By Jimi O. Adesina, Andrew M. Fischer and Nimi Hoffmann

In a , published on 22 December 2020, that he as the most important thing he wrote in 2020, Nic Cheeseman penned a strong criticism of what he calls the ‘model of authoritarian development’ in Africa. This phrase refers specifically to Ethiopia and Rwanda, the only two countries that fit the model, which is otherwise not generalisable to the rest of the continent. His argument, in a nutshell, is that donors have been increasingly enamoured with these two countries because they are seen as producing results. Yet the recent conflict in the Tigray region of Ethiopia shows that this argument needs to be questioned and discarded. He calls for supporting democracy in Africa, which he claims performs better in the long run than authoritarian regimes, especially in light of the conflicts and repression that inevitably emerge under authoritarianism. His argument could also be read as an implicit call for regime change, stoking donors to intensify political conditionalities on these countries before things get even worse.

Cheeseman’s argument rests on a number of misleading empirical assertions which have important implications for the conclusions that he draws. In clarifying these, our point is not to defend authoritarianism. Instead, we hope to inject a measure of interpretative caution and to guard against opportunistically using crises to fan the disciplinary zeal of donors, particularly in a context of increasingly militarised aid regimes that have been associated with disastrous ventures into regime change.

We make two points. First, his story of aid dynamics in Ethiopia is not supported by the data he cites, which instead reflect the rise of economic ‘reform’ programmes pushed by the World Bank and IMF. The country’s current economic difficulties also need to be placed in the context of the systemic financial crisis currently slamming the continent, in which both authoritarian and (nominally) democratic regimes are faring poorly.

Second, we reflect on Cheeseman’s vision of aid as a lever of regime change. Within already stringent economic adjustment programmes, his call for intensifying political conditionalities amounts to a Good Governance Agenda 2.0. It ignores the legacy of the structural adjustment programmes in on the continent during the 1980s and 1990s. 

Misleading aid narratives distract from rebranded structural adjustment

On the first point, Cheeseman establishes his argument early on by stating ‘that international donors have become increasingly willing to fund authoritarian regimes in Africa on the basis that they deliver on development’. In support of this assertion, he cites a table from the World Bank that shows net Official Development Assistance (ODA) received by Ethiopia surging to USD 4.93 billion in 2018, up from just over USD 4 billion in 2016 and 2017, and from a plateau oscillating around USD 3.5 billion from 2008 to 2015.

These aggregated data are misleading because ODA received by Ethiopia from western bilateral donors in fact fell in 2018 (and probably continued falling in 2019 and 2020). The World Bank data that he cites are actually from the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) statistics, which refer to all official donors (but not including countries such as China). If we restrict donor assistance to DAC countries – which is relevant given that Cheeseman only refers to the US, the UK and the EU in his piece – disbursed ODA to Ethiopia fell from USD 2.26 billion in 2017 to USD 2.06 billion in 2018 (see the red line in the figure below).

Figure: ODA to Ethiopia (millions USD), 2000-2019

Source: , last accessed 30 December 2020.

There was a brief moderate increase in DAC country ODA starting in 2015 and peaking in 2017. Cheeseman might have been referring to this. However, contrary to his argument, it was likely that the reason for this increase in aid was primarily humanitarian, responding to the that began in 2015 and to the -17. It was also probably related to attempts to induce incipient political reform following the major protests in Oromia in 2014, which Cheeseman would presumably condone given that conventional measures of democracy and freedom improved in 2018. Indeed, it is notable that committed ODA from DAC donor countries fell even more sharply than disbursed aid in 2018, from USD 2.49 billion in 2017 to USD 2.07 billion, reflecting the context in which these countries were negotiating hard with the Ethiopian government at the time.

Instead, the sharp increase in ODA in 2018 came entirely from the International Development Association (IDA) of the World Bank Group, which increased its mixture of grants and loans to the country from USD 1.1 billion in 2017 to USD 2.1 billion in 2018. This subsequently fell to USD 1.8 billion in 2019 (the dashed green line in the figure).

Such ODA has been explicitly tied to the World Bank’s long-standing goal of liberalising, privatising and deregulating the Ethiopian economy, thereby ‘reforming’ (or disassembling) many of the attributes that have allowed the Ethiopian state to act in a developmentalist manner. These attributes include state-owned enterprises, state control over the financial sector, and relatively closed capital accounts, in strong distinction to most other countries in Africa (including Rwanda).

For instance, in in support of ‘a range of economic reforms designed to revitalize the economy by expanding the role of the private sector… to gradually open up the economy and introduce competition to and liberalize sectors that have been dominated by key state-owned enterprises (SOEs)’. The support aimed to promote public-private partnerships in key state-owned sectors such as telecoms, power and trade logistics as key mechanisms to restructure these sectors, as well as broader deregulation and financial liberalisation. It is also notable that the World Bank prefaced this justification by emphasising the political reforms that had already been embarked upon, and the promotion of ‘citizen engagement social accountability’ in Ethiopia.

In other words, contra the idea that western donors have been increasing their support for an authoritarian development model, they have been gradually withdrawing aid since 2017. The World Bank pulled up the slack in 2018, and in December 2019 both the and in support of ongoing economic reforms. The economic liberalisation has in turn undermined political liberalisation and has been a key source of political destabilization.

The bargaining hand of these donors has been reinforced by the economic difficulties faced by the Ethiopian economy – in particular, a hard tightening of external foreign-exchange constraints. reveal that the government had effectively stopped external borrowing after 2015, a policy that it was advised to adopt in its as its external debt distress levels were rising. As a result, the government became excessively reliant on donor grant money as a principal source of foreign financing. Yet the country continued to run deep trade deficits, in large part because its development strategies, as elsewhere in Africa, have been very import and foreign-exchange intensive (e.g. think of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, requiring more than USD 4.6 billion to build, the bulk in foreign exchange). Significant capital flight appears to have taken place as well; for example, errors and omissions reported on the balance of payments were -USD 2.14 billion in 2018. In order to keep the ship afloat, the central bank burnt through over USD 1 billion of its reserves in 2018 alone.

This severe tightening of foreign-exchange constraints needs to be understood as a critical structural factor in causing the development strategy to stall. Along with non-economic factors, this in turn put considerable strain on the government’s ability to stabilise political factions through the deployment of scarce resources, of which foreign exchange remains among the most important, especially in the current setting. Again, the point is not to apologise for authoritarianism, but rather to emphasise that the current situation is rooted deeper within a conjuncture of systemic crises that go far beyond any particular form of political administration.

Indeed, Cheeseman commits a similar oversight in ignoring the previous systemic crisis that the present is in many ways repeating. Later in his piece, he asserts: ‘The vast majority of African states were authoritarian in the 1970s and 1980s, and almost all had poor economic growth.’ This is an ahistorical misrepresentation of the profound global crisis that crippled Africa from the late 1970s for about two decades and which was the source of the poor growth he mentions. Then, as now, economic crisis was triggered throughout the continent by the severe tightening of external constraints, which neoliberal structural adjustment programmes exacerbated in a pro-cyclical manner despite being justified in the name of growth. The combination crippled developmentalist strategies across the continent regardless of political variations and despite the fact that many countries were performing quite well before the onset of the crisis. Such historical contextualisation is crucial for a correct assessment of the present.

In this respect, there is a danger of putting the cart before the horse. Most countries that descend into deep protracted crises (economic or political) generally stop being nominally democratic, and yet this result becomes attributed as a cause, as if authoritarianism results in crisis or poor performance. Cheeseman cherry-picks two papers (one a working paper) on and performance in Africa (which like all cross-country regressions, are highly sensitive to model specification and open to interpretation). However, drawing any causality from such studies is problematic given that states tended to become more authoritarian after the global economic crisis and subsequent structural adjustments of the late 1970s and 1980s, not the other way around. For instance, . Faced with crippled capacity under the weight of severe austerity and dwindling legitimacy as living standards collapsed, many states responded to against the harsh conditionalities of adjustment with increasing force. As such, economic crisis and adjustment plausibly contributed to the rise of political instability and increasingly authoritarian regimes. Other factors include the , which western countries fuelled and profited from. In other words, the political malaise across Africa at the time was driven by as much by external as internal factors. 

Aid as a lever of regime change

This leads us to our second point concerning Cheeseman’s vision of aid as a lever of regime change. Cheeseman is at pains to emphasise that rigged elections and repression of opponents have contributed to the recent emergence of conflict in the Tigray region. While these are important features, Ethiopian intellectuals have also emphasised that conflicts in contemporary Ethiopia have taken place against a history of imperial state formation, slavery and debates about the ‘’, or what has sometimes been called ‘internal colonialism’. These conflicts are shaped by the system of , in which ethnically defined states control their own revenues, social provisioning and security forces. They have been affected by , which interact with older histories of semi-feudal land dispossession. Most recently, there have been concerns that regional over the and may help draw neighbouring countries into the conflict.

In the face of this highly complex and rapidly changing context, no one person can identify the optimal response. It plausibly requires regular collective deliberation by people who are deeply embedded in the context. In particular, the brief political liberalisation of 2018 was followed by a sharp uptick of political violence on all sides, rooted in fundamental tensions between different visions of statehood. Such situations cannot be solved simply by ‘adding democracy and stirring’; they require deliberative governance.

Yet, Cheeseman’s piece seeks a reimposition of the very political conditionalities that were a primary factor in on the continent during the first wave of structural adjustment and its attendant Good Governance agendas. Such conditionalities work by constraining the open contestation of ideas and the process of informed consensus-building. They undermine the sovereignty of key institutions of the polity and the economy. And by doing so they degrade the historical meaning of development as a project of reclaiming social and economic sovereignty after colonialism.

Indeed, as Thandika Mkandawire has argued, the previous wave of political conditionalities and democratisation reduced democracies to formal structures of elections and, by wedding and subordinating them to the orthodox economic policy frameworks established under structural adjustment, led to what he called ‘’. Such ‘disempowered new democracies’ are incapable of responding to the substantive macroeconomic demands of voters and thereby undermining substantive democracy, deliberative governance and policy sovereignty.

In particular, the idea of a democratic developmental state is meaningless in the absence of policy sovereignty. The of the type that Mkandawire wrote about does not merely prevent key institutions, such as central banks, from using broader policy instruments to support the developmental project. It also involves the deliberate creation of unaccountable policy vehicles, such as Monetary Policy Committees (MPCs), which operate outside of democratic oversight, but have considerable hold on the levers of economic policy. MPCs are in turn wedded to neoliberal monetarism. The message to such disempowered new democracies is that ‘you can elect any leader of your choice as long as s/he does not tamper with the economic policy that we choose for you.’ Or as , ‘two or three IMF experts sitting in a country’s reserve bank have more to say than the national association of economists about the direction of national policy.’

In such contexts, the prospect of a democratic developmental state is severely diminished. Ensuring significant improvements in people’s wellbeing is important for the legitimacy of democracies. Yet the subversion of policy sovereignty significantly constrains the ability of new democracies to do so, setting them up for a crisis of legitimacy.

If democracy is to be meaningful it should involve the active engagement of citizens in a system of deliberative governance. Civil society organisations, in this context, are meaningful when they are autonomous institutions of social groupings that actively engage in boisterous debate and public policymaking in articulating the interest of their members. Yet, donor clientelism in Africa has wrought civil society and advocacy organisations that , not the citizens. This is a substantive subversion of democracy as a system of deliberative governance.

In this respect, we can call the kind of intrusive donor clientelism that Cheeseman is recommending Good Governance 2.0. His advocacy for strengthening patron-client relations between western donors and African governments, and his urging that donors use crises as a way of forcing regime change and policy conditionalities, is ahistorical, counterproductive and morally indefensible. In particular, it does not take into account the destructive, anti-democratic role of western-backed regime change and policy conditionality across the Global South during the era of flag independence. Even recently, these donor countries have disastrous human rights records when pushing for regime change in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Their support for military dictatorships, such as in Egypt, has been a central pillar of foreign policy for decades. And several of these donor countries worked hard to uphold apartheid in South Africa. They have no moral high ground to push for regime change, and little record to ensure that they could do so without causing more harm than good.

Moreover, external actors attempting to enforce their narrow view of democratisation in contexts of deeply polarised and competing visions of statehood, and in the midst of economic instability reinforced by already burdensome economic conditionalities, austerity and reforms, could well be a recipe for disaster. As a collective of intellectuals from across the Horn has , the people of Ethiopia in particular and the Horn in general must be at the forefront of developing a lasting peace. This would likely require a developmental commitment to supporting state capacity and deliberative governance, not undermining it through external interference and conditionalities.

Jimi Adesina is professor and Holder of the South African Research Chair in Social Policy at the College of Graduate Studies, University of South Africa, South Africa.

Andrew Fischer is associate professor in Social Policy and Development at the International Institute of Social Studies (Erasmus University, Rotterdam), The Hague, The Netherlands.

Nimi Hoffmann is lecturer at the Centre for International Education at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom.

Originally published in . Photo: .

Following a stand-off with commercial creditors and protracted but unresolved negotiations with the IMF, Zambia defaulted on its external sovereign debt on 13 November this year. While most commentary has focused exclusively on the government’s sovereign borrowing, our own research has detected massive outflows of private wealth over the past fifteen years, hidden away on an obscure part of the country’s financial account. The outflows are most likely related to the large mining companies that dominate the country’s international trade. With many other African countries also facing debt distress, the lessons of this huge siphoning of wealth from the Zambian economy need extra attention within discussions about debt justice in the current crisis. We explain here what we’ve found.

Zambia was already debt-stressed going into the COVID pandemic. The economy was hard hit following the sharp fall in international copper prices from 2013 to 2016, especially that copper made up about (including unrefined, cathodes and alloys). Following a , the government entered into negotiations with the IMF but never agreed on a programme. There was some improvement in macroeconomic outlook in 2017 due to rising copper prices, which sent international investors throttling back into . However, international investors again turned against the country in 2018 in the midst of the , which compounded the effects of . As a result, the government was already teetering on the edge of default on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic. The economic fall-out of the pandemic has since pushed the country over the edge (see an excellent analysis ).

Most of the commentary on Zambia’s default focuses exclusively on the government’s sovereign borrowing. Our own analysis peers behind this headline focus into the intricacies of financial flows into and out of the economy. Through this analysis, we have identified massive outflows of private wealth over the past fifteen years, reaching peaks of almost 20% of GDP in 2012, 15% of GDP in 2015, and over 7% of GDP as recently as 2017. The magnitude of these outflows thereby siphoned off most of the gains from both the commodity boom of the early 2010s and the government’s borrowing, undermining any hope for achieving external financial stability.

These outflows can be identified through an apparent anomaly on the financial accounts of the Zambian balance of payments that started with the debt relief of the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI) in 2005. The anomaly was a sharp rise in net acquisitions of debt instruments by resident non-financial ‘other sectors’ on the ‘other investment’ account. In other words, Zambian residents – which can include the local subsidiaries or affiliates of transnational corporations – were massively increasing their holdings of debt assets abroad even in the midst of debt distress at home.

What could such debt assets represent? Local subsidiaries of transnational corporations have been known to borrow heavily offshore, as is commonly discussed in the financialization literature.[1] However, such financial operations would appear as debt liabilities, not as debt assets, so this explanation does not make sense.

In exploring this puzzle during fieldwork in Zambia, we came to understand that the debt assets in question represent an accounting discrepancy that is mostly likely explained by unreported profit remittances by large mining companies in Zambia. Other corporates might have also been involved, although given the conventional wisdom that most things occurring on the external accounts of Zambia are somehow related to the mining majors, it follows that so too were the discrepancies. Regardless, they represent a massive siphoning from the economy at a time when the authorities have been desperately trying to sustain the economy.

Some background

It is important to note that the external accounts of Zambia exhibit the classic features of a poor primary commodity exporter dominated by foreign corporations. As outlined in my recent article, ‘’, such countries tend to run merchandise (i.e. goods) trade surpluses, at least during periods of commodity booms, although these surpluses are counterbalanced by service trade deficits (which are dominated by foreign firms) and primary income account deficits (due to interest payments on debt or profit remittances). As a result, the gains made in commodity exports are largely depleted by payments to the foreign firms that dominate, service and/or finance such exports. This is in contrast to classic developmentalism, such as in South Korea, which actually ran merchandise trade deficits supported by aid, service trade surpluses, and debt.  

Zambia proves the rule. As shown in Figure 1 below, it ran strong goods trade surpluses in the commodity boom years, roughly from 2006 to 2014, but the country actually struggled with current account deficits even during these years because of deepening services deficits (which reflect the commodity trade given that they are dominated by freight transport) and persistent primary income account deficits. As a result, it only earned more limited current account surpluses for a briefer period, in 2006 and then from 2009-13.

Figure 1: Zambia, current account, 1997-2019 (millions current $US)

Source: IMF Balance of Payments Statistics (last accessed 22/11/2020) and OECD DAC for ODA data.

In the years when the Zambian merchandise trade and hence current accounts were both in deficit (e.g. 1998-2003, and 2015-16), this reflected deep economic recession and/or crisis. However, even in these contexts, service and primary income deficits continued to drain foreign exchange from the economy. For instance, as shown in Figure 2, deficits on the services and primary income accounts amounted to more than 5% of GDP each in the late 1990s and early 2000s, equivalent to most of the official development assistance committed to the country in those years (according to the OECD DAC).

Figure 2: Zambia, current account, 1997-2019 (percent of GDP)

Source: calculated from IMF Balance of Payments Statistics and International Financial Statistics.

While debt relief in 2005 relieved much of the burden of interest payments on debt, remittances of profits earned from foreign direct investment (FDI) rose rapidly at the same time, more than counteracting the income effects of debt relief. As a result, the primary income account deficit actually increased following debt relief, reaching 10% of GDP by 2007. Some of this was reinvested (hence reappearing as FDI inflows on the financial account), although the amount that was genuinely remitted was still huge in international comparative perspective.

These dynamics reflect that the MDRI was synchronised with the resurgence of FDI into the continent by major transnational mining companies, which themselves were following the sharp rise in commodity prices at this time, e.g. copper prices skyrocketed from less than $1 USD per pound in the period between 1998 and mid-2003, to almost $4 USD per pound by spring 2006. Mining companies then remitted large amounts of their profits in subsequent years. This was facilitated by the under the Highly Indebted Poor Countries initiative that effectively ended with the MDRI.

Already from this baseline view, Zambia benefitted little from the commodity boom in terms of mobilising foreign exchange for its development efforts, even considering the contributions of aid. However, at the very least, its current accounts appeared orderly, with errors and omissions at very negligible levels.

Financial account anomalies in the post debt-relief period

This orderly picture, however, needs to be broken down, especially on the financial account, where a lot of volatility underlies the aggregate balances. As shown in Figure 3, volatility includes large swings in FDI that have followed the commodity supercycle (the green line), the government’s short-lived forays into Eurobonds in 2012 and especially 2014-15 (the blue line), and other investment (the red line), which is mostly debt. The large surge in other investment in 2005-06 represents the MDRI debt cancellation. However, the massive surge from 2010-15 represents actual outflows from the economy.

Figure 3: Zambia, financial account, millions $US (current), 1997-2019

Source: same as above; note that this follows the BPM6 reporting, according to International Investment Position, hence a positive balance represents a foreign exchange outflow.

The above-mentioned anomaly can be found in the disaggregated other investment account. As shown in Figure 4 below, the surge in other investment outflows was due to a sharp rise in net acquisitions of debt instruments by resident non-financial ‘other sectors’ (the dashed green line). These debt asset acquisitions started at the same time as the MDRI debt relief, when this category jumped from non-existance in 2003 to over $600 million in 2005 and over $900 million in 2006, more than counteracting the gains of debt relief (note that cancelled multilateral debt was close to $2 billion in both 2005 and 2006 – the dashed red line in those years – although the actual gains from this were only accrued through reduced interest payments on debt, which only fell by $73 million USD in 2016 and $37 million USD in 2017).

These obscure debt asset purchases then jumped again to almost $1.5 billion in 2007 and, after a brief respite during the global financial crisis, peaked at over $5 billion in 2012, over $3 billion in 2015, and over $1.8 billion in 2017. While they subsided in 2018 and 2019 – to a level that was roughly equal to rising net general government borrowing (the dashed red line) – they had already reached over $1.3 billion in the first half of 2020 (based on the latest quarterly reporting; not shown in the figure). In proportional terms, these outflows were equivalent to almost 20% of GDP in 2012, almost 15% of GDP in 2015, and over 7% in 2017. The amounts also far exceeded the Eurobonds that were issued in 2012, 2014 and 2015 (worth $3 billion USD, the blue line), which are now the focus of default.

Figure 4: Zambia, selected other investment categories and portfolio liabilities, millions $US (current), 1997-2019

Source: same as above.

The monetary authorities in Zambia have been aware of this anomaly. At the time of our interviews in 2017,[2] they admitted to us that they had been trying to figure it out with the help of the IMF and suspected that it represents illicit or unreported remittances, most likely related to mining companies. It was not related to private capital flight through banks given that the banking sector is well regulated by the central bank (the Bank of Zambia or BoZ). In contrast, mining companies are not required to report to the BoZ given that they are non-financial firms and hence are not covered by banking regulations, even though they dominate much of the financial activity in the economy, especially on the external accounts. 

Indeed, the anomaly itself was a creation of the BoZ based on their observation of discrepancies between their own data versus the reporting of assets held by Zambian residents by the Bank of International Settlements, to which international banks are required to report even when they fall outside Zambian jurisdiction. This led the BoZ to believe that the discrepancies belonged in this category of international debt assets. Technically, however, it should have been reported in the category of errors and omissions, although this would have of course raised alarm bells given the magnitude of these flows.

If we nonetheless treat the bulk of these discrepancies as profit remittances or their equivalent, then total profit remittances would rise to around 15-20% of GDP during the peak period from 2010-15, rather than around 5% as reported in the current account. They would have also been well above 10% of GDP as recently as 2017, rather than the 4.5% reported in the current account. Based on the most recent quarterly reporting, they would have reached these levels again in the first half of 2020 in the lead up to default.

The enormous sums involved relative to the economy – and relative to the $3 billion of sovereign bonds currently in default – provides a vital counterperspective to the rise of sovereign borrowing by Zambia. In effect, sovereign borrowing has helped sustain these private outflows, especially once the commodity boom came to an end. Foreigners have profited, much of the wealth of Zambia is now offshore, and yet the Government of Zambia has continued borrowing in a desperate attempt to keep the financial ship afloat despite these massive holes in its hull. Regular Zambians are now paying the price.

The argument for this economic model since the beginning of the century has been, to put it crudely, that Africans are better off being exploited than not being exploited at all, in terms of the extra jobs, investment, demand, and revenue that transnational corporations bring. With governments returning to the spectres of hard adjustment and deep recession, so soon after debt relief and commodity boom were squandered by massive outflows of wealth that open capital accounts facilitated, it is hard to see how this logic retains any credibility. More than just debt relief, a complete rethink of the model is required.

Andrew M. Fischer is Associate Professor of Development Studies at the ISS and the Scientific Director of CERES, The Dutch Research School for International Development. He tweets at .

Photo:

[1] For instance, see Serena JM, Moreno R. 2016. ‘’. BIS Quarterly Review, September: 81-97. For more critical discussions, see Bortz PG, Kaltenbrunner A. 2018. ‘’. Development and Change. 49(2): 375-393; or Kaltenbrunner A, Painceira JP. 2015. ‘’. Cambridge Journal of Economics. 39(5): 1281-1306.

[2] These must remain anonymised given the political sensitivity of these issues.

Andrew M. Fischer is Associate Professor of Social Policy and Development Studies at the ISS and the Scientific Director of CERES, The Dutch Research School for International Development. Since 2015, he has been leading a European Research Council Starting Grant on the political economy of externally financing social policy in developing countries. He tweets at @AndrewM_Fischer.

Charmaine G. Ramos is a Lecturer at Leiden University College, Leiden University, The Netherlands. Her current research focuses on analysing social policy and resource governance, as a means for exploring how political economy dynamics constrain and structure institutions for social transformation and productive expansion in developing economies.

Endnotes

[1]Ìý

[2] This work builds on our ongoing research that we have been conducting since 2015 into the political economy surrounding the institutional evolution of the Philippine social protection system, as part of ERC-funded research project entitled ‘’ (grant agreement No 638647). Our current research on the COVID response has been based on deskwork ¬– by necessity given that all three authors have been in lockdown in Europe – and has involved the collection and analysis of official documents (including relevant laws, presidential reports, and other administrative edicts) and media coverage concerning the Philippine government social protection responses to the pandemic, and selective remote interviews withÌý social workers from the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) who have been involved with the COVID-19 response at various levels of government.

[3]Ìý.

[4] SeeÌýÌýandÌý

[5] Cf.Ìý,Ìý;Ìý;Ìý.

[6] The rampant inaccuracies of the Pantawid are detailed in our forthcoming article currently under review. Also see Kidd and Athias (2019).

[7] For instance, seeÌý.

[8] E.g., see viral posts on Facebook likeÌýÌýand news reports likeÌý.