Economics Roundtable

My good friends Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian (along with Pratap Mehta) have written a piece in the FT which takes Larry Summers to task for having expressed views on reforming globalization with which I am broadly in agreement.� They write:

The liberal economic order of ...

German president Horst Köhler has some strong words about international financial markets:

Global financial markets have become “a monster” that “must be put back in its place”, the German president has said, comparing bankers with alchemists who were responsible for “massive destruction of assets”.

In some of the ...

Negotiators continue to work desperately to achieve a breakthrough in the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round. Their goal is to get an agreement by the end of 2008. Developing countries should pull the plug on this moribund round until rich countries can ...

I am off to Milan this afternoon, first to talk to students at Bocconi university, and then to take part at a panel in a public conference on Governing Globalization. So I have been reading about recent economic performance in the EU, especially within the Eurozone, which will complete ...

The Center for European Studies at Harvard is hosting a conference on "The Nordic Model: Solutions for Continental Europe’s Problems?" today and tomorrow.� Here is the program and the papers.�

The South African National Treasury has just put on its web site all the papers that were completed during a two-year project that I was involved in (along with a long list of other economists and social scientists).� The papers run the whole gamut from straightforward research exercises to ...

Here is the video of a talk I gave last month at the annual meeting of the Turkish-American Scientists and Scholars Association (TASSA).� The title of my talk: Why Do Some Countries Remain Poor While Others Grow Rich?� The answer: I wish I knew.

Bob Kuttner spends some time in Denmark and has wise things to say about the welfare state in Denmark and advanced countries in general:

Reading Adam Smith in Copenhagen -- the center of the small, open, and highly successful Danish economy -- is a kind of out-of-body experience. ...

Through Chris Blattman I learn that Freakonomics has anointed my former colleague Rob Jensen the Indiana Jones of economics.� Rob has a really funny account of his adventures--together with co-author Nolan Miller--in the search for that elusive treasure, the Giffen Good:

About five years ago, I ...

I can't seem to get off this topic.� This time my excuse is Maggie McMillan of Tufts, who rebukes me for having missed an opportunity to point out an important contradiction in the empirical literature surrounding the question of what a rise in food prices does to the world's poor.� ...