Institutions All the Way Down

Written by Ryan McGuine // In October, economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.” While the Solow Model explains income differences between countries by the accumulation of physical capital and human capital, and rate of technological progress, Nobel laureate Douglass North wrote that rather than driving economic growth, these factors are economic growth. One thing that actually drives growth is institutions. Continue reading

Doing Less More With Less

Written by Ryan McGuine // In many ways, it feels like the world is changing faster than it ever has, yet measures of economic productivity have been growing more slowly than any time in the last 200 years. Productivity growth has been the main driver of historically-improving living standards, leading to more food, better health, better housing, and more consumer goods. But despite growing at around 2% per year for the past few decades, productivity growth has been slowing in advanced economies around the world. Continue reading

Demography & Development: Fruitful Multiplication

Written by Ryan McGuine // For millennia, there was very little change in the number of humans on earth, but like so many other measures of physical well-being and consumption, the global population skyrocketed in the 19th and 20th centuries. While it seems intuitively obvious that fewer people is good, because fewer people means higher incomes, as well as smaller environmental impact, there is actually good reason to be worried about declining populations. Continue reading

COVID-19 Response: Reflections from the (Virtual) Trenches

Written by Rebecca Alcock // On June 3rd, 2018, a volcano erupted in the heart of Guatemala. At the time of the eruption, I was living and working in Guatemala as a field intern for Engineers Without Borders, supporting the pre- and post-implementation site assessments for infrastructure projects. Our team mobilized to rebuild crucial infrastructure in the communities surrounding the volcano and had the foresight to formally establish a response framework, which would pave the way for the substantial COVID-19 response efforts underway today. Continue reading

Data & Development: A Journey Without Maps

Written by Ryan McGuine // The world is awash in data like never before, which is a good thing for global development — there are increasing returns to both more information, and better linkages across information types and sources. Despite considerable progress, though, it seems likely that a lot of the value associated with plentiful data is related to the ability to ask better questions, rather than the ability to make better prescriptions. Much of that value has yet to be realized. Continue reading

Troubled Waters for Emerging Markets

Written by Ryan McGuine // The global economy has faced a series of dramatic shocks related to the COVID-19 outbreak. While high-income countries have thrown money at their health systems and economies to dampen the hardship, many other countries lack the resources to do so. Continue reading

This is America

Sparked by the death of George Floyd, who was killed by police officers in Minneapolis, protesters marched against systematic racial bias and police brutality in cities throughout America last week. This is a site about global development, a field which typically avoids coverage of the USA. Nonetheless, its tools to study poverty and inequity are just as applicable in wealthy countries as they are in low- and middle-income ones. Continue reading

Long Story Short: Poverty, Development & Coronavirus

Written by Ryan McGuine // Poverty and development are intimately related, and COVID-19 provides an example of that connection as it continues to spread worldwide, including to ill-prepared regions like South America and Africa. Continue reading

Poor Economics, Great Economists

Written by Ryan McGuine // In October, economists Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty." Until the 1980s, the field of development economics, which seeks to determine why some countries grow rich while others remain poor, was mostly concerned with big questions, debates about foreign aid were heavily ideological, and billions of dollars were spent on untested projects based on untested assumptions. Enter the Randomistas. Continue reading

Avoiding the Resource Curse

Written by Ryan McGuine // Economic history is full of countries with abundant stocks of natural resources exporting them to generate revenue. Despite this, economic history is short on countries that have successfully converted natural resource revenues into long-term, sustained economic growth. In fact, this effect is so pronounced that Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner alleged that countries with bountiful supplies of natural resources actually grow more slowly than countries that do not — a phenomenon known as the "resource curse." Continue reading