#developmental economics

[oupacademic]

Several cities around the world have implemented driving restrictions including Mexico City, Santiago, Bogotá, Beijing, Athens, and Paris. Fuel taxes and road pricing are among the more common restrictions, but a growing number of countries are opting for increasingly severe limitations.

Rationing car use based on license plate number has become one of the more popular policies to address congestion and air pollution, but does this approach actually work?

The World Bank Economic Review examines the effects of a recent driving restriction program on car use and air pollution in Bogotá, Colombia in an attempt to discover whether or not stringent policies actually drive results or just induce more driving.  – From “The More Stringent, the Better? Rationing Car Use in Bogotá with Moderate and Drastic Restrictions”

Image via Unsplash.

[feathershy]

one challenge of blaming modern poor countries' lack of development of economic mismanagement is that it isn't as if Britain the birth place of the industrial revolution was following good economic policy by modern standards.

(though obvious being a first mover is different)

[feathershy]

given all the rich developed countries that exist, you would think that either we could identify a common factor or that development would be easy. And yet we still have no consensus on what Argentina do, and Argentina is still a basketcase.

(unless for some reason this attempt at a free market pays off in the long term, unlike the last several)

[fatal-conceit]

UChicago’s Diedra McCloskey, one of the greatest economic minds of our time, joins Don Boudreaux of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center to discuss her new book Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World. McCloskey’s book, the third of a series, argues that the classical liberal values of the bourgeoisie was the catalyst of what she calls the “great enrichment:” the fact that most of humanity, particularly the west, has had improvements in wealth and quality of life by dozens of orders of magnitude in the last couple centuries. Boudreaux also interviews McCloskey about her thoughts on the economics profession, hermeneutics and rhetoric, income inequality, Piketty, and Marx. Highly recommended listening. 

[4l3n4]

There is a lot of noise in the world, and there is a lot of idiosyncrasy. But there are also regularities and phenomena. And what the data is going to be able to do-- if there's enough of it-- is uncover, in the mess and noise of the world, some lines of music that actually have harmony. It's there, somewhere.

Esther Duflo, professor of developmental economics at MIT

Seriously the most beautiful description of the purpose of data I've ever read.

[fatal-conceit]

What is central to development, in this second way of seeing, are creativity (which itself cannot be engineered), consumer sovereignty (which is the only known means of reliably determining which outputs are truly worthwhile and which are not – and which requires freedom for both consumers and for producers), power-limiting institutions (such as – and most importantly – private property), and a culture that not only tolerates but celebrates innovation and material prosperity. Too much discussion of economic development proceeds as if governments can achieve development simply by mimicking the material outcomes of genuine economic development: people in rich countries have lots to eat, so let’s give people in poor countries more food; people in rich countries have lots of paved roads, so let’s give people in poor countries lots of paved road; people in rich countries do not allow their children to work in factories, so let’s insist that people in poor countries act similarly….

Donald Boudreaux, A Knowledge Economy

[pejmanyousefzadeh]

Stop giving money to tyrants.

[theangrylibertarian]

First World governments’ immigration policies effectively forbid international trade in labor.[3] The world’s poor cannot legally work in a First World country without that government’s permission. For most current residents of the Third World, this permission is almost impossible to obtain. If you’re an unskilled worker with no relatives in the First World, you have to endure Third World poverty, win the immigration lottery, or break the law. Contrary to popular opinion, moreover, illegal immigration is far from easy. The U.S.–Mexico border is almost two thousand miles long, but Mexicans still pay years of salary to coyotes to get across. Smugglers’ fees for more remote nations are higher still. If First World governments simply respected everyone’s right to accept job offers from willing employers, most of the world’s poor wouldn’t need charity. They could take care of themselves. Any able-bodied person living in poverty would be free to sell his labor to the highest bidder in the world. Instead of paying years of income to coyotes, the global poor could migrate for the cost of a bus or boat ticket. Instead of crossing the border in fear to compete for illegal jobs, the global poor could cross the border openly to compete for any job they’re qualified to do. Wouldn’t this simply drive First World wages down to Third World levels? No. Basic economics tells us that trade barriers don’t just redistribute wealth; they destroy wealth. Confining able-bodied workers to the Third World is like confining agriculture to Antarctica. Standard economic estimates say that open borders would roughly double world output.[4] While trade liberalization never benefits absolutely everyone, free migration would be great for the world and great for the world’s poor.

Bryan Caplan in his reply to Nicole Hassoun.