My last post left a few loose ends, so let me clarify and amplify. First, Albert Hirschman is very much with us, although in failing health. He could not attend yesterday's event in his honor, although his wonderful wife Sarah Hirschman and many members of the Hirschman family were there. It was...

I can't seem to get off this topic. This time my excuse is Maggie McMillan of Tufts, who rebukes me for having missed an opportunity to point out an important contradiction in the empirical literature surrounding the question of what a rise in food prices does to the world's poor. Maggie, who...

A long-standing debate between libertarians and others concerns the extent to which a state is needed to enforce cooperative rules. Many libertarians argue that informal, self-sustaining agreements can achieve desirable outcomes even without the state acting as a third-party enforcer. See here f...

Johan Swinnen responds to Oxfam: Let me start by thanking Dani Rodrik for putting a reference and summary of my report on his weblog. I also want to thank Mr. Bailey from Oxfam for his response and reference to two Oxfam reports. In fact, unlike Mr. Bailey’s claim that they contradict my argumen...

That’s the title the editors at The New Republic picked for the article I wrote based on my new book. It was really hard to get the argument of the book into a short article, and frankly I am not sure I quite succeeded. (You have to be a subscriber to read the whole article or buy the hardcove...

In December I traveled to Turkey with my wife and young son, as we do every year during winter break. This time, though, we had more than visiting family and friends in mind. We were on a mission to demonstrate that what many have called the trial of the century in Turkey is in fact a sham built...

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...

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’...

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...

Non-economists are often baffled by the disagreements among professional economists on the issues of the day--from international trade to the minimum wage, from economic development to health policy. I think the best way to understand the source of these disagreements is to recognize that there...

Suppose that the world’s leading policymakers were to meet again in Bretton Woods, New Hamp­shire, to design a new global economic order. They would natu­rally be preoccupied with today’s problems: the eurozone crisis, global recovery, financial regulation, international macroeconomic imbal­ance...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 Maggie McMillan, guest blogger According to the NYT, the experts (aka the World Bank) have been pressing African governments to get rid of fertilizer subsidies. This, the article claims, has been a big mistake. The experience of Malawi proves it: farmers in Malawi experienced record harvests ...