The world of economics lost another one of its giants this week, Peter Kenen. Kenen was a leading scholar in international economics, and the long-time director of Princeton’s famed International Finance Section, the publisher of a landmark series of essays on international economics. Kenen prod...

The Turkish court overseeing Turkey’s Sledgehammer case has finally issued its much awaited reasoning behind the verdict of last September, which found 330 officers guilty of plotting a coup in 2003 against the then-newly installed AKP government. The fabrication of evidence and the manipulatio...

My new Project Syndicate column deals with the age-old battle between the liberal and mercantilist models of capitalism. While liberalism has won the intellectual fight, the real-world battle is still on, and is likely to shape the future of the world economy. [I]t is more accurate to think of...

This column on “The Tyranny of Political Economy” quickly rose to become the most-read piece on Project Syndicate – quite to my surprise, as it deals essentially with an academic subject. I take the recent rational-choice political economy to task for ignoring the role of ideas in shaping how ve...

This is so absolutely brilliant and important: “One thing that experts know, and that non-experts do not, is that they know less than non-experts think they do.” It comes from Kaushik Basu, currently chief economist at the World Bank and one of the world’s most thoughtful expert-economists. ...

What follows below is the original, unedited version of my oped in the Financial Times today, for those who cannot access it. (UPDATE: I should add that neither the title of the FT piece nor the subtitle is mine. The subtitle in the print edition "A political class has turned violent to mask it...

There has been much discussion in Turkey in recent days about the performance of the economy under the AKP government, occasioned in part by an exchange I had with Minister of Finance Mehmet Şimşek. The Turkish government likes to claim that the GDP expanded by more than three-fold between 2002 ...

There has been much discussion in Turkey in recent days about the performance of the economy under the AKP government, occasioned in part by an exchange I had with Minister of Finance Mehmet Şimşek. The Turkish government likes to claim that the GDP expanded by more than three-fold between 2002 ...

So big changes ahead for me. This is my last week at Harvard, as I am moving to the Institute for Advanced Study as the Albert O. Hirschman professor in the School of Social Science. Here is the Institute’s official announcement. My new home page is here, although it is barely under constructi...

I have an article in the IAS’s quarterly publication, the Institute Letter, on the state of Economics. Despite the evident role of the economics profession in the recent crisis and my critical views on conventional wisdom in globalization and development, my take on the discipline is rather pos...

Here is the one paragraph version of what is happening in Turkey. During the last decade in which he has been in power, Erdogan has allowed the Gulen movement to take control over the police, judiciary, and large parts of the state apparatus. The Gulen movement in turn established a republic of ...

Guest post by Derek Headey A few years ago Dani very kindly let me guestblog on some of my work on the global food crisis (see here and also Dani’s much earlier comments here). In that earlier work I used Gallup World Poll data on subjective food security to conclude that the 2007-08 global food...

Guest post by Uma Lele[1] How quickly and how well are developing countries transforming their economies and with what effects on inter-sectorial growth and distribution? A group of us studied structural transformation looking at evidence from 109 countries over 30 years covering a 1980 to 2009 ...

Daron Acemoglu wrote what seemed like a surprising upbeat piece on Turkish democracy a few days ago. His argument seems to be that democracy required power to be wrested away from the secularists who had erected authoritarian structures, and Erdogan had achieved that. Even though, Erdogan’s rece...

David Held is one of the most thoughtful researchers and commentators on global issues, so I am thrilled and honored to be joining forces with him as joint general editor of Global Policy. The journal publishes a range of exciting academic and policy oriented pieces. Check it out here.

At long last, Turkey's consitutional court has reversed the conviction of the more than 200 officers previously found guilty in the bogus Sledgehammer coup plot, leading to the release on June 19th of all those in jail (including my father in law). Even though a retrial is to take place, the rul...

It’s been interesting to watch how the conventional wisdom on rapid convergence – developing countries closing the gap with the advanced economies – has been changing over the last few years. It wasn’t so long ago that the world was in the grips of emerging-markets mania, projecting wildly optim...

I gave a talk yesterday on New Growth Strategies at the World Bank, which was more or less an elaboration of this short piece. I argued that industrialization had pretty much run out of steam as a growth strategy, that services would need to be the focus going forward, and that this required in ...

This piece on “Erdogan’s Willing Enablers” prompts me to put down a few thoughts on the role that various members of the Turkish media and intelligentsia have played in enabling the steady deterioration of the political climate in Turkey over the last decade. What stands out with these intellect...

Two-and-a-half years ago I wrote a short piece titled "The End of the World as We Know It" which began like this: Consider the following scenario. After a victory by the left-wing Syriza party, Greece’s new government announces that it wants to renegotiate the terms of its agreement with the I...

Preparing for a panel discussion on Turkey gave me the opportunity of putting together some notes and slides on the country’s economy. That Turkey is not doing well at the moment, economically or politically, is well known. But the roots of the problem remain misunderstood. Many analysts blame t...

There is an interesting debate going on in Europe about the likely consequences of the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership). Much of the real debate is (or should be) about the proposed Investor-State dispute resolution (ISDS) and the desirability of regulatory harmonization whe...

I am doing one of the “Conversations with Tyler” events on September 24th, and in preparation for that, Tyler Cowen asked his blog readers to submit possible questions. As of this writing, there was a terrific list of challenging questions on the list. I want to offer some thoughts on one of tho...