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Joe and I
Brad DeLong reports that a student of his wants to know the difference, if any, between Joe Stiglitz's views on development and mine. Frankly, I had not thought about this quite in this way before, so the question set me thinking. I know that I have shaken my head many times at things that Joe h...
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Phew!
It turns out that the man who brought down the world economy studied not finance or economics--but political science! Now my colleagues and I can go out in public again... (HT: Andrew Leonard)
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Coming soon to a theater near you: capitalism 3.0
Capitalism is in the throes of its most severe crisis in many decades. A combination of deep recession, global economic dislocations, and effective nationalization of large swathes of the financial sector in the world’s advanced economies has deeply unsettled the balance between markets and stat...
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Simply the best economic development blog
I have been following Chris Blattman's blog for a while and I am just incredibly impressed by how good it has become. It focuses on Africa--but not exclusively--and contains the most intelligent and timely commentary on economic development around. I just felt I ought to say it. And no, Chris ...
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How to square the U.S.-China circle
Three is a nice long article in the New York Times by David Leonhardt, in which we learn, among other things, that Tim Geithner is actually an old China hand. Which should come in handy as he tries to right the bilateral imbalance between the two countries that has clearly become unsustainable....
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The economics of civil strife
One of my graduate students, Oeindrila Dube, has written a fascinating paper (jointly with Juan Vargas) on the determinants of Colombia's civil war, and how world prices for its major exports (coffee and oil) affect the intensity of the conflict. The central question is this: do higher world p...
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Can too much competition be the culprit?
I was just about ready to write off the repeal of Glass-Steagall as one of the instigators of the current mess, based on arguments made and linked to here, when I came across Barry Eichengreen's newest Project Syndicate piece. Now Barry is a great economist, with the rare historical perspective...
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Wolf on Spence (and Easterly)
I agree with Martin Wolf's take on the Spence commission report on growth, and his put-down of Bill Easterly's column: Contrary to what Prof Easterly argues, the report makes useful contributions to policymakers’ understanding. The most important is the emphasis on growth itself, underplayed by...
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Non-sequitur of the day
... comes from Michael Boskin (with a little help from the WSJ editors): A financial crisis is the worst time to change the foundations of American capitalism.
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Some good news for EMs
Two pieces of good news for emerging markets today. One is that the IMF has just announced a new short-term liquidity facility (SLF), which will provide certain countries quick-disbursing assistance with minimal conditionality up to five times their quotas. The other is that the Fed has announc...
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Look who's blogging now
Bono and Jeff Sachs have the tough job of convincing the U.S. and other rich nations to cough up real money for the world's poor during these financially uncertain times, and they chronicle their travails--encounters with Carla Bruni and all--here.
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The Goats of Finance
One thing leads to another. Or in this case, everything leads back to the global financial crisis... I was doing some reading on the Caribbean economy in preparation for this, and came across the homepage of Norman Girvan, who is one of the most thoughtful (living) economists I have never met. ...
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Mr. Lin goes to Washington
Justin Lin is apparently poised to become the World Bank's next chief economist, following the departure of Francois Bourguignon. LIn is an inspired choice for a number of reasons. First and foremost, this is the first time that the Bank has appointed an economist from a developing world. Secon...
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China's billionaires
Forbes has put out its latest list of China's wealthiest men and women. Here is something that initially surprised me when I looked at who is on the list. We think of China as a manufacturing powerhouse, with growth being led by an undervalued currency and a phenomenal export performance. So you...
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Misplaced concern over sovereign wealth funds
Why are normally cool heads so worked up over sovereign wealth funds and the possibility that foreign governments may come to own substantial shares in domestic companies? Recently, Larry Summers declared that this issue is "profound and goes to the nature of global capitalism." The logic of t...
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Trade and the great divergence
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...
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Fact Check, Reality Check? New GDP Data
by Arvind Subramanian, guest blogger Why did nearly 15 years have to elapse before GDP data were updated? The World Bank’s statisticians have changed the economic facts. Under these circumstances, Keynes, the economist, would have us change our opinions, while the great scientist, Einstein, woul...
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Fear mongering by free traders
Here is what I do not understand. Why is it that anyone who says that the gains from the next trade agreement are not huge, that there are real social and distributional issues we need to confront before we strike the next trade deal, and that perhaps we need to rethink the basis of the multila...
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Graduate programs in development
Chris Blattman is one of the first graduates of the MPAID program and now maintains a very interesting blog on development, with special focus on Africa. Following his MPAID, Chris did a Ph.D. in economics at Berkeley and is now on his way to Yale as assistant professor of economics and politica...
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The New York Times gets it wrong on immigration
The NYT declares that the temporary worker program contained in the immigration deal reached in the U.S. Senate is nothing less than "awful." The agreement fails most dismally in its temporary worker program. “Temporary means temporary” has been a Republican mantra, motivated by the thinly disgu...
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Fair trade: savior or ruse?
Mexican coffee farmers in Chiapas have raised their incomes while enhancing the environment thanks to "fair trade," according to the NYT. Meanwhile consumers can sip their coffee knowing that they are contributing to alleviating poverty and safefguarding the environment. Seems like a win-win, ...
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The NYT doesn't get it on trade
The New York Times bemoans the lack of support that the existing trade regime gets from the field of Democratic presidential candidates: Many Americans are experiencing economic anxiety. Wages for most workers are going nowhere. It is a sad fact that despite enormous gains in productivity over t...
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The tyranny of methodological consensus in development economics
by Murat Iyigun, guest blogger Listening to Angus Deaton’s dead-on critique of the current state of the literature on health and development at an AEA session this past weekend, I could not help but think about the costs and benefits of methodology fads in our profession in general, and growth &...
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Don't cry for Doha
Well the Doha Round appears to have collapsed yet again over disagreements on agricultural subsidies and tariffs. Even though we should never underestimate the ability of trade negotiators to resuscitate the dead, we will now likely see the usual hand-wringing about the huge costs of failure to ...
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Yes, demand curves can slope upwards
A paper with the title "Giffen Behavior: Theory and Evidence" may not get your heart racing with excitement, but here is one of the most interesting pieces of economic research I have seen in a while. Many years in the making, this paper by my two Kennedy School colleagues Rob Jensen and Nolan ...
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