Though I was surprised to learn that William Easterly participated in the latest edition of the Economic Freedom of the World report, his chapter contains few surprises. In brief, he writes:

– Jeff Sachs and the poverty trap argument are a trip back to the 1950s and 60s.
– The Millennium Development Goals involve a lot of central planning.
– Poor countries have grown faster than rich ones.
– Economic freedom, GDP per capita, and manufacturing exports are all positively correlated. We can instrument for economic freedom to address reverse causality concerns.
– Foreign aid doesn’t boost growth. (Citation of Rajan & Subramanian)
– Meaningful accountability promotes success.

The report and the full dataset are available online. (Unfortunately, the data are only available at five year intervals prior to 2000, so you can’t go very far back if assembling annual panel data.)

Dr. Joseph Stiglitz’s new book, Making Globalization Work, seems likely to trigger another round with Jagdish Bhagwati:

Attacking the idea of free-for-all markets in a superfluous debate with conservative purists only overshadows Dr. Stiglitz’s practical suggestions, like adding labor and environmental ministers to trade negotiations. [NYT]

The book is shipping now, so it seems that I will have to grab a copy soon.

Adam Posen’s FT op-ed earlier this month demonstrates the continued relevance of Pop Internationalism, which I recommended in my last post. Posen writes:

A dozen years ago Paul Krugman, the US economist, famously called competitiveness “a dangerous obsession” among US policymakers. In fact, in every decade, in all advanced economies, a focus on export competitiveness tends to erode living standards and distracts policymakers from a more beneficial emphasis on productivity…

A focus on export competitiveness usually leads to actively harmful policies, beyond simply wasted resources and rhetoric. If exports are the public criterion of economic success, policymakers can meet that goal only by self-destructive means: depreciating a country’s currency, thus eroding the purchasing power and the accumulated wealth of citizens; depressing wages in export sectors, either directly or through relative deflation vis-à-vis trading partners, thus cutting real incomes and domestic demand; subsidizing or protecting exporting companies, thus distorting investment decisions and locking in old technologies and businesses at the expense of new entrants; or promoting national champions, thus increasing both wasteful public spending and the costs to domestic households and businesses.

As someone concerned with poverty reduction, I expected this headline to be good news: “Overweight now outnumber under-fed around the world.”

Instead, we learn that massive government intervention is needed:

To combat this, governments need to adjust domestic policy to allow control over the price of food which could then in turn impact on people’s diets, the annual conference of the International Association of Agricultural Economists has been told…

As the “burden of obesity” shifted from the rich to the poor, Professor Popkin suggested that governments should design economic strategies to influence the national diet.

However, he said, such policies used to control people’s diets would need to be carefully examined.

“A central issue affecting the world’s public health is the need to shift the relative prices of a range of foods to encourage healthier, less energy-dense and more nutrient-dense foods.

I imagine that there will be numerous unintended consequences of extensive, diet-conscious price controls on food.

Jim points to an article criticizing the prevalence of unpaid internships as the entry-level positions at UK international development NGOs. Is this also common in the States? I would be very surprised to hear of “multilingual PhD graduates competing against each other for an unpaid NGO position.”

Fun article in the Economist.

[Hat tip: DeLong]

NBER working papers from July that I ought to read when I have some free time:

Lee Bransetter & Nicholas Lardy: A primer on China for international economists who aren’t specialists.
N. Gregory Mankiw & Phillip Swagel: A review of the political uproar over offshore outsourcing and some recent empirical data.
Jonathan Eaton & Samuel Kortum: A dynamic Ricardian model of research specialization across countries and its consequences for relative wages.

Shreya Shah argues that the tendency of Western media to focus on negative stories about Africa is damaging the continent and deterring investment.

I haven’t seen other trade bloggers mention it yet, so I’ll just pass on the word in case you missed it earlier this week: US export growth has outpaced import growth so far this year, by a score of something like 10 percent to 6 percent. That mildly reduces the trade deficit. Typical coverage available here.

Brad DeLong once again notes the weakness of reporting on economic issues by the NYT and WaPo. Those papers make the budget deficit debate sound like a war of competing press releases, as opposed to an economic issue involving, you know, numbers.

(I don’t subscribe to the WSJ. Does the print edition feature content similar to the Washington Wire?)