Beyond foreign aid – recommendations to a House of Commons enquiry
03 Oct 2014 Leave a comment
in development economics, growth disasters, growth miracles Tags: development aid, foreign aid, overseas development aid
- Reducing trade barriers that limit exports from poor countries: implementing aspects of the Doha Round negotiation could create real income gains for low- and lower middle-income countries of more than £28 billion a year.
- Facilitating private investment, especially for infrastructure: lack of infrastructure financing for African countries may be reducing growth in some countries by as much as 2% a year.
- Protecting global environmental public goods, which create substantial value for poor countries (fisheries alone contribute an estimated £17 billion a year to African economies), and the burden of whose depletion falls disproportionately on low-income countries.
- Facilitating more research and development and technology transfer, ranging from new or cheaper pharmaceutical products to intellectual property that can be used by firms in poor countries. e) Increasing the proportion of migration that comes from developing countries: even temporary migration of poor workers to rich countries creates massive annual income gains far larger than any aid programme.
- Promoting security. While civil wars have a human cost and set back economic growth, the UK spends exports £12 billion worth of military and dual-use equipment to states on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s list of Countries of Concern for human rights abuses.
Is our economic ignorance about the sources of growth increasing?
30 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in development economics, economic growth, growth disasters, growth miracles, macroeconomics Tags: Solow residual
Bill Easterly on the great dangers of evidence-based policy and field trials
28 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
The Putin Effect on transitional economies in the former Soviet union
14 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in development economics, growth disasters, growth miracles, income redistribution, Marxist economics, Public Choice, rentseeking Tags: development, development miracles, disasters, former Soviet Union, Poland, The Great Enrichment, transitional economies, Ukraine
Poland was in the same position as Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet empire, but it followed better policy and is now several times richer.
Six of the world’s seven billion people have mobile phones – but only 4.5 billion have a toilet, according to a U.N. report
06 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
Cheap Chinese imports no more – Chinese manufacturing industry wages are growing rapidly
05 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
The World’s Most Corrupt Diplomats, As Told Through Parking Tickets
30 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in development economics, economics of crime, growth disasters, growth miracles, law and economics, liberalism Tags: crime and punishment, diplomatic corruption, diplomatic parking tickets, official corruption
Kuwait tops the list, with 246 violations per diplomat, followed by Egypt (under Mubarack), Chad, Sudan and Bulgaria. At the bottom, with no violations, are 21 diverse countries including not just the ever-polite U.K., Japan and Canada.
Most U.N. diplomats have improved their parking behaviour since 2002 when the U.S. began withholding parking fines from foreign aid payments: violations fell by 90% immediately after the measure was passed.
The British High Commissioner to New Zealand, plate DC1, nearly ran me over at pedestrian crossing yesterday outside the Wellington library, so this is not an unbiased post.
He was travelling too fast to stop in the central business district, where the speed limit is 30 kilometres per hour. You should not speed near pedestrian crossings because people are trying to walk out onto it.
Infrastructure investment and economic development strategies in Shanghai and Rio de Janeiro
28 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
What is the precariat?
24 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, development economics, entrepreneurship, growth disasters, growth miracles, income redistribution, rentseeking, technological progress, Uncategorized Tags: Leftover Left, precariat, The Great Act, The Great Enrichment, The withering away the proletariat
With the withering away of the proletariat because of the great enrichment, the Left over Left coined the word precariat.
The precariat is a social class formed by people suffering from precarity: a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare as well as being a member of a proletariat class of industrial workers who lack their own means of production and hence sell their labour to live. Specifically, it is applied to the condition of lack of job security, in other words intermittent employment or underemployment and the resultant precarious existence. The term is a portmanteau obtained by merging precarious with proletariat.
Very similar to the Karl Marx’s Lumpenproletariat: the layer of the working class that is unlikely ever to achieve class consciousness and is therefore lost to socially useful production, of no use to the revolutionary struggle, and perhaps even an impediment to the realization of a classless society.
One of the drawbacks of the precariat is they are inconveniently happier than Left over Left are willing to give them credit. For example, a lot of women in part-time jobs are happier than those in full-time jobs because of the greater worklife balance. Casual and seasonal jobs pay more too.
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Deirdre McCloskey – Equality vs. Lifting Up the Poor
21 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, constitutional political economy, development economics, growth disasters, growth miracles, liberalism Tags: Deirdre McCloskey, poverty versus inequality, The Age of Enlightenment, The Great Enrichment, The Great Escape, The Great Fact
HT: deirdremccloskey via cafehayek
Deirdre McCloskey: inequality is an ugly word – it frightens
20 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, development economics, growth disasters, growth miracles, history of economic thought, income redistribution, liberalism Tags: Deirdre McCloskey, poverty versus inequality, The Great Escape The Age of Enlightenment, The Great Fact
HT: deirdremccloskey via cafehayek
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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