This one comes from Bob Kuttner of The American Prospect. [Rodrik’s] new book, The Globalization Paradox, is simply the best recent treatment of the globalization dilemma that I've read, by an economist or anyone else. The paradox of his title is the fact that markets need states, but states ar...

At last week's IMF conference, Vivian Davies of VoxEU.org recorded an interview with me on my recent work on "growth-reducing structural change" and other matters. You can listen to it here. I spent this week in London and Warwick, giving a talk at LSE among other places. I was stunned -- that ...

Finally broke down and opened my own account: @rodrikdani

The absurdities of the Ergenekon investigation in Turkey have reached even greater heights. Now investigators are after every single copy of a draft book by the journalist Ahmet Şık (titled The Imam’s Army), which reportedly describes infiltration of the police and judiciary by Fethullah Gülen’...

Chris Blattman pays me a huge compliment by calling me a Karl Polanyi for the 21st century in his review of my Globalization Paradox – although I sure hope I am somewhat easier to follow than Polanyi. He is not too far off – at least in terms of what I thought I was doing in the book. Chris als...

Not long ago, a Harvard colleague wrote to me that Saif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, a son of Libya's dictator, would be in town and wanted to meet me. He is an interesting fellow, my colleague said, with a doctorate from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE); I would enjoy talking ...

I am copying here Martin Wolf's comments on the Doha Round, as expressed on the CUTS-tradeforum. I find them remarkable because Martin simultaneously explodes three myths about the trade regime. First, he dismisses the "bicycle theory" of trade negotiations, which says that the trade regime will...

Guy Sorman's review of my book The Globalization Paradox has one good turn of phrase at the beginning, where he calls me "a liberal mugged by globalization." But from my perspective it is all downhill from there. I provide the link to the review in the interest of equal time for my critics. The...

(This is the Afterword that appears in my book The Globalization Paradox. It is an attempt to state the book's central argument in the form of a bedtime story.) Once upon a time there was a little fishing village at the edge of a lake. The villagers were poor, living off the fish they caught an...

I thought it would be useful to clarify the economic theory that lies behind my parable on the global economy. The book covers these issues at length, so I thought that the links with the parable, coming at the end as it does, would be obvious to the reader. Obviously this need not be the case...

This isn't the greatest interview I ever gave, but it is on an interesting and challenging question: is it ever OK for an academic to work with and give advice to an authoritarian regime? My answer, despite the outcry against Harvard academics' relationship with Libya, is "yes" – although there ...

Johns Hopkins SAIS has put up a video of my talk there yesterday on "The Globalization Paradox" and you can watch it here. You can barely see me, give the positioning of the camera, but at least the audio is pretty clear.

I was at the Peterson Institute recently, hosted by Fred Bergsten at a book-launching event for The Globalization Paradox. The video of my presentation is here, and here is the Powerpoint that goes with it.

My newest Project Syndicate column was stimulated, if that is the right word, by a comment made by a discussant at a recent book launch for The Globalization Paradox. "Rodrik wants to make the world safe for politicians," complained the discussant, and this set me off thinking. Here is the resul...

There is a wonderful scene in Sebastian Mallaby's book that covers Jim Wolfensohn's tenure at the World Bank. Wolfensohn is arriving by cargo plane in Sarajevo in 1996, with his point man for Bosnia, Kemal Dervis. Dervis, who has worked hard to put together a reconstruction program for the war-t...

By Derek Headey, guest blogger Have higher food prices hurt the poor, or helped them? So far everything we "know" about this topic comes from simulation studies, all of which estimate that poverty or hunger went up by somewhere between 63-160 million people as a result of higher food prices ...

This graph is from a new paper by Frank Levy and Tom Kochan, showing trends in labor productivity and compensation since 1980: Labor productivity increased by 78 percent between 1980 and 2009, but the median compensation (including fringe benefits) of 35-44 year-old males with high school (a...

Poor countries have access to new technologies already developed elsewhere so should grow more rapidly than richer economies. This is one of the implications of standard growth models, as well as of common sense. But in reality, there is no automatic tendency for economic "convergence" among co...

This is one that Charles Babbage received in 1821 from The Edinburgh Journal of Science "It is with no inconsiderable degree of reluctance that I decline the offer of any Paper from you. I think, however, you will upon reconsideration of the subject be of opinion that I have no other alternativ...

By Will Martin and Hassan Zaman, guest bloggers We are delighted that Derek Headey has introduced new data and new approaches into the debate on the impacts of higher food prices on food security. But we have difficulty with his claim that the results from Gallup World Poll (GWP) contradict the ...

By Maggie McMillan, guest blogger When economists talk about structural transformation, they typically have in mind developing countries and the dual economy models à la W. Arthur Lewis that emphasize productivity differentials between broad sectors of the economy, such as agriculture and manuf...

A Turkish court accepted a second indictment yesterday in the infamous Sledgehammer case, adding 28 new names to the 195 officers already under indictment (most of whom have been jailed). The new indictment is based on additional (digital) documents, said to reinforce the original charges, whic...

As rich economies' prospects dim under their crushing debt burdens and political paralyses, the world's hope for economic dynamism rests with developing nations. These countries had an exceptionally good decade before the global financial crisis struck. And most among them have recovered quickly...

I showed a neat picture in my previous post on the divergence in growth rates between developing and rich countries. But can developing countries really carry the world economy? Much of the optimism about their economic prospects is the result of extrapolation. The decade preceding the global f...