This paper proves that the changes in the climate are impacting communities in many different ways. I definitely was not aware of the extent of these impacts. The paper argues that climate change is damaging many communities’ crops, food access, water access, and energy security. Although media has been talking about melting glaciers, the risks of flooding, and the rising sea levels. I think that they failed in talking about what communities will be affected the most and how. I was not aware at all that rising sea levels pose a particular threat in the Middle East and North Africa, even though that’s where I am from. I wish the paper focused more on current climate displacement, specifically in some Islands in the Pacific that are sinking and risk to disappear in the next decades, such as the Marshall Islands, the Fiji Islands, or the Kiribati Island. One of my really close friends is from the Marshall Islands and she would always talk to me about how scared she is of losing her country and how hard it is for her community ( a poor community) to invest most of their resources in protecting their island from sinking. The Guardian has very interesting articles about these Islands. What surprised me the most and also scared me was reading about how climate change will have such a large impact on Morocco. I am pretty sure that most people in Morocco aren’t even aware of any of these threats. However, I am proud to say that Morocco, being a very poor country, has been investing a lot in renewable energies and is being very climate-conscious. That proves one of the points made by the paper, the most vulnerable communities to climate change are developing countries.

To be frank, I found the paper « Interest Rates in the North and Capital Flows to the South: Is there a missing link?” by Eichengreen quite confusing and I had a hard time understanding it. This paper reconciles the findings of mathematical that emphasized on the state of global financial markets as a determinant of capital flows to emerging markets with econometric studies relying on disaggregated data that have found very little support to that theory. From this paper, there are three major takeaways: 1. Both the supply and demand sides of debt are important when studying how financial decisions affect the economies of developing countries. 2. global credit conditions have also had an important impact on the market for developing countries’ debt. 3. Higher interest rates in the major money centers have a negative impact on the borrowers’ issue decisions. I thought that the most interesting part of this paper was when he talked about how higher interest rates in the US affect different countries in many different ways. I knew that it would have an impact on developing countries that have dependent economies but I sure wasn’t aware of the impacts it had on stronger economies.

“The economic and social burden of Malaria” details the multiple ways by which malaria impedes the development of many countries. The writer argues that “Where Malaria prospers most, human societies prospered least”. I was not surprised by the correlation between GDP and malaria, but I was surprised by the number of people who suffer from this disease every year. I was astonished by fact that there are 300 to 500 million clinical cases of malaria every year. This is because the burden of this disease is not evenly distributed. The global pattern of malaria show that it is mainly found in the tropics, but also into the subtropical regions of the five continents. In the regions that were characterized by strong seasonality and cold winters, the attempts to eliminate malaria were successful. On top of that, malaria cease development completely at temperatures below 16°C. Therefore, we can assume that some countries are predisposed to face a certain economic obstacle. There are two important categories of mechanisms by which malaria can impede development and cause economic costs beyond medical costs. First of all, as we talked about in our last class, health creates changes in household behavior, including investment in schooling, migration, and savings. The second one is the impact of malaria on trade, tourism, and foreign direct investment. The paper “The impact of AIDS treatments on savings and human capital investment” was a little harder for me to understand. I still found it fascinating the way they employed the “difference-in-difference” strategy to estimate the impact of ART availability on cash savings, education expenditures, and children’s schooling. It’s very interesting to see how much the ART availability improves educational attainment for children of the respondents.

In “The Economics of Being Poor”, Theodore W. Shultz talks about the major mistakes made by economists when trying to understand the reasons why some countries are still developing, while others have reached the status of developed. He analyses the history of economic development and realizes the major misconceptions that economists have believed for years. The first and most important misconception that economists have had is that they think that the standard economic theory is inadequate for understanding low-income countries and that a separate economic theory is necessary. I thought it was a very interesting point since I myself thought that cultural and behavioral factors were as important as economic factors and that they should be highly considered when making economic models. However, he argues that “standard economic theory is just as applicable to the scarcity problems that confront low-income countries as to the corresponding problems of high-income countries”. Another mistake that has long been made is the neglect of economic history. I highly agree with that. As we’ve talked about earlier in the class, context is important when analyzing economic activity and history is a very important part of context. I thought it was fascinating that he talked about how land is overrated when around me people have always talked about land scarcity being a limiting factor of growth. He even argues that “differences in productivity of the soils is not a useful variable to explain why people are poor in long-settled parts of the world. Finally, he argues that the quality of human agents is underrated. It seems obvious that a more educated population results in higher productivity and higher income. However, governments around the world tend to forget the importance of investing in health and in education to attain this objective.

In this paper on “Women empowerment and economic development”, Esther Duflo analyses the two sides of women empowerment-development relationship. She proves the validity of two arguments: one that claims that gender equality improves when poverty declines and the other that argues the importance of empowering women in order to reach development. From these theories, there are two questions that can be drown: 1. Are growth-strategies enough to overcome gender inequality? 2.Will women empowerment naturally lead to overall economic development? The first argument is that reducing poverty, even without targeting women, will help women. The evidence for that lies in the idea that by reducing the vulnerability of poor households to risk, economic development will improve women’s well-being because when poverty is reduced, the condition of everyone, including women is reduced. There is evidence from many developing countries that show that fertility decreases and women’s education improves when income increases. However, I disagree with the idea that there is a correlation between economic development and women’s legal and human rights. Or at least, I wouldn’t think that there is a strong correlation because it depends on many other aspects of a country such as religion, culture, and history. For instance, in the 17 years that I have lived in Morocco, I have seen a lot of growth happening in my country. However, this growth was not followed by an increase in gender equality. Women are still oppressed and are not given nearly as many opportunities as men, even if opportunities have been increasing. On the other hand, I think it makes more sense to believe that gender equality will lead to development. I think it’s fair to say that it’s more logical to expect that knowing that women are more than half of the world’s population and if they are not given the opportunities to have essential roles in society, it will slow down growth proportionally.

The paper“Growth strategies ”by Dani Rodrik revolves around an examination of neoclassical economic analysis and understanding the importance of context when it comes to economic growth. If there is one take away from this paper it would be that different economies function differently and local conditions matter. Therefore, there isn’t a determined solution for underdevelopment or a specific process that countries need to take in order to grow. I thought that it was very interesting to compare this paper with the one on “institutional barriers and world income disparities”. In my opinion, the one on institutional barriers compares twenty countries and gives a very broad conclusion on what policies should be taken in order for countries to grow. On the other hand, it seems to me that this paper questions the assumptions made on that paper. Dani Rodrik insists that growth-promoting policies need to be context-specific. I thought that it was very interesting that he took “the high performing East Asian countries” as an example to illustrate that significant deregulation or liberalization trade is not necessary for economic growth since neither of these countries undertook these policies until the late 1980s. He also talks about how China took a very different approach to reform. China is always the perfect example to portray how a country can grow very fast even when relying on a series of institutional innovations that differ entirely from the Western Norms. I wish he gave more examples of Western countries so that we are able to understand his argument a little better. In conclusion, I loved this paper because of how he talks about how the discipline of economics offers powerful ways to analyze the consequences of proposed policy changes but emphasizes on the idea that it is necessary to realize that these principles do not translate directly into specific recommendations.

In “The Fall and Rise of Development Economics”, Krugman offers a very interesting analysis of two different themes. First of all, he gives an overview of the bizarre history of development economics. He depicts the ideas and discussion about development from 1949 to the 1990s. I thought that was very interesting to see that, while it was highly questioned for a long period of time, in the 1990s economists were “able took at high development theory with a fresh eye” and they could finally understand that it made a lot of sense. He also describes the “problem of method” in the social sciences. I was surprised to know that high development theorists were always having a hard time expressing their ideas in the specified models that were becoming the language of discourse of economic analysis. I also found it very interesting to read about the disputes over the nature of the policies that might be required to break a country out of the poverty trap. I thought it was related to the article we read last week on institutional barriers. I was not convinced by Hirschman’s theory that a policy promoting a few strong of the economy is key to development. I agreed more with the idea that Rosenstein and others argue saying that coordinated, broadly based investment program would be required for development. My evidence for this would certainly be the paper we have read last week. The paper also argues that the modern methods of production are potentially more productive than traditional ones, but their productivity edge is large enough to compensate for the necessity of paying higher wages only if the market is large enough, which I also thought was a strong and valid argument.

I think that this article offers a very interesting perspective on some causes of development and what could be hindering countries from attaining a certain level of economic growth. I usually argue that education and health are the most important steps towards development because they are an investment in human capital and they should result in higher productivity. However, this article made me question this belief. I have realized the importance of political institutions on the process of growth. The diagrams show a clear picture of how the world income disparities between countries have widened throughout the past decades. I was very surprised by the remarkable growth experienced by the “Asian Tigers” and how that contrasted with the withering of the “Trapped countries”. When comparing all the countries chosen in the article, I have realized that there were some obvious common denominators for growing economies and common denominators for trapped economies. The former would be the adoption of policies that led to exported-led economies and the investment on industrialization, while the latter would be the corruption of the governments and the dependence on imports. I noticed that some countries had their own surprising steps that lead them to development that were not necessarily correlated to industrialization, technological advance, or opening to international trade. Mauritius is a great example of how a country can achieve economic growth just by improving tourism. I also noticed that China, while international trade played a big role in its growth, there were many other interesting transformations that were part of this change including rural industrialization, reform state-owned enterprises, and modernization of the banking sector. Finally, I believe that most of these arguments seem valid and the evidence is strong. However, they should not be taken as the ultimate cause of poverty or economic growth. There are many other different factors that could have hindered economic growth in Africa and Latin America such as geography, colonial history, natural disasters...

I think that this article offers a very interesting perspective on some causes of development and what could be hindering countries from attaining a certain level of economic growth. I usually argue that education and health are the most important steps towards development because they are an investment in human capital and they should result in higher productivity. However, this article made me question this belief. I have realized the importance of political institutions on the process of growth. The diagrams show a clear picture of how the world income disparities between countries have widened throughout the past decades. I was very surprised by the remarkable growth experienced by the “Asian Tigers” and how that contrasted with the withering of the “Trapped countries”. When comparing all the countries chosen in the article, I have realized that there were some obvious common denominators for growing economies and common denominators for trapped economies. The former would be the adoption of policies that led to exported-led economies and the investment on industrialization, while the latter would be the corruption of the governments and the dependence on imports. I noticed that some countries had their own surprising steps that lead them to development that were not necessarily correlated to industrialization, technological advance, or opening to international trade. Mauritius is a great example of how a country can achieve economic growth just by improving tourism. I also noticed that China, while international trade played a big role in its growth, there were many other interesting transformations that were part of this change including rural industrialization, reform state-owned enterprises, and modernization of the banking sector. Finally, I believe that most of these arguments seem valid and the evidence is strong. However, they should not be taken as the ultimate cause of poverty or economic growth. There are many other different factors that could have hindered economic growth in Africa and Latin America such as geography, colonial history…