A bit of Balkan kabuki

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The Bulgarians arrested Agim Ceku last week! But then, after a couple of days, they let him go. Serbia is upset.

Who is Agim Ceku, and why should you care?

Well, Agim Ceku is a very important Kosovar Albanian. He was an officer in the Yugoslav army and then, after 1991, he was a commander in the Croatian Army during their war against the Serbs. Then, after that, he was chief of staff of the Kosovar Liberation Army during the 1999 Kosovo War. Later, he was Prime Minister of Kosovo. He’s sort of retired now, or at least politically in eclipse, but he’s still one of the most important political figures in Kosovo.

The Serbs say he’s a war criminal. They have indictments against him for various horrible acts, including genocide. They tried him in absentia for some of them, back in 2002, and convicted him to 20 years in prison. They’ve managed to get an Interpol warrant for his arrest. So, Interpol member states are supposed to assist in capturing Ceku and, if necessary, extradite him to Serbia.

There have been several attempts to do this. None have yet succeeded. The most recent was last week, when Ceku visited Bulgaria. He was stopped at the border, then detained, while a Bulgarian court considered whether to hand him over to Serbia. After a couple of days the Bulgarians decided no, they weren’t going to do that, and Ceku went free. The Serbian government has expressed outrage, outrage! Ceku is still in Bulgaria but should be heading back to Serbia soon.

So why should anyone care? Continue reading →

Health Care Reform: A Bull in China’s Apothecary Shop?

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As the healthcare debate continues raging in the US, universally covered Europeans look on smugly from the sidelines.  (Well, not all Europeans.    Tim Worstall argues that high US health spending is the successful application of the will of the market.) 

Meanwhile, President Obama has been telling his staff to read Atul Gawande on the weak relationship between spending and the quality of health provision across the US.  Gawande argues that high costs are driven by unnecessary treatment rather than better care. 

There’s a similar story to tell across the Pacific.  In the 1970s, China had a cooperative medical system that provided coverage to 90 percent of the rural population.  A series of reforms since then have introduced fee for service and health insurance schemes.  These reforms have increased costs, but it is hard to see much impact on improved levels of health.  Per capita health spending increased seven-fold in rural areas over the period 1990-2002, but rates of progress in health outcomes have dramatically slowed. 

That’s in part because the quality of care provided can be pretty grim, not least because of the incentives of the fee for service model.  Over-prescription of drugs is a particularly big problem.  In 1999, a study of eight village clinics in Chongquing and Gansu provinces found less than 0.06% of prescriptions handed out were deemed reasonable by the doctors in the survey team.  

China isn’t the United States, of course.  But it does provide stark evidence that health care reform can have a dramatic impact on the efficiency of provision –for good or ill.

Ingushetia, boom

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So someone tried to blow up Yunus-Bek Yevkorov last week. Almost got him, too: they seem to have killed several members of his entourage, including his cousin, and Yevkorov himself is currently in a Moscow hospital with burns and a ruptured liver. He’s expected to live, though.

We wrote about Mr. Yevkorov a few months ago:

Yevkurov was appointed by Moscow late last year to replace the notoriously corrupt, unpopular, and none-too-competent incumbent. The timing was interesting: just a couple of months after the Georgia conflict. Ingushetia is next door to South Ossetia and just a short drive from Georgia. In retrospect it looks like Moscow decided it could no longer afford to have a loyal-but-hated tool running things in this strategic region, and decided to appoint the most plausible possible Ingush instead.

It’s damnably difficult to get straight news out of Ingushetia — the Russian authorities don’t encourage foreign journalists, while the local government is oppressive and pretty paranoid — but it looks like Yevkurov is trying to make a go of it. He’s much more popular than his predecessor (not hard), and he seems to be peripatetically competent.

Other than the President getting blown up? Not a lot has changed since then. Until last week, Yevkurov was still trying to set things right. And he was still severely handicapped by a moribund local economy — Ingushetia is the poorest republic in Russia; it produces, basically, nothing — and Moscow’s insistence on using federal security forces, who are universally feared and loathed, to “help” the situation there. Continue reading →

Senegal: Islam, democracy, sexy

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Not Iran this time!

I’ve been in Senegal the last couple of weeks. And, you know? Senegal is (1) 90% Muslim, and (2) a vibrant democracy.

The opposition won the last couple of elections. The press is free — sometimes obnoxiously so. Human rights violations are relatively rare. (Nonexistent, really, by African standards.) Senegal has never had a military dictatorship, a civil war, or a coup. Okay, the first couple of Presidents ruled for twenty years each, but they seem to be past that — the current President won a free and fair election. He’s also term limited, and everyone is already looking forward to a gloriously democratic free-for-all in a couple of years when he steps down.

I don’t want to overstate here. Senegal has all the usual African problems. It’s desperately poor. About a third of the population is still illiterate. There’s spectacular corruption. The President is clearly grooming his son for the succession; this involves putting Junior in the path of some rather large business opportunities. And while Senegal is a democracy, I might hesitate to call it a fully functional liberal democracy. Media that criticize the President too sharply may get hassled or shut down, government money is poured out like water to win elections, and many Ministers and members of Parliament are pretty openly for sale.

On the other-other hand, the opposition won the midterm elections last year, sweeping the President’s party out of almost every local government. To his obvious irritation and dismay. You don’t see that happening in Turkmenistan or Belarus.

So why doesn’t Senegal get any respect? Continue reading →

Random thoughts on returning from French Africa

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If you’re a human being who speaks French, you’re more likely to be African than European. La Francophonie’s demographic center of gravity is now somewhere around Bamako, Mali.

If you’re a human being who is literate in French — say, at a high school graduate level — you’re probably European. But not for much longer. Demographic growth plus the slow-but-steady rise of literacy rates in most of Africa means that by the next decade, most literate Francophones will be African too.
Continue reading →

Tweeted and Facebooked.

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To keep up with the fast changing world of social media, in addition to our recently added Twitter feed, A Fistful of Euros now also has page on facebook, which allows you, our gentle readers, to become an outspoken “fan” of afoe, and discover freshly published afoe posts right in your facebook activity feed. Have a look. Just click on the links in this post, or on the twitter or facebook icon in the sidebar.

Japan Consumer Sentiment Rises, Even As Exports Slump – But Where, Oh Where, Is The Recovery?

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Japan put in a pretty negative export performance in May. Even shipments to China show little sign of improvement, and the general impression is that hopes for a quick recovery in global demand are looking very premature.

On the other hand a 42 per cent year-on-year fall in imports in May left Japan with a trade surplus of Y299.8bn for the month – something that will help push gross domestic product back toward growth this quarter, but a trade surplus where imports fall faster than exports is not the same as a surplus where exports grow faster than imports, and certainly for the global economy it isn’t. Continue reading →