solutions for the world's great problems. When a new disease called SARS hit China last year, the World Health Organization coordinated the actions of dozens of governments, and the crisis was quickly brought under control, at least for now.