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Balen goes on to argue that access to clean water has increased significantly in those countries which have allowed some privatisation. (He is virtually always talking about government-regulated privatisation, incidentally. It would be interesting to know if there have been any complete privatisations, without heavy government controls, and how well these have improved supply.)

In Tunja, Colombia, access to water increased by 10% folllowing privatision; in Gabon the figure was almost 15%. Cartagena, Colombia posted access increases of 25%, Conakry, Guinea of 20% and La Paz - El Alto, Bolivia of 10%. In Chile, 99% of urban residents, as well as 94% of rural residents are now supplied with water all day round, which contrasts fabourably with pre-privatisation figures of 63% and 27% respectively. Finally, Corrientes, Argentina, and Cote d'Ivoire saw increases of almost 15%.

He makes the point that a private company only makes any money if a water connection is sucessfully made. Meanwhile an employee of a state industry goes on getting paid regardless of how many connections are made.

Private companies are also less wasteful. Money is spent replacing leaking pipes, for example.

Under public ownership, the amount of water leaked from Buenos Aires's system as a percentage of the total water available was 45%. Now just 0.18 metres cubed per connection per day is lost.

There are fewer unnecessary workers employed, too, which reduces the cost of supply water and thus increases its affordability.

In Chile, the private sector managed to reduce its workforce by 30% during 1998 to 2001, a period which saw public sector employment fall by just 5%. This was achieved alongside an increase in the customer base of 6%.

The website of the Globalization Institute is here.

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He created ten different economic models - ten different bundles of assumptions and ways of measuring aid. Again and again, he found that development aid came out as a negative factor.

Dr Ovaska was saddened by the result. He had previously worked on foreign aid for the Finnish government. He was saddened, but not surprised.

He had seen how aid could misdirect effort and funds, how it created large bureaucracies. Now, through his painstaking economic analysis, he has seen that in many countries around the world, nations which have received more aid have not gone on to achieve more economic growth. On the contrary, they have done worse.

This may seem strange and perverse. It is difficult to understand why a country should do badly after being given a wad of cash. How could it happen?

One possibility is that big cash injections enable bad governments to survive. Take a government that is corrupt and has destroyed the business enterprise in its economy, thus causing economic failure. That government should collapse having lost all popular support. But if that same government is regarded, in the West, as a unfortunate case and given a great deal of money, suddenly it gets a new lease of life. The money can be spent rewarding those who have been faithful to the regime and perhaps buying arms to fight those who want to overthrow it. In that way aid can prop up a disastrous government and lead a country into even deeper poverty.

In half the countries he studied, Dr Ovaska found that foreign aid accounted for more than 5.4 per cent of their annual economic activity. In Africa the proportion was much higher. According to other research, the average reached a peak of 18 per cent in 1995. In places where aid plays such a major role, the ambitious and well-placed are tempted to think that the easiest way to get rich is by getting into government. Then, as ministers or civil servants, they will be able to get a slice of the cash coming in. In this way aid can have two bad effects. It can act as an encouragement to corruption and it can divert the most able people from building long-term enterprises which would create employment and economic wealth.

The long term story of Africa lends support to Dr Ovaska. Over the past thirty years, the aid given to Africa has more than tripled. But instead of this leading to an increase in the growth rate, it has been followed by the growth rate falling from an annual two per cent to virtually nil.

A small but growing minority of Africans are coming to the same conclusion that, paradoxically, government aid does Africa harm. "Far from fixing Africa's problems, aid worsens it" says Thompson Ayodele of the Institute of Public Policy Analysis in Nigeria. The important things for growth, he says, are "protection for property rights, effective institutions, clear and enforceable rules, an efficient and prompt judicial system and, above all, freedom to trade". Most of what he describes is good government. That is what gives businesses a chance to build up and create sustainable growth. His view is supported by Dr Ovaska's economic analysis which shows good government as by far the biggest positive factor in creating economic success.

There is a real danger that the West's heavy and now much- increased emphasis on aid could be worse than useless. Far from making poverty history, it could do damage. Africa has become like a welfare dependant - relying on hand-outs and, as a result, losing the resolve to make its own way in the world. The tragedy of Africa's economic stagnation could be the result of welfare dependancy on the biggest scale the world has ever known.

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It is noticeable how some of the most successful countries in the world - Japan, Switzerland, Hong Kong and Singapore - have been ones with very little in the way of natural resources. They have had no leg up from nature in achieving economic success. Yet perhaps it was the very absence of a 'free lunch' that made such countries adopt pro-enterprise and pro-trade policies which then led to their success. Africa has been showered with 'free lunches' in foreign aid and some of the countries have also had ample natural resources such as gold, diamonds, copper and good agricultural land.

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The way things are at present, foreign aid, whether from individuals or government, promotes a lack of accountability in a country's rulers.

If a government has a budget of ,say, £100 million and has to raise it by taxing the people, the citizens will want to know how the money has been spent.

But if a donor says we will give you half of that £100 million in aid, the government's accountability is reduced by half.

And further on:

Your heart is in the right place, Sir Bob, but you do not appreciate the unintended consequences of what you are doing.

It [foreign aid] can lead to more starvation, not loess. If you keep dipping into the maize mountains of America and Europe to provide food to Africa, when are the Agrican people going to develop thier own technology to incease production to feed themselves?

He cites Ethiopa as an example of how this has worked in practice:

The reason it cannot feed its people is beause it lacks the storage systems - weevils get into the dry storage - and the threshing process is not carried out properly.

But there is little incentive to do anything about this. Stockpiles are not needed because every time there is a crisis the West is asked to give more food.

If you want to solve poverty in Africa, then help create an etrepreneurial system that will generate wealth for the people.

Given the hostility to George W Bush that was apparently shown by some people at the Live8 concert, it is interesting that he says, referring to 'plundering' by African leaders,

Few politicians in the West have ever questioned this systematic theft of a continent's wealth by its own rulers, fearing charges of racism and perpetuating colonialism.

Those who do, such as Goerge Bush, have been accused of being hard-hearted. But attaching reasonable strings to aid shows a clear head and not a hard heart.

It is a curious game that the national newspapers have played with Live8. Several of the sunday papers carried commemorative issues about the concert. Yet inside some, such as the Mail on Sunday, the Sunday Telegraph and the Sunday Times, carried articles that were distinctly critical about what the concert was trying to do. So Live8 was celebrated and criticised simultaneously.

This is Realnewspaperpolitik. Editors want to attract and keep young music fans and sympathisers with the politics of Live8 while at the same time expressing their actual opinions.

I know of one national newspaper which did not say anything bad about Sir Bob and Live8 on its main editorial page. But, it allowed its columnists to criticise Live8 elsewhere in the paper.

One can call it Realnewspaperpolitik but in truth but, more bluntly, it is hypocrisy. If these papers really believe that Live8 is wrongheaded, they should not report it, but not celebrate it.

I wish I could make a link to the Mbeki article but I cannot find the article on the Mail on Sunday website.

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The problem is that the state schools are nothing like as good at delivering education as the private schools. Prof Tooley organised tests of 3,000 children at a random selection of state and fee-paying schools in Lagos. In every subject, children at the fee-paying schools did considerably better. In maths, they scored an average of 56 marks whereas children at the free state schools got 41. In English they scored 65 marks whereas children at the free schools got only 42.

When he visited the state schools, some of the reasons for this disparity became clear. Even though his visits were pre-arranged, he came across one teacher who was slumped at his desk, apparently sleeping. In another class, the teacher broke off from teaching to take a call on her mobile phone.

Elsewhere in Africa, in Ghana, his research revealed that only 57 per cent of teachers at state schools were actually present and teaching.

Prof Tooley's work is not the first to have suggested that state schooling in Africa and other Third World countries is markedly inferior to schooling provided by private schools that cater to the poor.

The World Bank studied schools in Tanzania, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines and Thailand and concluded that "private school students generally outperform public [state] school students on standardised math and language tests".

This was despite the fact that the cost of the education in the private schools was generally lower. The World Bank studies adjusted for the social class of the parents and the bank took care to emphasise, in commenting on Tanzania and Colombia, "our results are robust. The estimated private advantage is large and empirically important".

Some will respond to all this by saying: "Even if it is true that private education for the poor in Africa is better than state education, the great thing about state education is that it can be given to every last child. No one will be left out." That assertion may possibly be true in form, but not in reality.

We in Britain should know. Theoretically, we have "education for all". But, according to the Government itself, 20 per cent of all adults in Britain are "functionally illiterate". As the black MP Diane Abbott once exclaimed when justifying sending her child to a private school, "In Hackney [state] schools, only nine per cent of black boys get five decent GCSEs".

More than 14 per cent of children in Britain pass no exam. So yes, in name, we have education for all through free state schooling. But it is theoretical, not actual. The same - or worse - will certainly be the case if Africa goes pell mell for a vast increase in state education.

This drive to push free education in Africa is generally driven by a laudable, philanthropic instinct. But we ought to adopt one of the principles of the medical profession: primum non nocere - "first, do no harm". We should be careful, too, of simply exporting the way we do things to Africa. Even those who think state schooling in Britain is a great success have reason to wonder how well it would be administered in parts of Africa where corruption is rife.

To put an extreme case, who truly believes that there would be a great improvement in schooling in Zimbabwe if the G8 gave hundreds of millions of dollars a year to President Mugabe on condition that he spent it on free education?

By discovering the huge, mostly unrecorded, number of private schools for the African poor, Prof Tooley has also shown that far fewer children are missing out on education there than was formerly thought. Officially, half the children in Lagos are getting no education. But Tooley's research suggested that it may be only a quarter.

It is also likely - certainly in those countries where some economic growth is being achieved at last - that the proportion missing out will continue to fall in coming years. That is what happened in Britain in the 19th century as private and charitable schooling grew at an astonishing rate.

Prof Tooley went with a BBC Newsnight team to look at the private schools in the shanty town of Makoko. He says the team was sceptical, as you might expect. But as they came to see more of the private and the state schools, they were converted.

Before we impose a state model on Africa, we should be open-minded and honest enough to ask, are we sure that African state education will really achieve what we all want?

(This article is printed in the Daily Telegraph today. The full report by James Tooley can be found here.)

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He has written an article in the latest edition of Economic Affairs which is introduced thus:

In many developing countries, private unaided schools are serving the poor in large numbers. Some commentators view their presence as undesirable in particular assuming that there is a conflict between 'commercial gain' and 'concern for the poor'. We show one way in which there is no conflict the private unaided schools offer free or concessionary places to the poorest of the poor. Using data from a random sample of schools in Hyderabad, India, and a smaller sample in Makoko, Nigeria, we show that such places range from 1020% of all places offered

The full text is here.

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When Bob Geldof is angry, people have to listen just as they did to Moses. He has moral authority earned through years of effort on behalf of the poor. He has now taken on the wealth and, indeed, popularity, of Ebay which has a stockmarket value of US$51 billion, and bullied it into submission. He encouraged people to bid ridiculous prices of up to £10 million for Live 8 tickets - sums that would never be paid - so as to wreck the auction process. He fulsomely insulted the company. He deliberately damaged their name and their business. In a court of law, the company might have had a right to claim damages. But Ebay realised that it that it would either have to give in or take on a mighty battle with Bob Geldof, conscience of the nation. The company understandably decided to give in.

One has to admire Mr Geldof. He is brilliantly effective. He gets attention and makes things happen. He has even performed a miracle - persuading the band Pink Floyd to get back together again. He also focuses relentlessly on something that genuinely matters - unlike some pop stars who flit from one fashionable cause to another.

But there is increasingly reason to feel uneasy about Bob Geldof and what he demands of us.

In the midst of this latest row, the quiet question people were asking was: what is so wrong about people buying or selling Live 8 tickets on Ebay? What harm was being done?

Bob Geldof said it was "capitalising on the misery of the poor". But if one person (the buyer) goes to the Live 8 concert instead of another person (the seller), how would this hurt the poor? The issue of who happens to sit in a particular seat in Hyde Park one afternoon is surely a matter of indifference to those struggling to get enough food for themselves and their families. And if no one is harmed, then Bob Geldof's expressions of outrage appear illogical and excessive.

He calls the sales "profiteering" as if making a profit were, in itself, an evil thing. But the entire economy is based on people making profits. Every company from Marks and Spencer to the Body Shop tries to make profits. Those who do jobs generally do so to get money, too. Bob Geldof used to sell records on which he, too, made profits. Indeed members of his own band are currently starting proceedings against him because they argue that he kept too much of the profits and passed too little on to them. If profits are evil, we are all sinners.

Bob Geldof may have stopped Ebay from auctioning tickets, but he should not imagine that he has stopped all buying and selling of Live 8 tickets. That will go on by email, in pubs and clubs and outside the concert itself. By blackmailing Ebay into halting its auction, his only achievement will have been to drive the trade underground whereas otherwise it would have been open and traceable.

Mr Geldof clearly thinks he has got the whole country behind him boasting, after Ebay gave way, "they miscalculated this country very badly and, magnificently, the country won". But on a Radio 5 Live phone in yesterday, there were plenty of callers saying they did not agree with him and who regretted that Ebay had been bullied into closing down a legal and useful auction. Warren Buffet, the second richest man in the world, is meanwhile showing that Ebay, far from being villainous, can be used to help good causes. He is selling lunch with himself on the auction site and the proceeds will go to Glide, a San Francisco charity for the homeless. Last year he raised $202,000 for the charity in this way.

The whole nature of what Bob Geldof is doing has changed. When he first created Live Aid, he was raising money for charity to help with the famine highlighted by Michael Buerk on BBC News. Charity - delivered with dedication by decent, philanthropic people to those in need - is something which virtually all of us support.

But Live 8 is not directed towards charity. It is a political campaign in which, among other things, Mr Geldof is trying to pressure world governments into giving more aid to the governments of poor countries. This is a different matter. Plenty of people have serious doubts about government-to-government aid. As a leading authority on the subject, Professor Peter Bauer that said government-to-govenment aid could readily mean "transferring money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries".

Through his over-the-top attack on Ebay and the changed nature of what he is doing, Mr Geldof could be beginning to lose some of the moral authority he previously built up. It is a pity. We can do with people who care about right and wrong.

(This is the unedited version of an article which appeared in the Daily Express today).

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