Category: Q. Academic writing
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Putting Life Back into Miracles is an unpublished short paper. If you type "Middle East Miracle" into Google, you get a paltry 151 hits, compared to 29,000 for "East Asian Miracle." And yet despite a grim economic performance, between 1962 and 2002 life expectancy in the Middle East and North Africa increased from around 48…
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Toward Universal Telephone Access Market progress and progress beyond the market was published in Telecommunications Policy vol. 31. It was written with Rym Keremane. The last 10 years have seen an explosion in access to telephone services worldwide based on rapid technology advance in increasingly competitive markets. The mobile phone has driven expansion in subscribers…
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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 is an unpublished short paper.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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The OECS and Regional Telecommunications Reform, co-authered with Donnie DeFreitas and Robert Schware, was published in info, Vol. 3, No.3. The Impact of Reform on Telecommunications Prices and Services in the Countries of the OECS, co-authored with Robert Schware and Eliud Williams, is forthcoming in the Journal of Information Technology for Development. Five member countries…
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A Note on the Ethical Implications of the Stern Review is an unpublished short paper.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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Measuring and Reducing the Impact of Corruption in Infrastructure was issued as a working paper in December 2006. The paper examines what we can say about the extent and impact of corruption in infrastructure in developing countries using existing evidence. It looks at different approaches to estimating the extent of corruption and reports on the…
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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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Were People in the Past Poor and Miserable? was published in Kyklos 59, 2, 2006. Standard economic theory would suggest close linkages between income, broader measures of the quality of life and ‘utility’. When we look at broader measures of objective and subjective wellbeing in both rich and poor countries today, however, the relationship to…
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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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Questioning the Monopoly-Supported Postal USO in Developing Countries was published in M.A. Crew and P.R. Kleindorfer (eds.), Progress toward Liberalization of the Postal and Delivery Sector (Springer, 2005). The monopoly-supported universal service obligation (USO) is usually defended on the grounds that the monopoly allows for cross-subsidy in letter services that in turn allows universal access…