Author Archives: Ken

Aid Effectiveness – A New Scorecard

The Centre for Global Development has published a new collection of measures related to aid effectiveness, along with a web-based tool for looking at different dimensions of aid. Remarkably, Canada is almost exactly average, not just in total, but also … Continue reading

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The Democratic Transition

A new empirical paper on the relationship between democracy and economic growth, by Romain Wacziarg and Fabrice Murtin. Abstract Over the last two centuries, many countries experienced regime transitions toward democracy. We document this democratic transition over a long time … Continue reading

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African poverty: Falling faster than you think

A summary of recent work on African poverty rates by Maxim Pinkovskiy and Xavier Sala-i-Martin. African poverty: Falling faster than you think. The critical result to this research is the decline in inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa since the mid-late 1980′s, … Continue reading

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Measuring Development

A new paper by Martin Ravallion from the World Bank. The basic idea – the UN HDI formulation has changed but remains arbitrary. SSRN link

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Dead Aid – The Short Version

Her 2009 Wall Street Journal article, based on her book “Dead Aid”, on the negative role of foreign aid.

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Will Ireland stay in the Euro?

Not my area of expertise, but an interesting dichotomy that might be of interest to my Global Governance students. Will Ireland stay with the euro? And how much can they extract from the rest of Europe to get them to … Continue reading

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Economic White Papers – The Grand Challenges

A variety of leading economists present their opinions on the key issues for research in the social sciences. Link The importance of institutions, both formal and informal, and their interaction, are highlighted in the essays by Acemoglu, Alesina, and Samuelson, … Continue reading

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The Right Price of Food

An interesting paper on how the fluctuations in the commodities markets are reported in the development literature. Abstract – by Johan F.M. Swinnen Only a few years ago the widely shared view was that low food prices were a curse … Continue reading

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