January 29, 2009
Take a look at Development and the Crisis, a new online debate moderated by Dani Rodrik, which has kicked off with contributions from Nancy Birdsall, Jose Antonio Ocampo, Arvind Subramanian, and Yung Chul Park. Here are some excerpted highlights from Dani’s opening pitch ‘Let developing nations rule’:
Read more >>
Greed, Fear, Deregulation and previous crashes: the origins of the meltdown
January 28, 2009
Rich pickings in this week’s Economist with a special report on the future of finance, and a nice briefing on ‘global economic imbalances’ that ties together the East Asian crisis of the late 90s with the current mess. The story runs like this, (allowing for my non-Economist spin) The East Asian financial crisis of the late 90s was caused by
Read more >>
A Billion Hungry People – remember the food price crisis?
January 26, 2009
Read this paragraph: ‘Despite the recent creation of a United Nations High Level Task Force, there is still little coordination or collaboration among UN organisations, the World Bank/International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other donors. There is no functioning global mechanism to ensure coordination and policy coherence of the various actors, thus adding complexity to the response effort and reducing efficiency,
Read more >>
Promises v Reality: The Widening Credibility Gap on Aid
January 20, 2009
The backsliding began almost as soon as the ink was dry on the promises of increased aid made at the 2005 G8 summit in Gleneagles. Have a look at the graphic, based on the latest figures. It comes from a recent analysis of the latest aid numbers by ace crunchers, Development Initiatives, by way of Owen Barder’s blog.
Read more >>
Financial Crisis: Calvin and Hobbes called it 15 years ago
January 13, 2009
thanks to an unlikely source for this. the World Bank’s Crisis Talk website.
Read more >>
Financial crises at a glance: bank crashes, geopolitics and how long til the rebound?
January 12, 2009
Here are two illuminating graphics from the Financial Times and Economist. First up is a figure from Martin Wolf’s latest column in the FT, itself based on a new paper by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, showing the proportion of the world economy affected by banking crises, from 1900-2008. Its main features are a spike around the Great Depression of the
Read more >>
Why my wife is half-right on the Tobin Tax
December 9, 2008
Read more >>