Humans Shaped Stone Axes 1.8 Million Years Ago: Advanced Tool-Making Methods Pushed Back in Time

Early humans were using stone hand axes as far back as 1.8 million years ago. (Credit: Pierre-Jean Texier, National Center of Scientific Research, France)

Science Daily  — A new study suggests that Homo erectus, a precursor to modern humans, was using advanced toolmaking methods in East Africa 1.8 million years ago, at least 300,000 years earlier than previously thought. The study, recently published in Nature, raises new questions about where these tall and slender early humans originated and how they developed sophisticated tool-making technology.

"The Acheulian tools represent a great technological leap," said study co-author Dennis Kent, a geologist with joint appointments at Rutgers University and Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "Why didn't Homo erectustake these tools with them to Asia?"

Homo erectus appeared about 2 million years ago, and ranged across Asia and Africa before hitting a possible evolutionary dead-end, about 70,000 years ago. Some researchers think Homo erectusevolved in East Africa, where many of the oldest fossils have been found, but the discovery in the 1990s of equally old Homo erectus fossils in the country of Georgia has led others to suggest an Asian origin. The study in Nature does not resolve the debate but adds new complexity. At 1.8 million years ago, Homo erectusin Dmanisi, Georgia was still using simple chopping tools while in West Turkana, Kenya, according to the study, the population had developed hand axes, picks and other innovative tools that anthropologists call "Acheulian."

In the summer of 2007, a team of French and American researchers traveled to Kenya's Lake Turkana in Africa's Great Rift Valley, where earth's plates are tearing apart and some of the earliest humans first appear. Anthropologist Richard Leakey's famous find--Turkana Boy, a Homo erectus teenager who lived about 1.5 million years ago -- was excavated on Lake Turkana's western shore and is still the most complete early human skeleton found so far.

Six miles from Turkana Boy, the researchers headed for Kokiselei, an archeological site where both Acheulian and simpler "Oldowan" tools had been found earlier. Their goal: to establish the age of the tools by dating the surrounding sediments. Past flooding in the area had left behind layers of silt and clay that hardened into mudstone, preserving the direction of Earth's magnetic field at the time in the stone's magnetite grains. The researchers chiseled away chunks of the mudstone at Kokiselei to later analyze the periodic polarity reversals and come up with ages. At Lamont-Doherty's Paleomagnetics Lab, they compared the magnetic intervals with other stratigraphic records to date the archeological site to 1.76 million years.

"We suspected that Kokiselei was a rather old site, but I was taken aback when I realized that the geological data indicated it was the oldest Acheulian site in the world," said the study's lead author, Christopher Lepre, a geologist who also has joint appointments at Rutgers and Lamont-Doherty. The oldest Acheulian tools previously identified appear in Konso, Ethiopia, about 1.4 million years ago, and India, between 1.5 million and 1 million years ago.

The Acheulian tools at Kokiselei were found just above a sediment layer associated with a polarity interval called the "Olduvai Subchron." It is named after Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge, where pioneering work in the 1930s by Leakey's parents, Louis and Mary, uncovered a goldmine of early human fossils. In a study in Earth and Planetary Science Letters last year, Lepre and Kent found that a well-preserved Homo erectusskull found on east side of Lake Turkana, at Koobi Fora Ridge, also sat above the Olduvai Subchron interval, making the skull and Acheulian tools in West Turkana about the same age.

Anthropologists have yet to find an Acheulian hand axe gripped in a Homo erectus fist but most credit Homo erectus with developing the technology. Acheulian tools were larger and heavier than the pebble-choppers used previously and also had chiseled edges that would have helped Homo erectus butcher elephants and other scavenged game left behind by larger predators or even have allowed the early humans to hunt such prey themselves. "You could whack away at a joint and dislodge the shoulder from the arm, leg or hip," said Eric Delson, a paleoanthropologist at CUNY's Lehman College who was not involved in the study. "The tools allowed you to cut open and dismember an animal to eat it."

The skill involved in manufacturing such a tool suggests thatHomo erectus was dexterous and able to think ahead. At Kokiselei, the presence of both tool-making methods -- Oldowan and Acheulian-- could mean that Homo erectus and its more primitive cousin Homo habilis lived at the same time, with Homo erectus carrying the Acheulian technology to the Mediterranean region about a million years ago, the study authors hypothesize. Delson wonders if Homo erectus may have migrated to Dmanisi, Georgia, but "lost" the Acheulian technology on the way.

The East African landscape that Homo erectus walked from about 2 million to 1.5 million years ago was becoming progressively drier, with savanna grasslands spreading in response to changes in the monsoon rains. "We need to understand also the ancient environment because this gives us an insight into how processes of evolution work -- how shifts in early human biology and behavior are potentially caused by changes in the climate, vegetation or animal life that is particular to a habitat," said Lepre. The team is currently excavating a more than 2 million year old site in Kenya to learn more about the early Oldowan period

NASA's Chandra Finds Nearest Pair of Supermassive Black Holes

Science Daily — Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory discovered the first pair of supermassive black holes in a spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way. Approximately 160 million light years from Earth, the pair is the nearest known such phenomenon.

The black holes are located near the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 3393. Separated by only 490 light years, the black holes are likely the remnant of a merger of two galaxies of unequal mass a billion or more years ago.

"If this galaxy wasn't so close, we'd have no chance of separating the two black holes the way we have," said Pepi Fabbiano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Mass., who led the study that appears in this week's online issue of the journal Nature. "Since this galaxy was right under our noses by cosmic standards, it makes us wonder how many of these black hole pairs we've been missing."

Previous observations in X-rays and at other wavelengths indicated that a single supermassive black hole existed in the center of NGC 3393. However, a long look by Chandra allowed the researchers to detect and separate the dual black holes. Both black holes are actively growing and emitting X-rays as gas falls towards them and becomes hotter.

When two equal-sized spiral galaxies merge, astronomers think it should result in the formation of a black hole pair and a galaxy with a disrupted appearance and intense star formation. A well-known example is the pair of supermassive black holes in NGC 6240, which is located about 330 million light years from Earth.

However, NGC 3393 is a well-organized spiral galaxy, and its central bulge is dominated by old stars. These are unusual properties for a galaxy containing a pair of black holes. Instead, NGC 3393 may be the first known instance where the merger of a large galaxy and a much smaller one, dubbed a "minor merger" by scientists, has resulted in the formation of a pair of supermassive black holes. In fact, some theories say that minor mergers should be the most common way for black hole pairs to form, but good candidates have been difficult to find because the merged galaxy is expected to look so typical.

"The two galaxies have merged without a trace of the earlier collision, apart from the two black holes," said co-author Junfeng Wang, also from CfA. "If there was a mismatch in size between the two galaxies it wouldn't be a surprise for the bigger one to survive unscathed."

If this was a minor merger, the black hole in the smaller galaxy should have had a smaller mass than the other black hole before their host galaxies started to collide. Good estimates of the masses of both black holes are not yet available to test this idea, although the observations do show that both black holes are more massive than about a million suns. Assuming a minor merger occurred, the black holes should eventually merge after about a billion years.

Both of the supermassive black holes are heavily obscured by dust and gas, which makes them difficult to observe in optical light. Because X-rays are more energetic, they can penetrate this obscuring material. Chandra's X-ray spectra show clear signatures of a pair of supermassive black holes.

The NGC 3393 discovery has some similarities to a possible pair of supermassive black holes found recently by Julia Comerford of the University of Texas at Austin, also using Chandra data. Two X-ray sources, which may be due to supermassive black holes in a galaxy about two billion light years from Earth, are separated by about 6,500 light years. As in NGC 3393, the host galaxy shows no signs of disturbance or extreme amounts of star formation. However, no structure of any sort, including spiral features, is seen in the galaxy. Also, one of the sources could be explained by a jet, implying only one supermassive black hole is located in the galaxy.

"Collisions and mergers are one of the most important ways for galaxies and black holes to grow," said co-author Guido Risaliti of CfA and the National Institute for Astrophysics in Florence, Italy. "Finding a black hole pair in a spiral galaxy is an important clue in our quest to learn how this happens."

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra's science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass.

For more information on the Chandra mission and this result, including images and other multimedia, visit:http://chandra.harvard.edu and http://www.nasa.gov/chandra

Glowing, Blinking Bacteria Reveal How Cells Synchronize Biological Clocks

Green fluorescent protein causes the E. coli to glow when the cells' clock is activated. (Credit: UC San Diego)

Science Daily  — Biologists have long known that organisms from bacteria to humans use the 24 hour cycle of light and darkness to set their biological clocks. But exactly how these clocks are synchronized at the molecular level to perform the interactions within a population of cells that depend on the precise timing of circadian rhythms is less well understood.

To better understand that process, biologists and bioengineers at UC San Diego created a model biological system consisting of glowing, blinking E. coli bacteria. This simple circadian system, the researchers report in the September 2 issue ofScience, allowed them to study in detail how a population of cells synchronizes their biological clocks and enabled the researchers for the first time to describe this process mathematically.

"The cells in our bodies are entrained, or synchronized, by light and would drift out of phase if not for sunlight," said Jeff Hasty, a professor of biology and bioengineering at UC San Diego who headed the research team. "But understanding the phenomenon of entrainment has been difficult because it's difficult to make measurements. The dynamics of the process involve many components and it's tricky to precisely characterize how it works. Synthetic biology provides an excellent tool for reducing the complexity of such systems in order to quantitatively understand them from the ground up. It's reductionism at its finest."

To study the process of entrainment at the genetic level, Hasty and his team of researchers at UC San Diego's Biocircuits Institute combined techniques from synthetic biology, microfluidic technology and computational modeling to build a microfluidic chip with a series of chambers containing populations of E. coli bacteria. Within each bacterium, the genetic machinery responsible for the biological clock oscillations was tied to green fluorescent protein, which caused the bacteria to periodically fluoresce.

To simulate day and night cycles, the researchers modified the bacteria to glow and blink whenever arabinose -- a chemical that triggered the oscillatory clock mechanisms of the bacteria -- was flushed through the microfluidic chip. In this way, the scientists were able to simulate periodic day-night cycles over a period of only minutes instead of days to better understand how a population of cells synchronizes its biological clocks.

Hasty said a similar microfluidic system in principal could be constructed with mammalian cells to study how human cells synchronize with light and darkness. Such genetic model systems would have important future applications since scientists have discovered that problems with the biological clock can result in many common medical problems from diabetes to sleep disorders.

Other members of Hasty's team included Lev Tsimring, associate director of the BioCircuits Institute, and bioengineering graduate students Octavio Mondragon, Tal Danino and Jangir Selimkhanov. Their research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and General Medicine and the San Diego Center for Systems Biology.

Biological 'Computer' Destroys Cancer Cells: Diagnostic Network Incorporated Into Human Cells

The wiring diagram of the cellular computer: all five factors must be in their correct state in order to trigger cell death. (Credit: Illustration by Benenson Y. & R. Weiss)

Science Daily  — Researchers led by ETH professor Yaakov Benenson and MIT professor Ron Weiss have successfully incorporated a diagnostic biological "computer" network in human cells. This network recognizes certain cancer cells using logic combinations of five cancer-specific molecular factors, triggering cancer cells destruction.

In a study that has just been published in Science, they describe a multi-gene synthetic "circuit" whose task is to distinguish between cancer and healthy cells and subsequently target cancer cells for destruction. This circuit works by sampling and integrating five intracellular cancer-specific molecular factors and their concentration. The circuit makes a positive identification only when all factors are present in the cell, resulting in a highly precise cancer detection. Researchers hope that it can serve a basis for very specific anti-cancer treatments.

Yaakov (Kobi) Benenson, Professor of Synthetic Biology at ETH Zurich, has spent a large part of his career developing biological computers that operate in living cells. His goal is to construct biocomputers that detect molecules carrying important information about cell wellbeing and process this information to direct appropriate therapeutic response if the cell is found to be abnormal. Now, together with MIT professor Ron Weiss and a team of scientists including post-doctoral scholars Zhen Xie and Liliana Wroblewska, and a doctoral student Laura Prochazka, they made a major step towards reaching this goal.

Selective destruction of cancer cells

The scientists tested the gene network in two types of cultured human cells: cervical cancer cells, called HeLa cells, and normal cells. When the genetic bio-computer was introduced into the different cell types, only HeLa cells, but not the healthy ones, were destroyed.

Extensive groundwork was required to achieve this result. Benenson and his team had to first find out which combinations of molecules are unique to HeLa cells. They looked among the molecules that belong to the class of compounds known as microRNA (miRNA) and identified one miRNA combination, or profile, that was typical of a HeLa cell but not any other healthy cell type.

Finding the profile was a challenging task. In the human body there are about 250 different healthy cell types. In addition, there are numerous variants of cancer cells, of which hundreds can be grown in the laboratory. Still greater is the diversity of miRNA: between 500 to 1000 different species have been described in human cells. "Each cell type, healthy or diseased, has different miRNA molecules switched on or off," says Benenson.

Five factors for cancer profile

Creating a miRNA "profile" is not unlike finding a set of symptoms to reliably diagnose a disease: "One symptom alone, such as fever, can never characterize a disease. The more information is available to a doctor, the more reliable becomes his diagnosis," explains the professor, who came to ETH from Harvard University a year and a half ago. The researchers have therefore sought after several factors that reliably distinguish HeLa cancer cells from all other healthy cells. It turned out that a combination of only five specific miRNAs, some present at high levels and some present at very low levels, is enough to identify a HeLa cell among all healthy cells.

A network operates similar to a computer

"The miRNA factors are subjected to Boolean calculations in the very cell in which they are detected. The biocomputer combines the factors using logic operations such as AND and NOT, and only generates the required outcome, namely cell death, when the entire calculation with all the factors results in a logical TRUE value," says Benenson. Indeed, the researchers were able to demonstrate that the network works very reliably in living cells, correctly combining all the intracellular factors and giving the right diagnosis. This, according to Benenson, represents a significant achievement in the field.

Animal Model and Gene Therapy

In a next step, the team wants to test this cellular computation in an appropriate animal model, with the aim to build diagnostic and therapeutic tools in the future. This may sound like science fiction, but Benenson believes that this is feasible. However, there are still difficult problems to solve, for example the delivery of foreign genes into a cell efficiently and safely. Such DNA delivery is currently quite challenging. In particular this approach requires temporary rather than permanent introduction of foreign genes into the cells, but the currently available methods, both viral and chemical, are not fully developed and need to be improved.

"We are still very far from a fully functional treatment method for humans. This work, however, is an important first step that demonstrates feasibility of such a selective diagnostic method at a single cell level," said Benenson.

World Battleground, 1000 years of war in 5 minutes

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List of largest empires of all times

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2000 Years of History (1000 BC - 1000 AD)

Challenges of Development in East Asia

Bringing Good Governance into Focus

SUBMITTED BY SHANTHI KALATHIL

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I recently attended a very interesting conference on democratization in East and Southeast Asia, sponsored by theUniversity of Louisville's Center for Asian Democracy , during which there was some discussion of the differentiation between the terms we use to identify varying governance systems and governance-related phenomena. At times we use the terms "democratization," "political liberalization", "political opening," and "good governance" almost interchangeably, when in fact they of course can refer to very different things depending on the perspective and intent of the speaker. In particular, I got to thinking a bit more about the distinction between the field of democratization studies and the field of good governance studies. With respect to the former, there is a longstanding and well-referenced theoretical literature pertaining to political transitions, and a good number of competing "theories of change," each with its own backers, detractors, and robust line of argumentation.

But the concept of "good governance" is a bit fuzzier when you look at it from an academic point of view. What exactly do we mean by the term? Is it democratization "lite?" Is it some combination of voice, accountability, service delivery and state responsiveness without explicit political competition? If so, what is the particular value that this construct brings to the conversation? And, as is often brought up in conversations within the Bank and elsewhere, what exactly is the "theory of change" (or multiple theories of change) underpinning this work? As far as I can tell, the bulk of the literature relating to good governance is either drawn from subsets of the democratization literature, or is made up largely of donor-conducted or donor-funded research - that is, case studies and other applied research designed explicitly to extract lessons learned and best practices to improve implementation in the field. Perhaps the field of "good governance" is significant then mainly as an applied rather than a theoretical construct - in which case it is no wonder that we often come up against the thorny  "theory of change" issue.

All this was buzzing somewhat chaotically through my head when I stumbled across a ten year old IDS paper on citizen voice, "Bringing citizen voice and client focus into service delivery ," by Anne Marie Goetz and John Gaventa. Despite its age, the paper reads like a fresh attempt to clarify the issue of citizen voice by: a) focusing explicitly on citizen voice in service delivery; b) categorizing "voice and responsiveness" initiatives by type; and c) drawing some preliminary conclusions as to the type of political environment in which such "voice and responsiveness" issues may be likely or unlikely to succeed. The paper contains a wealth of information (albeit now somewhat dated) on various types of service delivery-citizen voice initiatives, and for the categorization exercise alone is of value to anyone seeking to better understand how such issues may be usefully broken down and analyzed. For me, though, the most interesting section is the conclusion, in which the paper frames questions for further research that hinge directly on explicitly addressing the idea of political competition and its implications for citizen voice initiatives.

"Many participation and responsiveness initiatives are launched with scant consideration of their relationship to other institutions and processes for articulating voice or engineering state response - namely, political parties and political competition," the report notes. "The research in this report indicates that political competition strongly influences the way citizen concerns are articulated and the way public agencies respond." However, it goes on to say, the relationship between political competition, voice initiatives and responsiveness initiatives is poorly understood. It is a shame that, ten years on, these statements still seem accurate within the context of applied research on "good governance." Setting aside academic theory, if we are serious about achieving results in this field, it seems we would all do well at the very least to acknowledge these issues head-on rather than hide behind fuzzily articulated concepts.

Photo Credit: Sam Judson (on Flickr) 

Women Headed Households

Open Knowledge Aids Problem-Solving on Urbanization, Green Growth, ICT

New model of development problem-solving taps open-source technology, social networks, and knowledge of innovators. Students in Tanzania use GPS to map roads, water collection points, footpaths to plan for a more sustainable community. World Bank “knowledge platforms” on urbanization, green growth, ICT enable collaboration among development experts, policymakers and innovators. August 29, 2011 – This month, 25 students with GPS tools once considered geeky and hard to use are geocoding every home, road, footpath, drain, school, shop, water and waste collection point in a Dar es Salaam neighborhood. The effort – a pilot project funded with $30,000 from the World Bank – is the first step in a plan to map the marginalized communities of the rapidly growing Tanzanian city and turn them into more livable places. It's also is an example of a new approach to development problem-solving that taps the promise of ubiquitous and cheap technology, open source tools, social networks, and the wisdom of local and global experts and innovators, says Edward Anderson, a young professional at the World Bank working on the institution’s new knowledge strategy for information communication technology (ICT). Inspired by Map Kibera Anderson says the project was inspired by the mapping of Nairobi's Kibera slum , where residents worked with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to map the community's water and sanitation needs using OpenStreetMap . -- an "open source" software whose 300,000 volunteer editors promote user-generated maps. In Dar es Salaam, urban planning students from local Ardhi University are geocoding with assistance from community volunteers. The project is also being facilitated by Ground Truth , —the creators of Map Kibera—and receiving support from Twaweza , a local NGO that focuses on access to information and citizen advocacy around education, health care and clean water. While the Bank is not managing the mapping, the idea was conceived in partnership with the its Dar es Salaam-based urban and local government team, which wants to use ICT to better prepare for the proposed Dar Es Salaam Metropolitan Development Project (DMDP). The Bank worked with Ardhi University to embed community mapping into the curriculum, so students who already receive a small stipend contribute to the project while gaining experience in the field. And the Bank, acting as a “matchmaker” and networker, introduced city officials to the concept and to the partners that could make the project happen, says Anderson. "In less than three years from now, we hope there will be a network of citizens aware of the community mapping and know how to give feedback about trash collection, road maintenance, potholes, and drain flooding," says Anderson. Open Development Strategy Takes Shape The project is among the first initiatives to come out of the World Bank’s move toward “open development” outlined in a speech  by World Bank President Robert Zoellick before the 2010 Annual Meetings of the Bank and IMF. In the last 18 months, the Bank opened its own data to the public and increasingly partnered with technology leaders such as Google, Microsoft, NASA and Yahoo, as well as with local and global innovators and experts. "Hackathons" hosted by the Bank allowed technologists and disaster experts to join forces to develop applications in response to disasters in Haiti and Pakistan. On October 21-23, water hackathons organized by the Bank to seek innovative solutions to water problems will take place simultaneously in several cities. The Bank also hosted an Apps for Development  competition last spring that encouraged innovative use of Bank data, and aided new open government initiatives in Kenya  and Moldova . Connecting to Innovators A year ago, the Bank announced the creation of “knowledge platforms” to enable collaboration among World Bank staff, research centers and academic institutions from developed and developing countries, think tanks, practitioners, and the private sector. This is an effort to bring people that aren't traditionally development partners into the development field. —Julia Bucknall, World Bank Water Sector Manager The first three platforms were on urbanization, green growth, and ICT for open development, which is aiding the Dar es Salaam mapping effort. Another three – on jobs, food security and nutrition, and fragility, conflict, and violence – were announced this year. Knowledge platforms will further open up the way the Bank creates and shares knowledge and help make the institution more connected, efficient, and focused on results, says Aniruddha Dasgupta, the director of the Reform Secretariat leading the Bank's knowledge strategy. “The Bank’s goal is to create opportunities for co-generation of knowledge, focusing internal and external resources on critical, strategic, and transformational issues affecting developing countries,” says Dasgupta. “Our clients are asking us to partner with them on a range of vexing issues,” he adds. "The Bank is not the center of expertise--that expertise is out there.” "Our ability in the future to provide the best service to our clients has to depend on our ability to bring all sorts of global knowledge--not only produced by the Bank but increasingly produced by partners of the Bank--and our ability to co-produce knowledge with them," he says. Urbanization, Water Issues A Draw Innovators are increasingly drawn to the problems of rapid urbanization, particularly in Africa and South Asia, says World Bank urban economist Austin Kilroy. “There is a huge amount of interest. Urbanization is already transforming the development agenda,” he says. “We're responding by helping policymakers to access the world's best knowledge and data, and to learn from each other. The challenge is to get knowledge to the right people at the right time.” To that end, the Bank has partnered with multiple organizations to form Urban Knowledge.org , and launched the knowledge program in multiple cities around the globe to create hubs for knowledge exchange. Likewise, outside interest in water issues is high among a growing community of innovators, says Julia Bucknall, manager of the Bank’s water program. “We can describe the problems and we can make sure software solutions get used, but we can't develop software solutions,” says Bucknall. “This is an effort to bring people that aren't traditionally development partners into the development field.”

Investing in infrastructure is still the best bet to spur growth, jobs

SUBMITTED BY JORDAN SCHWARTZ 

Every profession has its fantasy Triple-Win. For a gambler at the horse races, it’s theTrifecta. For musicians, it is a song that breaks hearts, moves feet and sells records. Yet even we geeks have our dreams. In the field of infrastructure, in Latin America  and elsewhere, the ultimate triple-win is an investment that

1. spurs economic growth

2. contributes to social well-being, and

3. helps the environment.

“Impossible!” you say. “The laws of nature could not possibly allow for growth that contributes to society’s well-being without taxing our natural endowment.” Is there no way we can unstick ourselves from the Kuznets Curve  and uncover investments that spur Green and Inclusive Growth?

To tackle all three sides of the triangle, we probably need more than one blog discussion. Let’s start with the links between infrastructure and growth for this go-round…

To say that infrastructure investment drives growth has become common wisdom over the last decade—built on the research of economists here at the Bank, the OECD and elsewhere. Yet we have to ask: In what kind of growth are we interested? Is all infrastructure investment good for all kinds of growth?

In times of stagnation and high unemployment, governments may turn to public works and infrastructure expenditure to stimulate short-term growth and employment creation. Here’s what the Short-term Growth Investment Menu , in terms of jobs from construction and its inputs (not jobs induced from expenditures), looks like from small to large:

• Because of higher salaries and greater “leakage” or expenditures on imported technology, energy investments tend to produce few local jobs in the short-run—in the hundreds or the thousands for every US$ billion invested in the region’s power plants on average.
   
• Highways and roads produce thousands or even tens of thousands for the same amount—depending on what type of road and how it is built.
   
• Water and sanitation expansion projects may produce 100,000 annualized jobs per billion dollars; and
   
• A rural road maintenance program may generate two to five times as many annualized jobs as that—200,000 to 500,000—because wages are low in the region’s countryside and almost all expenditures go to labor.

The order of that list might not look the same for long-term growth. We know that the connectivity and productivity that come from energy and telecom investments are crucial to long-term growth even if they are not always short-term job drivers. Highway corridors, railroads and ports may not be the medicine for immediate stimulus, but they are crucial to competitiveness and long-term growth, because they facilitate commerce and reduce the costs of trade.

For countries—like Brazil  or Mexico --with industrial production, there may be some short-term gains from investment in “long-term” assets such as power plants and rail systems where a big part of the expenditure goes to equipment and technology. This comes from producing the inputs to construction and infrastructure—such as steel, engines, construction equipment, cranes, and turbines. But for those countries further down the labor-capital curve—Bolivia , Honduras , Nicaragua , Paraguay —the menu of priorities for spurring short-term growth will look very different from the menu for long-term growth. Unless countries such as these are running up against a reserve margin, public investment in power plants or treatment plants might be put on hold during a recession (or, better still, solicited from the private sector) while that would be a good time to expand the sewerage network or rehabilitate rural roads.

To generate long-term growth, we also know that the quality of the infrastructure service provided is at least as important as the stock of infrastructure. Bank analysis shows that the growth-investment elasticities for the six Central American countries vary wildly from one to the other. That is, while some countries are able to garner high growth out of infrastructure investments, their neighbors are only generating low levels of growth from their investments. The relationship seems to depend not only on how much is being invested, but on how efficiently the resulting assets are operating. A speculative investment in a port or a highway may create a few jobs in the short term, but it will not generate sustainable economic returns unless it reduces the cost of transporting goods, creating producer and consumer surplus. A new power plant that relieves an energy shortage will release economic activity, but if it also increases dependence on fuel imports and raises average electricity rates, its long-run effects on productivity will be mixed.

So… infrastructure is strongly correlated to growth, but the particular investment will define the brand of growth, short or long. Also, the sustainability of that growth will depend on the quality of the service provided by the investment.

That covers one leg of our Infrastructure Triple-Win: Growth, both short and long. Let’s take a breath. We’ll talk about the human and environmental sides of the Triangle—The “Inclusive” and “Green” parts of Growth—in our next blog.

The daughter also rises

Women are storming emerging-world boardrooms

 from the print edition

ZHANG YIN (also known by her Cantonese name, Cheung Yan) was the eldest of eight children of a lowly Red Army officer who was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution for “capitalist offences”. Today she is one of the world’s richest self-made women, with an estimated fortune of $1.6 billion. In the early 1980s, as a dogsbody in a paper mill, she noted that the waste paper her superiors so casually discarded was actually worth something. She has been capitalising on her insight ever since. Nine Dragons Paper, which she founded with her husband in 1995, is now one of the world’s largest paper recyclers.

The emerging world is home to many businesswomen like Ms Zhang. Seven of the 14 women identified on Forbes magazine’s list of self-made billionaires are Chinese. Many firms in emerging markets do a better job of promoting women than their Western rivals, some surveys suggest. In China, 32% of senior managers are female, compared with 23% in America and 19% in Britain. In India, 11% of chief executives of large companies are female, compared with 3% of Fortune 500 bosses in America and 3% of FTSE 100 bosses in Britain. Turkey and Brazil come third and joint fourth (behind Finland and Norway) in the World Economic Forum’s ranking of countries by the proportion of CEOs who are women. In Brazil, 11% of chief executives and 30% of senior executives are women.

In “Winning the War for Talent in Emerging Markets: Why Women are the Solution”, Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Ripa Rashid point out that businesswomen face steep obstacles in emerging markets. How can they stay on the fast track if, as in the UAE, they cannot travel without a male chaperone? And how can they be taken seriously if, as in Russia, the term “businesswoman” is synonymous with prostitute? In every emerging market women bear the lioness’s share of family responsibilities. In many places, deals are sealed with booze and male bonding.

Young, middle-class women are overtaking their male peers when it comes to education. In the United Arab Emirates 65% of university graduates are female. In Brazil and China the figures are 60% and 47% respectively. In Russia 57% of college-age women are enrolled in tertiary education; only 43% of men are. Business schools, those hothouses of capitalism, are feminising fast. Some 33% of students at the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) in Shanghai and 26% at the Indian School of Business are female, a figure comparable with those of Western schools such as the Harvard Business School and INSEAD.

The workload for tiger businesswomen can be crushing. Rapid growth means exhausting change. Having customers in different time zones, as global Asian firms often do, makes it worse. More than a quarter of the female high-fliers surveyed by Ms Hewlett and Ms Rashid report working between eight and 18 hours more each week than they did three years ago. And horrible commutes are common. In IBM’s ranking of the world’s worst commutes, Beijing and Mexico City each scored 99 out of a possible 100 pain points. New Delhi, Moscow and São Paulo also did appallingly. Female commuters often have to put up with leering, groping men, particularly if they work late: 62% of Brazilian women say that they feel unsafe travelling to work.

Still, young women have no shortage of high-profile role models, from Indra Nooyi, the Indian-born boss of PepsiCo, to Dong Mingzhu, the author of one of the bestselling business books in China. In “Regretless Pursuit”, Sister Dong, as her fans call her, recounts her rise from saleswoman to boss of Gree Electric, the country’s biggest manufacturer of air-conditioners.

Living in emerging markets offers many advantages for female professionals. Most obviously, there are plenty of cheap hands to cook and take care of children. And corporate culture is changing astoundingly fast, not least because companies are hiring so many young people. (Youngsters in India and China grew up steeped in capitalism; their parents did not.)

Skills shortages spur a battle for brains. In some countries, companies expect to lose a fifth of their highly skilled staff every year. So they will try anything that might help them hang on to the talent. This includes becoming more female-friendly. Many multinationals have created mentoring programmes and women’s networks. Boehringer Ingelheim, a drug company, and Citi, a bank, have introduced short-term job placements to encourage women to travel. Goldman Sachs (India) pairs expectant mothers with seasoned working mothers. Infosys, an IT firm, provides “pregnancy yoga”. Wipro, another IT company, arranges child-care camps on its campus during long holidays. GE India provides its female staff with assertiveness training.

Wise firms focus on the two biggest problems for working women in emerging markets: looking after their ageing parents, which is typically more of a problem than child care, and commuting. A growing number of companies provide flexi-time so that women can work from home. Ernst & Young holds family days to show parents what their daughters have achieved. It also offers medical cover for parents. Many companies provide their female staff with late-night shuttle buses—and female-only taxi companies are springing up in India, the UAE and Brazil.

A woman’s place is in the boardroom

All this might sound a bit namby-pamby to pioneers like Sister Dong (who says that she hasn’t had a holiday for 20 years) and Zhang Yin (who boasts that: “My success came from my character”). But namby-pambyism is a sign of progress. Heroines who build empires out of sweat and determination are rare in any culture. (As, indeed, are heroes.) Rapid growth in emerging markets is pulling more women into corporate life. And as they show their mettle, patriarchal attitudes are beginning to dissolve.

Niger Takes Action to Reverse 50 Years of Food Insecurity

Over half of Niger’s population faces food insecurity A new report points to broader solutions beyond emergency food aid World Bank supports new social safety net to cover a million people Over the past 50 years, Niger—a mineral-rich, low-income country on the southern edge of the Sahara desert—has faced extended periods of drought, frequent food shortages, and some of the most difficult human development challenges in the world. “It takes extreme drought to make headlines, but the reality is that nearly a quarter of the population of Niger faces chronic food insecurity in any given year,” said Ousmane Diagana, World Bank Country Director for Niger. “Poverty and hunger are part of the landscape here during years of normal harvest, and things simply get worse with harsh climate or other shocks.” A chronically food-insecure person is expected to survive on less than 1,800 kcal a day.  In 2006, data showed that over 70 percent of daily caloric Nigerien’s consumption came from cereals (millet, sorghum and other cereals).  Less than five percent of daily caloric consumption was derived from meat and fish, dairy products, and fruits and vegetables, which are important sources of micronutrients, such as iron, iodine, vitamin A and calcium. Since 1990, over 60 percent of Niger’s largely rural population has lived below the poverty line, a trend made all the more serious by rapid population growth. According to UNICEF, the rate of chronic malnutrition in 2009 was 46.3 percent while in the second and third largest cities Zinder and Maradi respectively, both located in south Niger, this rate was over 50 percent. Half of the country’s children below the age of five suffered from chronic malnutrition, as measured by stunting (low height-for-age). The recent food crises of 2008 and 2010, due to local drought and international high prices, have exacerbated the vulnerability of the poor to food insecurity. In January this year, after civilian rule was restored in the country, measures to cope with long-running food insecurity and deep poverty began taking shape. While a strong emergency food response continues to be a priority, longer-term solutions are also being actively sought and implemented. New safety net to cover a million people over five years The World Bank is supporting Niger’s renewed effort to protect vulnerable households through analytical work that has helped identify effective investments and by financing a new social safety net that is expected to cover a million people over five years in the worst affected regions of the country. With reliable assistance being made available for the poorest families, today’s infants and young children in the regions of Dosso, Maradi, Tahoua, Tillaberi, and Zinder need not be permanently weakened by malnutrition, which has serious long-term consequences, including for learning skills. The new safety net system will provide regular transfers of approximately $20 a month over a two-year period to very poor households in a state of chronic food insecurity. The payments are made to women who are expected to attend “essential family practices” training in health, nutrition and sanitation.  Payments will be made to women through designated payment agencies, mostly microfinance institutions and mobile phone companies, and are expected to significantly improve food consumption among registered households. Already 2500 women have been benefitting from an early pilot of the project in four departments in Tahoua and Tillaberi. Those transfers have allowed them to purchase more food and not depend on hand outs from other people in the village. In other cases some women have already started to make arrangements to start participating in local saving schemes so they can buy livestock later on.  At Foygorou, Commune Ouallam, Department of Ouallam (Tillaberi), Mrs. Hadiza Moussa said she bought a sack of millet with her allowance of the first transfer. With the second transfer, she bought clothes for her children and gave her husband 2000 francs for some other essentials. Cash-for-work will be offered every year for a period of sixty days each year to about 15,000 people going through temporary food insecurity, as a means of increasing household income during hard times caused by crop failures, high food prices, or other unpredictable events. How the strongest solutions were identified A recent World Bank report, Niger: Food Security and Safety Nets  has informed the design of Niger’s new safety net initiative, finding that, for instance, very short-term transfers only after the occurrence of a large food crisis, do not strengthen household food security much beyond the life of the intervention. “The new safety net in Niger has been designed based on a comprehensive analysis of Niger’s particular challenges,” said Carlo del Ninno, Senior Economist with the World Bank’s Africa Region. “We find that cash transfers to poor people must be for at least 18 months so as to have a positive impact; and that essential family practices campaigns do improve family health and children’s nutritional status.” The new safety net will also follow international best practices such as a robust management information system to support key functions like targeting, a database of potential and actual beneficiaries, payment, and monitoring and evaluation. Significant resources will be invested in this before the actual large-scale payments begin. Other medium-term responses recommended for Niger include: a) investment in agriculture to increase availability of staple food products by increasing productivity, improving efficiency of domestic agricultural markets, and reducing production risks for farmers; b) monitoring and anticipation of cereal price trends in neighboring countries; c) and a stronger emergency response.