Lately, I've been musing about the key trends in Net social dynamics circa 2004. These are my initial rambling thoughts, I welcome your comments and stories. First, some background: in the mid-to-late 1990s, I ran a successful design studio specializing in innovative online communities. I was fas...

From Bloomberg: French President Nicolas Sarkozy said the government and a state-owned lender will raise 6 billion euros ($7.6 billion) to create a sovereign fund aimed at protecting and developing the country's ``strategic companies.'' ... The creation of the fund is aimed at implementing Sark...

Whenever I see Andrei Shleifer, he asks me how the revolution is going. He has in mind of course the kind of views I espouse in this blog, which he considers heretical. But Andrei is promoting his own counter-revolution, one that enshrines the last quarter century as the age of Milton Friedman. ...

Opening up to international trade raises the return to skills in advanced economies and reduces it in the less advanced ones, according to the standard factor-endowments story. If human capital accumulation in turn depends on these returns to skills, trade should enhance human capital accumulati...

David Leonhardt attributes the following thought to Larry Summers: "any system that created the Mexican peso crisis, the Asian financial crisis and the current troubles needs to be changed." I couldn't agree more. But I also cannot help but recall that at the time of the Mexican and Asian crise...

What should a World Bank economist know about governance and growth? That was the intriguing question with which Brian Levy entrapped me into writing a short note on governance. (To my credit, I was not the only one so gullible: he managed to rope in Daron Acemoglu, Francis Fukuyama, Doug North...

Want to know how much CO2 is emitted by the power plant across town, and how it compares to the one in the city you are planning to move? The Center for Global Development has just launched a web site that will tell you exactly that. In fact, the site has emissions data for every single power p...

Our Center for International Development launched its new Empowerment Lab with a conference yesterday, and one of the most interesting new social entrepreneurship initiatives I learned about is something called MyC4.com. This is a web-based platform that allows you to look up a list of African ...