Back from holiday and in about an hour, I’ve just skimmed 250 pieces from the last three weeks of writing from my 15 favourite writers and bloggers, everyone from Paul Krugman and Martin Wolf to Texas in Africa and Political Climate. I didn’t have to go searching for them – they were all waiting for me on my homepage when

As a technologically challenged grumpy old man, I am one of the 90% of the world’s population who is still not on Facebook (to be honest, mainly because I’m worried about not having any friends). But as with Twitter, this blog is now dipping its toe in the murky waters of social networking. ‘From Poverty to Power’ is now available as

One of the perks of writing a blog is that I can scrounge review copies of development-related books. I’m sure they’re all fascinating and I really want to read them but alas, they don’t come with extra hours in the day attached. So I now have a growing pile by my desk that is in danger of becoming a health

My favourite lecturer on development, Hans Rosling, has gone post-digital. His new TED lecture on global population growth uses Ikea storage boxes instead. But don’t worry, he gets onto his trademark whizzy graphics at the end, and the result is spellbinding, as always. His message? If you want to reduce global population growth, start by increasing child survival rates.

Back from a week’s holiday and a ‘South in the North’ experience attending a wedding in Lewis in the Outer Hebrides (go to the top of Scotland, and turn left). My father-in-law comes from there, and his family still run a croft – a smallholding with a few sheep and cattle in one of Britain’s few remaining peasant communities. So

Google Analytics is dangerously addictive. You can see who’s visiting your blog, country by country, city by city and in real time. I have to ration myself or I’d be checking it every 5 minutes. Anyway, it turns out that I have now been writing this blog for two years. So here’s the verdict so far: Number of posts: 445 Number

One of the things undermining the effectiveness of the UN’s work on gender issues has been the lack of a single agency with responsibility for the subject. Now, after years of difficult negotiations, the U.N. General Assembly has voted to set up a body that will seek to improve the situation of women and girls around the world. The new body

Last month I spent an enjoyable hour debating zero growth with Tim Jackson in his back garden, for a slot in the July issue of New Internationalist magazine. Tim is the UK’s first Professor of Sustainable Development (at Surrey University) and author of the excellent Prosperity Without Growth (reviewed here). We largely went over the ground covered in previous posts

Last week I wrote about Justin Lin’s intriguing suggestions for how developing countries can best pursue a low risk/high return form of industrial upgrading. Here Justin responds to some of the concerns and questions raised in that post: “I am grateful to Duncan Green for his comments on my recent paper “Growth Identification and Facilitation”, which offer me the opportunity

Another bumper issue of the Economist this week. Here are some snapshots from my four favourite articles: Politics: A three page feature on Brazil, as its election campaign kicks off today. Constitutional term limits means that Lula is stepping down, despite 75% approval ratings (amazing, after eight years in office), but the country’s success means his chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff,

Justin Lin, the World Bank’s chief economist, was in London last week and presented his new paper on ‘Growth Identification and Facilitation’. Two years ago he came through just after being appointed, promising to bring a ‘new perspective’ to the Bank (see post here). His new paper certainly does that, as its subtitle ‘the role of the state in the dynamics

A new Paul Collier book is always a good workout in the brain gym and his latest, The Plundered Planet: How to Reconcile Prosperity with Nature, is no exception. You can either be seduced by his writing, conceptual acrobatics, anecdotes and soundbites (who isn’t sick of hearing ‘Bottom Billion’ in every seminar?) or you can choose the more exhausting (but