This post is an expanded commentary on today’s posting on the World Bank’s Impact Evaluation blog about IEs and Sachs’ Millennium villages.
The Migration and Development Debate Redux
October 10, 2011 by
The cooperative game analysis of the development efforts in a developing country sheds a different light on the well-meaning development experts (in advanced countries) who promote policies that will facilitate defections and thus will tend to break down the cooperative solution to a developing country’s development efforts.
Free Cities: What could be wrong with that?
October 4, 2011 by
This post is an update of a previous post on The Charter Cities Debate and Democratic Theory. A new twist on Paul Romer’s idea of charter cities has come to my attention. It is promoted under the name of “free cities.” The home base seems to be the Free Cities Institute headquartered at the Francisco Marroquin University, a right-wing university in Guatemala.
Fukuyama and Dahrendorf on Hayek
May 9, 2011 by
Frank Fukuyama’s recent review of Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty in the NYTimes has raised a ruckus in Hayekian circles. I review an older critique of Hayek by Ralf Dahrendorf and then lament the absence of the Hayekians in the great debate of the 1990s about socially engineering the transition from socialism to capitalism. Apparently the Hayekian strictures against utopian social engineering only applied to the transition in the opposite direction.
Cash on Delivery: Gee, why didn’t someone think of that before?
March 15, 2011 by
So many development commentators over the decades have demonstrated their incomprehension of the subtleties of development aid by modeling it on the idea of “vaccinating children” that this example has become a punch-line for jokes about development naïveté. But today I see in the New York Times the breathless new idea of “cash-on-delivery aid” to pay developing countries so much cash for each child vaccinated!
The Charter Cities Debate and Democratic Theory
February 5, 2011 by
The charter cities debate is great for helping to bring out these non-democratic aspects of classical liberalism and conventional economic theory not to mention right-wing libertarianism.
Development or just poverty reduction?
February 3, 2010 by
Many of the debates about foreign aid and development assistance seem to pivot on different visions of the goal: development or just poverty reduction.
Obama needs new job creation ideas
January 29, 2010 by
The Obama economics team seems trapped by rather conventional job-creation ideas, e.g., Keynesian pump-priming or tax breaks for small businesses, ideas whose main virtue is that they are better than the opposition’s ideas of more tax breaks for the rich. But there are other ways to increase job creation and entrepreneurship that have been hindered by the size-maximizing tendencies of American corporations.