Sometimes simple and bold ideas help us see more clearly a complex reality that requires nuanced approaches. I have an "impossibility theorem" for the global economy that is like that. It says that democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can...

You don't come here for this kind of stuff, but if you are interested in Turkey, you should read this. And if you also happen to read Turkish, you should then turn here.

You read the title, and you say "here he goes again." OK, I admit it. I have been a bit obsessed with industrial policy lately. But there is a reason. I have been writing another paper on the subject, as an input to the work of the World Bank's Commission on Growth and Development. The Commissio...

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 ...

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...

Wrong! This revisionist piece of economic history comes from Jonh Nye, whose new book War. WIne, and Taxes is forthcoming from Princeton University Press (thanks to Marginal Revolution for the reference). Take a look at the graph below, which shows average tariffs in Britain and France during t...

But better late than never, and in any case I doubt I would have appreciated it nearly as much as I do now: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

One of the virtues of teaching in a public policy school is that writing clearly and for a broader audience is valued, instead of being taken as a negative signal of academic accomplishment and ambition. A response to my previous post by a successful economics blogger highlights the issues in st...

Until very recently, if you spent anytime thinking about development policy, the chances are that you fell into one of three groups. One group believes the problem with developing countries is lack of resources. So the solution is a vast increase in foreign aid. A second group believes the rea...

Rarely do you see a country where the mood among business people tells such a different story than the statistics. Now, in Argentina there are statistics are then there are damn lies--inflation figures are made up--but the broad contours of the economic performance of the last few years are not...

... the Mafia--or, as happens in this case, the Taliban--will. The setting is Ziarat in the tribal northwest territory of Pakistan and its potentially profitable marble quarries. The region's tribal groups have been unable to sort out competing property rights over the quarries, and the Pakista...

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...

Yes it does. And not just in theory, but also in practice. The evidence comes from the 1930s, and from the work of Ben Bernanke himself (along with other scholars like Barry Eichengreen). The important finding is that countries that devalued their currencies by getting off the gold standard wer...

The Cato Institute's 2007 annual report on Economic Freedom of the World has just been published. The report measures "economic freedom" based on the following: Size of Government: Expenditures, Taxes, and Enterprises Legal Structure and Security of Property Rights Access to Sound Money Freed...

It is Spring Conference time at the Kennedy School, and I just spoke at a panel on demography, poverty, and development chaired by our Dean, David Ellwood. I asked the audience a favorite question of mine: would you rather be poor in a rich country, or rich in a poor country. I gave them the fol...

Yes you can, and Asia has been doing it. I am in Bangkok for a Bank of Thailand conference, and among other interesting contributions (by Jose Antonio Ocampo, Raghu Rajan, and Arvind Subramanian) is a nice paper by the BIS's Robert McCauley and Guonan Ma called "Resisting financial globalizatio...

You read the title, and you say "here he goes again." OK, I admit it. I have been a bit obsessed with industrial policy lately. But there is a reason. I have been writing another paper on the subject, as an input to the work of the World Bank's Commission on Growth and Development. The Commissio...