This time the Gülenists were caught red-handed. In March 2009, a non-commissioned officer (NCO) serving on an air force base in the central Turkish town of Kayseri confessed to planting forged documents on a military computer, on instructions from his Gülenist mentor. His detailed account prov...

There is an important difference between domestic economic policies that create benefits by imposing costs on other nations ("beggar-thy-neighbor policies") and those whose economic costs are borne primarily at home though they might affect others as well ("beggar-thyself policies"). Beggar-thy-...

This paper of mine on the Turkish economy was completed more than a year ago but has just been published in the new journal of the Turkish Economic Association. Re-reading it, I feel it captures well the missed opportunities of the last few years. Unwillingness to use fiscal policy in a counterc...

I teach what is, for me, a new course this semester together with Roberto Mangabeira Unger of the Law School, called “Political Economy After the Crisis.” Roberto and I end up arguing quite a bit, with plenty of contributions from the students. For those of you who are interested, here is the s...

Many moons ago, I wrote a paper (with Alberto Alesina) called “Distributive Politics and Economic Growth,” which remains one of my most heavily cited publications. The paper has a simple idea: in highly unequal societies, the median voter is more likely to demand high taxes on capital, which in...

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...

In its Fact Sheet on CAFTA, the US Trade Representative assures domestic sugar interests that the market access the Agreement offers is no bigger than "about one day’s U.S. production, or approximately one teaspoon of sugar per week per adult American" and boasts that "CAFTA would not come close...

Now this is interesting. Al Jazeera appears to have removed my column on Turkey from their online archives. The piece, titled “Turkey on Trial” was first published in Al Jazeera English (AJE) at the end of July. It was one of my regular Project Syndicate columns, which are featured in AJE amon...

My newest column for Project Syndicate discusses the Spence Commission report on growth, and places it in the context of a new intellectual climate which, I argue, departs significantly from the strictures of the old Washington Consensus. The Spence report represents a watershed for development...

Greg Clark has written a book that offers a different perspective on why the Industrial Revolution happened and the West got rich before the rest. The main argument of the book runs counter to most of today's theories, including ones that put the emphasis on property right and high-quality insti...

Well at least a couple of them. I gave a talk with this name at LSE the other day, which was extremely well attended. I am not happy with the title at all, which as I joked, makes me sound like a Tom Friedman wannabe. But it does capture a couple of key ideas I was trying to get across: the m...

China has agreed to the posting of U.S. safety officials in its food plants, reports the NYT. According to the story, U.S. FDA officials will be "eventually be embedded in China’s food safety bureaucracy to help train Chinese officials and keep records on their inspections." Sounds good. I guess...

In an earlier post, I presented some preliminary results on what I called “growth-reducing structural change.” This refers to the highly anomalous and puzzling phenomenon whereby labor moves from high- to low-productivity activities. In joint work with Maggie McMillan (Tufts and IFPRI) we have n...

I have updated the page with links to Growth Diagnostics exercises that I know of. There is also a volume of Latin American GD case studies that should be coming out from the Inter-American Development Bank next month or so. I am sure that there are others that I am missing, so if you know of...

... and do something useful for the world, here is some wise advice from Chris Blattman, a former MPAID. In my experience, though, too many students who are interested in making a difference in the real world go on to the Ph.D--and for the wrong reason. As I always tell students asking me for ad...

Richer countries are more likely to be democratic. This has usually been interpreted as the consequence of higher wealth being more conducive, through various channels, to the maintenance of democratic institutions. For some time now, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, Jim Robinson, and Pierre Yared...

When I applied to Harvard College as a high school senior from Turkey, I wrote on my application form that I wanted to major in electrical engineering. Huh? Wake up Dani, there is no electrical engineering major at Harvard College! Nonetheless, I was admitted, through some quirk of the Harvard ...

Martin Wolf's review of two books that favor trade protection for developing countries has led to an interesting debate, including a contribution from Ned Phelps. I find some of the comments there astonishing. Here are a couple. Arvind Panagariya: few free-trade advocates argue that free trade ...

Tyler Cowen and Sergio Salgado for their links.

One of the worst jokes made at the expense of developing countries in recent years has been to market the current round of trade negotiations as a "development round." As the memoirs of Mike Moore, then WTO director general, candidly reveal, this particular appellation was contrived to endow glo...

Simon Johnson tells a simple and compelling story: the U.S. has been afflicted by a version of the crony capitalism that has been the scourge of so many emerging markets, except that Wall Street has bought its influence and power not by bribery but by shaping the ideology of our times: In a pr...

Look at the figure below, and then look at it again, and again, and again. It is the most telling picture about the U.S. political economy I have ever seen. It comes from Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels' new book, soon to be released. What it shows is the difference that the Pres...

Want to know how much CO2 is emitted by the power plant across town, and how it compares to the one in the city you are planning to move? The Center for Global Development has just launched a web site that will tell you exactly that. In fact, the site has emissions data for every single power p...

Never appear on a TV interview without checking up on your host. (Actually in my case, never appear on a TV show, period.) My colleague Jeffrey Frankel explains in his inaugural blog entry. Read and weep.