Inequality, Lobbying, and Resource Allocation

This paper describes how wealth inequality may distort public resource allocation. A government seeks to allocate limited resources to productive sectors, but sectoral productivity is privately known by agents with vested interests in those sectors. They lobby the government for preferential treatment. The government—even if it honestly seeks to maximize economic efficiency—may be confounded by the possibility that both high wealth and true economic desirability create loud lobbies. Broadly speaking, both poorer economies and unequal economies display greater public misallocation. The paper warns against the conventional wisdom that this is so because such governments are more “corrupt.”

Herbert Muggleton Stanley, 20 July 1903 - 4 July 1987

Herbert Muggleton Stanley was the guiding genius behind the invention and development of novel chemical processes at the former Central Research Department of the Distillers Company Limited (DCL) at Epsom. He had an unerring eye for new and cheaper routes to major chemical intermediates and to monomers for the plastics industry. Once convinced of the feasibility and economic desirability of a potential new process he would steer it to a successful conclusion with great determination. By his quiet but inspirational leadership he built up a highly motivated and fully integrated research department. His success was manifested, even before his retirement, in worldwide major petrochemical plants, operating processes the inception of which he had nurtured . As the Public Orator at Exeter University said of him, ‘ He was one of the makers of the modern world.’ This memoir describes successively Stanley’s school and university years and then proceeds to a general account of the progress of chemicals research in DCL, with which he was so intimately connected. After a comment on Stanley as man and manager his industrial career is returned to in more technical detail. In conclusion, the active life he led in retirement is outlined. .

The Economic Desirability of Migration

L'objet de cette étude est une recherche sur les intérêts économiques qui gouvernent l'émigration. Les avantages et les désavantages économiques des mouvements d'émigration en général et aussi dans des situations concrètes sont déduits des études antérieures dans ce domaine et des cas de certains pays d'émigration. L'avantage économique de l'émigration peut être analysé de deux points de vue: individuel et national. Il semble qu'il n'y ait aucune règle universelle qui détermine l'influence de l'émigration sur la situation économique d'un pays. Plutôt, celà dépend d'une évaluation de la situation économique de chacun des deux pays intéressés pour décider si l'émigration entre eux soit désirable.