Kicking Away the (Statistical) Ladder

Developed countries often lecture developing and emerging countries on the appropriate policies and institutions necessary for economic success. This is done either bilaterally or through multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, IMF, OECD or European Union. Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang exposed the hypocrisy of this approach in his provocative 2002 book Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective. Chang suggests that when today’s rich countries were themselves developing, they used practices opposite to what they preach today, including industrial policies, high tariffs and infant industry protection. Therefore their current advice to poorer countries amounts to ‘kicking away the ladder’ of development. Read more…

Put out the FIRE (in GDP)!

No one can escape discussions about the state of “the economy.” They inform political campaigns in the U.S., debt and austerity battles in the Eurozone, and development efforts in the poorest countries in the world. Our ideas about “the economy” — how it works, what it involves, and how it is measured — provide the departure point for our debates over inequality, unemployment, wages and a host of other hot topics. And no metric for describing and assessing national economic health is used more frequently today than Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

GDP purports to measure the total value of all goods and services produced in a country over a specific time period. But there are serious reasons to question whether this metric, as currently calculated, properly measures the size of the economy. Read more…

 

This is a great idea…needs more research

Time to Rethink Capitalism by Michael Yaziji:

http://hbr.org/2008/11/time-to-rethink-capitalism/ar/1

Welcome to my site

This will be my website as well as blog starting December 2011. I will periodically add new posts and link to publications.