Category: P. Other Topics
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An FP column for Thanksgiving with ten things to be thankful for –first up: turkeys (and the rest of us) should be happy that vegetarianism is spreading.
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Bomb Scare was published in the May issue of Foreign Policy. It suggests that Malthusianism has been and remains wrong, worldwide. It is based on the arguments from Is Anwhere Stuck in a Malthusian Trap?, which has been revised and published in the May edition of Kyklos (Vol. 63, no. 2). I spoke about the article on KERA's Think.
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Why do people die in earthquakes? is a working paper issued in January 2009. A version was published in the journal Disasters in 2012. Every year, around 60,000 people die worldwide in natural disasters. The majority of the deaths are caused by building collapse in earthquakes, and the great majority occurs in the developing world.…
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Crisis? What Crisis? is an unpublished short paper. It asks if a sense of despair regarding the state of development worldwide can be justified, or if the record suggests grounds for greater optimism.
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Is Africa a Failure? is an unpublished short paper. The usual way to refer to the performance of African countries over the forty or so years since independence is as a ‘crisis,’ or even a ‘rot.’ In these versions of Africa’s recent history, there is but one thing to argue over –who is to blame.…
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A Note on the Ethical Implications of the Stern Review is an unpublished short paper. The Stern Review adopts two interesting elements in its calculation of the costs and benefits of climate change mitigation. First is a ‘global welfarist’ approach that values the utility of the World’s people (now and into the future) equally, and…
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What Is Effective Aid? How Would Donors Allocate It? was issued as a World Bank Policy Research Working Paper in September, 2006. There are significant weaknesses in some of the traditional justifications for assuming that aid will foster development. This paper looks at what the cross-country aid effectiveness literature and World Bank Operations Evaluation Department…
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The Trouble with the MDGs: Confronting Expectations of Aid and Development Success, co-authored with Todd Moss and Michael Clemens was published as a Center for Global Development Working Paper (No. 40) in May 2004. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are unlikely to be met by 2015, even if huge increases in development assistance materialize. The…
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The Price of Oil: is it Low and is that Bad? co-authored with James Bond, was published in the International Journal of Global Energy Issues 17, 4, 2002. The long-term price of oil should rest near its long run marginal cost (LRMC). Past price history and both demand and natural supply factors suggest that an…
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Stock Markets in Africa: Emerging Lions or White Elephants? co-authored with Todd Moss, was published in World Development, 26, 5 (1998). The number of stock markets in African countries has doubled over the last 7 years. Although these markets remain small and illiquid, they are growing rapidly, and will become an increasingly important part of…