At its most basic level, economic development is the process through which a community creates material wealth and uses it to improve the well-being of its members. This calls for many interrelated ingredients: healthy and educated workers, more machines and better infrastructure, advanced knowledge and...
Can governments create industries?
It is an old debate. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, from Asia to Latin America, an idea caught fire among development economists: governments should try to create industries. Typically, civil servants would pick industries that could employ lots of people...
Why do governments struggle to prop up the world’s economy?
“Out of ammo,” “helicopter money,” “monetary impotence,” “infrastructure push,” “savings glut.” These are the kind of strange handles economists use when debating why the world’s economy has been stuck since the great recession of 2008–2009...
Will we ever reach gender parity?
If it could rid itself of gender discrimination, the average developing country would see its economy grow at least 2 percentage points faster every year. That would generate enough public resources to double the size of most social protection...
Why did Piketty’s work pique our sudden interest in inequality?
The publication in 2014 of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century brought inequality to the center of the public policy debate.1 Looking at lots of historical data, Piketty found that...
Through questions and answers, this book has brought to you the issues actually faced by those working on economic development. Implicit across those answers were a number of broad messages. Politics can make reforms difficult if not impossible, no matter how sensible and beneficial those...
Why do obvious reforms never happen?
Case One. An African country spends 4 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) every year paying for the gasoline consumed by its relatively few rich people. That would be enough money to double the budget for...
Is Africa’s emergence for real?
Do you sometimes wish you had bought property in Mumbai, Shanghai, or Rio ten years ago? You would have more than tripled your money. Well, ten years from now, you will regret not having bought in Abidjan, Dakar, or Nairobi...
