Development

Inequality and distribution—areas underserved by mainstream economics—sit at the heart of The Institute’s work. This program brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines to develop alternative approaches to the problem of inequality.

Chaired by Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Michael Spence, INET has assembled a global team of leaders and scholars calling for new thinking & new rules for the world economy

This research project will study the long-run interactions between transport infrastructure and economic development using spatially-disaggregated data for England and Wales over the period c.1817—2011. It will look to inform policy toward large investments in physical infrastructures.

Coping with the dysfunction of advanced economies, and developing strategies for economic development.

The Implications of Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative for China and the World Economy

A discussion featuring Kenneth Smith, Head of the Trade and NAFTA Office of the Ministry of the Economy of Mexico, and Jay Pelosky, Principal of Pelosky Global Strategies.

A discussion with Kaushik Basu, Professor of Economics and the C. Marks Professor of International Studies at Cornell University and former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank. 

Leading thinkers from outside the developed countries look to the future, spotlighting the pitfalls and opportunities thatawait us.

A country that produces goods of high quality at a competitive price is likely to be rewarded for its ingenuity with a trade surplus. Small countries often achieve great development success through export-led growth. At the same time, the entire economic system must be balanced.

How can we distribute growth globally when the developed world needs growth to emerge from debt overhangs and inequality between nations is still quite formidable?

The developed economies of Europe, North America, and Japan are facing tremendous challenges related to indebtedness and stagnation. How will the developing economies of Asia respond to this challenge as they reorient their growth strategies to meet the rising aspirations oftheir people?

The Foundations of Economic Prosperity: The Lessons of Innovation Process and History

Joseph Stiglitz, Michael Spence and a global team of leading thinkers are calling for new thinking & new rules for the world economy

Every nation faces the challenge of imagining what a good life means. Sound nutrition, shelter, health care, personal safety, social stability, security of savings, clean air and water, and the development of children are among the elements of what many envision as vital to a happy and healthy society.

India has for the last twenty years been undergoing a rapid and abiding structural shift in its pattern of development. The transformation of the economy from the period of the license raj to the post liberalization era has wrought many changes, with somewhat ambiguous implications.

Between July 5th and 12th, the second annual summer school in development economics, jointly sponsored by Azim Premji University and the Institute for New Economic Thinking, was held in Bangalore, India.

The Azim Premji University-Institute for Economic Thinking Advanced Graduate Workshop in Poverty, Development and Globalization is interested in identifying the complex global interactions that influence poverty and development as well as the development strategies that have proven successful in promoting equitable growth, promoting capabilities, and reducing poverty.

The relatively new field of inequality studies is gaining increasing momentum as economic disparity grows throughout the world, in advanced countries as well as less developed ones—especially in the United States.

The Advanced Graduate Workshop in Development, led by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz is interested in identifying the complex interactions that influence well-being, development and growth.

The World Economic Roundtable seeks to help the business, investment, and policy communities understand ongoing changes in the world economy and to promote a discussion of ideas that can advance the goal of a widely shared global prosperity.

The Young Scholars Initiative and the University of the Free State, SA, invite young scholars to attend the first YSI Africa conference. 

An event for INET’s Commission on Global Economic Transformation

The YSI Economic Development Working Group will host a series of panels at the annual conference of the Association for Heterodox Economics, with the goal of developing an innovative research program on productive structures, institutions, distribution, and economic development. 

This small interdisciplinary workshop, is organized by the Azim Premji University, Institute for Policy Dialogue and the Institute for New Economic Thinking. The goal of the workshop is to bring together graduate students studying development studies at a sufficiently advanced stage of their dissertation work to be able to discuss and receive feedback on their research.

Microfinance and then financial inclusion have become buzzwords in international development. Such initiatives have mobilised and generated  large amounts of development funding, despite substantial amount of critique. Such critiques call for a more impartial assessment of the effectiveness of financial inclusion on the grounds that funds for microfinance, they argue, displaced development spendings on healthcare, education or infrastructure. In addition, the focus on expansion of financial markets to ‘bank’ and financially ‘include’ the poor may divert attention from more comprehensive and effective poverty reduction strategies. Critiques of this ‘way of doing development’ are often sidelined and labelled as ‘extreme’, ‘sloppy’ or ideology-driven rather than evidence-based. We believe that there is a need for contemporary development scholars from all disciplines to engage in those debates. This half-day workshop would bring in such scholars to discuss what we have learned from a decade of research on the microfinance, and how financial inclusion and the emergence of fintech may offer new opportunities - as well as risks - in for inclusive global development. 

IMPORTANT: Due to growing concerns around the coronavirus, the INET Conference, as well as these workshops will be postponed. Applicants will soon be provided further information.

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the Young Scholars Initiative (YSI) are pleased to announce the upcoming UNCTAD Summer School 2019.

Developing countries, many of which appear not to have felt the health effects of COVID to the same extent as Europe and the US, are nonetheless facing severe economic effects as the pandemic pushes the global economy into a recession.

The implications of rising inequality are massive. Economists need to tackle it together.

In a complex world, we’ll experience more “black swans”, and the things that standard economic models assumed away will matter much more.

There’s no turning back from humanity’s move to high-density living, says Ed Glaeser. The task of the century will be making cities more liveable.

“Blindly” Engaging in Global Supply Chains Can Erode Developing Nations’ Economic Power

Robinson explains how natural experiments are done and why they’re useful. He also explains distribution of power and development of state play critical roles in successful economies.

Along the entire “innovation chain” — from research and development, to production and commercialization — government and private sectors have very different roles to play.

Institute Senior Economist Pia Malaney sees the election of Donald Trump as a message from the Rust Belt signaling a systemic failure in US political economy 

Repression in China today is at its most severe point since the aftermath of 1989. David Wu discusses the tensions inherent in a one-party state which is struggling to aspire toward a more predictable rule of law.

Fresh from discussions at the UN regarding the Argentinian debt crisis, Institute grantee Kevin Gallagher tells us about his new book and how developing countries can look for opportunity amidst modern financial obstacles.

Exploring inequality, gender, and the North-South divide.

A combination of leeway within the government and constitutional immunity during incumbency enables office holders to abuse their budget at will, which in turn creates a crisis of growth in Africa, relative to other parts of the world.

What is most demoralizing to participants in the financial markets? Falling prices? Constant volatility? How about a vacuum of trust?

For years, governments in India and much of the developing world have followed the advice of a paper arguing that labor regulations actually hurt workers. The problem? The research was wrong.

Labor market regulation is a controversial area of public policy in both developed and developing countries.

A better set of approaches for the 21st century.

In directing panelists to distinguish between what governments “can” and “will” do, this session’s title frames economic policymaking as a balancing act. Principled efforts to define and pursue the public interest are contested and repeatedly knocked off course by conflictingpersonal, bureaucratic, and political concerns that impinge on government decisionmakers.

Financial crises are staggeringly costly. Only major wars rival them in the burdens they place on public finances.

The crisis of the export led model in the EMU countries and its monetary and financial consequences on European integration.

At a time when China is the favored investment destination in the global market, it seems unlikely that it would ever face capital flight.

This is a small paper on a big subject: the polarization of American politics since the mid-1970s. In its early stages this process bore more than a passing resemblance to the opening scenes of a Grade B disaster movie: With almost everyone’s attention focused elsewhere, a series of tiny, seemingly insignificant departures from long standing routines took place.

After the inception and, hopefully, the passing of the most dangerous phase of the international financial crisis, economists have returned to the long favoured subject of global imbalances.

The ongoing eurozone crisis has prompted many to argue that monetary union withoutfiscal union was bound to fail.

These are truly testing times. The world economic order – capitalism – is being called into question following the Lehman crisis. The world’s best form of societal organization – democracy – is being challenged by the economic success of autocratic countries such as China and Singapore.

There are a number of possible purposes in assessing the level of economic development of a country or part of a country. The assessment may provide an incentive for better development, particularly if it can be compared meaningfully with assessments for other countries.

The chief obstacle to transformative change in the contemporary Middle East is the region-wide configuration of social power which was consolidated in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and which survived the transition from empire to post-Ottoman independent states largely intact.

The logic of deep global capitalist crises needs to be incorporated centrally into an understanding of the changes in the within-country inequality levels. I present a theoretical framework that incorporates two levels of political economic processes. First,global capitalist crises lead to the creation of an institutional structure or a regime in the capitalist centers that influences inequality in these core countries and in the periphery. Second the class configuration in the non-core countries - a set of institutional arrangements that can be termed local political economy - also plays a key role in determining inequality outcomes.

The paper presents a newly compiled and improved database of national household surveys between 1988 and 2008. In 2008, the global Gini index is around 70.5 percent having declined by approximately 2 Gini points over this twenty year period. When it is adjusted for the likely under-reporting of top incomes in surveys by using the gap between national accounts consumption and survey means in combination with a Pareto-type imputation of the upper tail, the estimate is a much higher global Gini of almost 76 percent.

The effect of ethnic violence on electoral results provides useful insights into voter behaviour and the incentives for political parties in democratic societies.

This paper studies the long-run impact of public debt expansion on economic growth and investigates whether the debt-growth relation varies with the level of indebtedness.

Anyone who has spent time in a developing country knows the importance of social connections. Among their many roles, these connections help individuals land jobs, and provide them with credit and other forms of support.

The presentation explains that Indian Economy is basically a market-oriented economy with constant rebalancing between state andmarket.

Many companies around the world have discovered they can benefit financially from integrating environmental, social and governance (ESG) targets in their daily operations and strategy.

The theme of this session is very timely and controversial, on the ability of sovereign governments to supervise Large Complex Financial Institutions (LCFIs), now officially described as G-SIFIs, global systemically important financial institutions.

Three major crises are confronting the world. The first is the increasing and uneven burden of humans on the biosphere, and the observation that we have already surpassed the ‘safe operating space’ for humanity with respect to three planetary boundaries: climate change, the nitrogen cycle and biodiversity loss.

“Taking advantage of the opportunity offered by the structural adjustments of the global economy…”The decisions on the four modernisations taken at the Third Plenum represented a radical change in Chinese domesticdevelopment strategy.

Only a few years ago, comparisons of American politics to opéra bouffe were not outrageously farfetched at least if you were not poor or sick.

Political meritocracy is the idea that a political system is designed with the aim of selecting political leaders with above average ability to make morally informed political judgments. That is, political meritocracy has two key components: (1) the political leaders have above average ability and virtue and (2) the selection mechanism is designed to choose such leaders.

Since the dawn of this millennium, and long before the current financial turmoil and the subsequent bitter pill of austerity therapy hit the Untied States and the European Union, the Chinese Communist Government has publicly recognized the monumental challenge of polarity.

Mercantilism, Accumulation of Foreign Exchange Reserves, and RMB Internationalization

Internationalization of the renminbi is a stated goal of the Chinese government, its brief flirtation with Special Drawing Rights and an Asian Currency Unit notwithstanding. Chinese officials understand that a dollar-centric international monetary and financial system is a mixedblessing.

Healthy innovation economies are the main driver of prosperity in the 21st century. But the three players that have traditionally sponsored basic research and invention in those economies are no longer willing or able to perform that role.

The Arab Spring has been a fundamental event in the Arab world and yet among Middle East scholars, there is great intellectual and analytical debate about the degree of political change or continuity that the Arab Spring had produced. As reverberations of the global economic crisis have continued and the international rules of the game have fundamentally remained unchanged, the demand on post-Arab Spring governments to change policy course is high.

While successive waves of democratization over the last half century changed the political landscape in various regions of the world, the authoritarian regimes have maintained their hold on power in the Arab region.

Five years after the end of the Great Recession, corporate profits are high and the stock market is booming. Yet most Americans are not sharing in the apparent prosperity.

This article studies the reasons for the under-investment in research vs. development in the decentralized equilibrium and argues that this bias provides a micro-foundation for the government direct involvement in conducting applied research rather than just financing it.

Pushing this strand of research brings a certain feeling of trepidation. It comes from recognizing that by openly elaborating on how to catch or deter a criminal, you thereby confer an undue advantage on the criminal through forewarning.

“Oh, the Chinese hate the Japanese and the Japanese hate the Chinese—to hate all but the right folks is an old established rule. The Koreans hate the Japanese and the Vietnamese hate the Chinese, and the North Koreans hate them all. Oh, the People hate the Communists and the Communists hate the People. The Nationalists hate the Communists and the Communists hate themselves. The Confucians hate the Buddhists and the Muslims hate them all. All of my folks hate all of your folks. But during National Brotherhood Week, be nice to people who are inferior to you. It’s only for a week, so have no fear—be grateful that it doesn’t last all year.”

Over the past decades African economies have exhibited two stunning paradoxes: growth acceleration coexisting with stubbornly high poverty rates; increasing capital flight along with widening development financing gaps. There has been no attempt to link the two in the literature.

During the past year, there have been numerous and somber reflections, rather like those during a traditional period of mourning, about the great and tragic events that occurred just 100 years ago – the beginning of the First World War. And in the course of these melancholy reflections about the past, there naturally have arisen anxious concerns about the future.

This paper discusses the main issues about increasing inequality, whether it matters and its impact on economic activity and growth. It starts by briefly considering the empirical evidence of the share of income going to the top one percent since 1945 in the advanced countries. It then considers whether this represents an increase in the productivity of the top one percent or merely an extraction of economic rent.

Can China lead the way on innovation?