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9 Jan 2010Those interested in American development policy should read the recent speech (PDF) by Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, on the subject. Although the significance of various concepts has to be decoded she made six main points: * Development should be based on partnership not patronage. This seems to mean that poorer countries should strive […]
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22 Nov 2009Daron Acemoglu, a professor of economics at MIT, summarises contemporary theories of global inequality in an article in Esquire (of all places). In broad terms two main lines of thought are popular nowadays: those that emphasise environmental factors such as geography and weather (such as Jeffrey Sachs) or natural endowments (such as Jared Diamond) or […]
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13 May 2009A lot could be said about the row over MPs’ expenses in Britain but I want to focus on one aspect of it. The discussion will no doubt strenghten the call for greater austerity. A key theme of the discussion is that everyone, including MPs, should be prepared to make sacrifices in these difficult times. […]
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3 May 2009The notion of corruption is one of the most widely used to call into question the drive for growth in developing countries. It is often argued that measures to promote growth are undesirable, because they could encourage corruption, or unrealistic. Corruption is also used to explain the lack of development of the poorest countries. A […]
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20 May 2008Will Hutton, writing in his regular Observer column on Sunday, was quick to blame corruption for the devastation caused by the recent Chinese earthquake. He associated this in turn with rapid economic growth: “Corruption is ubiquitous, which is why so many buildings were deathtraps. Another woman drew attention to the government and party buildings that […]
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11 Nov 2007A new documentary from Worldwrite, an education charity, examines the question of corruption from an African perspective. In Corruptababble two young South Africans, Brendon and Yolanda, travel around London and Edinburgh to gauge perceptions of corruption. Virtually everyone they speak to sees corruption as a big problem in Africa but few come even close to […]
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7 Nov 2007Martin Wolf has a characteristically astute piece on global inequality in today’s Financial Times. He makes a distinction between a capitalism where wealth is generated on the back of political connections combined with resistance to competition and the normal operation of the market. Carlos Slim, a Mexican who is the richest man in the world […]
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4 Nov 2007It is frustrating that two recent key books in the growth sceptic genre are not yet available in Britain. From what I can gather Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal focuses more on politics than economics. Krugman, a New York Times columnist and professor of economics at Princeton, apparently blames fundamentalist Republicanism for widening […]
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4 Jul 2007An article published today on the Guardian’s comment is free site shows how apparently radical views on inequality and corruption can lead to conservative conclusions. Salim Lone, a columnist for Kenya’s Daily Nation and former spokesman for the UN mission in Iraq, starts by bemoaning Africa’s poor record on development. He goes on to argue […]
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6 Jun 2007This month’s Prospect magazine includes an essay by Paul Collier, director of Centre for the Study of African economies at Oxford university, on why African countries are poor (the first paragraph of the article is available here). He examines several competing explanations including the naturalistic (it’s the environment or geography) and the moralistic (it’s corruption […]
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