I visited China for two weeks earlier this month, at the invitation of the Capital University of Economics and Business in Beijing. I gave a series of lectures on economics and labour relations to several classes of bright, eager, and surprisingly free-speaking graduate students. China’s economy has been growing at about 10% per year for over a decade, and the […]
Read moreA good-news story out of Latin America that the Inter-American Development Bank is forgiving the debts of five extremely poor countries, including Bolivia and Nicaragua. Debt relief under the IMF/World Bank Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) program only relieved a portion of their debts (and they had to go through major structural adjustment program hoops to get that). The devil […]
Read moreEvery now and then you see a sad story on TV about someone who won the lottery, and then their life went to shit (they gave it all away or lost it gambling, became an alcoholic, etc.). They invariably say at the end, “I wish I’d never won the lottery.” I kind of feel the same way about oil. I […]
Read moreSome econo-bloggers have been having fun with the fact that Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank and father of micro-credit, won the Nobel Peace Prize. Yunus, an economist who would not be shortlisted for the (kind of) Nobel Prize in Economics, wins a real one instead. I saw Yunus speak in Ottawa over ten years ago, and he was […]
Read moreKudos to Norway, already a leader in foreign aid as a share of GDP, for cancelling the bilateral debts of five poor nations. The amount of money is not huge, so one might ask why it has taken this long – the 2000 Jubilee campaign might have been a better time. From the story below, Norway actually seems pretty innocent […]
Read moreStarting with the collapse of the Doha Round, Joseph Stiglitz beats up on US agriculture subsidies that distort world trade and undermine the position of farmers in the South. From The Guardian: The failure hardly comes as a surprise: the United States and the European Union had long ago reneged on the promises they made in 2001 at Doha to […]
Read moreMark Weisbrot of the Washington, DC-based Center for Economic and Policy Research looks to recent political developments in Latin America, and sees the end of an era of neoliberal policies. His article, forthcoming in the International Journal of Health Services, begins: The changes that have taken place in Latin America in recent years are part of an epoch-making transformation. To […]
Read moreThe Globe and Mail’s Neil Reynolds does a hatchet job on Sweden. Alas, conservatives have called for the end of the Swedish welfare state for a long time, and this smear job may postpone the day that Canadians start looking at Sweden as a model we may want to emulate. Truth be told, I have never been to Sweden (though […]
Read moreWTO critic Waldon Bello, with the Thailand-based NGO Focus on the Global South, writes: The collapse on Monday of the Doha Round of World Trade Organization negotiations in Geneva is one of the best things to happen to the developing world in a long while. In the past two weeks, in anticipation of the July 27-28 meeting of the World […]
Read moreJoseph Stiglitz demonstrates the hypocracy of the Doha Round, and US and EU trade policies: America’s new trade hypocracy As the current “development round” of trade talks moves into its final stages, it is becoming increasingly clear that the goal of promoting development will not be served, and that the multilateral trade system will be undermined. Nowhere is this clearer […]
Read moreFrom his Project Syndicate column: Most academic economics rely on concepts laid down at the beginning of the twentieth century by the British economist Alfred Marshall, who said that “nature does not make leaps.†Yet we economists find ourselves increasingly disturbed by the apparent inadequacy of the neo-Marshallian toolkit that we have built to explain our world. The central bias […]
Read moreIf you listen to the Fraser Institute or like-minded think-tanks on the right, high taxes kill incentives to work and invest. They argue that Canada needs to lower its taxes in order to produce higher rates of economic growth. By their logic, the Scandinavian countries, all of whom have levels of taxes relative to GDP substantially higher than Canada’s, ought […]
Read moreMatthew McCartney, also writing in the Post-Autistic Economics Review, probes why economists know so little about economic growth when it comes to empirical research, and comes away skeptical about the merits of cross-country growth regressions: This paper is concerned with how economic growth is analysed by economists. Over the last fifteen years an extremely common method has been through cross-country […]
Read moreKevin P.Gallagher and Lyuba Zarsk, writing in Post-Autistic Economics Review, are skeptical of foreign investment policies. Their focus is on developing countries, but similar considerations could be made in the case of Canada given the intensity of investment in the resource sector and the federal government’s contention that Canada must maintain its share of global FDI because of its purported, […]
Read more