Though you surely already know it, Brad DeLong reiterates why reading about economics in papers other than WSJ and FT is so painful.

In case you didn’t already know.

Merely skimming the latest NBER abstracts can be very stimulating:

FDI is responsible for much of China’s growth, higher domestic saving rates encourage more FDI, and political risk alters the FDI structure. And while we ought to ditch the body mass index, unfavorable health conditions may not be the root cause of underdevelopment. Plus, measuring trade in services is really tough.

Tomorrow marks the opening of the global competition in my favorite sport. Pablo Halkyard has a great list of links to articles about the World Cup and economics.

In the 1960s, 85% of known reserves worldwide were fully open to the international oil companies. That number is now 16%. The rest of the world’s oil and gas is either restricted or entirely cordoned off. “You don’t have an infinite number of prospects to drill anymore,” says T. Boone Pickens, the raider and oil patch veteran. In 1979, U.S. and British companies accounted for 27.8% of world oil and gas production. By 2004 their share was just 14%, says Bernard J. Picchi, an analyst at Foresight Research Solutions LLC in New York. National champions such as Saudi Aramco, Kuwait Petroleum, and Mexico’s Pemex outweigh publicly traded oil companies in the production contest. “Everyone is pointing their fingers at the ExxonMobils, but they are relatively small players,” says Gal Luft, co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security.

While the international majors are not the altruistic utilities that U.S. politicians might wish them to be, their main interest is in efficiently extracting and selling oil and gas. Even when they struggle, as Royal Dutch Shell PLC has in Sakhalin in Siberia, the Western oil majors are usually best equipped to tackle the hardest projects. National oil companies, though, often have a different agenda. “More and more production and reserves are controlled by governments or institutions that have more of a political than a commercial motive,” says Gerald Kepes, a managing director at PFC Energy. “That has a huge impact on pricing.”

The track record of Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), the Venezuelan national oil company, is a striking example. For President Hugo Chávez, PDVSA is a cash cow for social programs, and developing new production is apparently a low priority. Since 1998, just before Chávez took power, PDVSA’s output has fallen by 46%. [Business Week]

[Hat tip: Brandon Henak]

Postal officials pitched the idea of creating a “forever stamp” that would be good for sending first-class mail no matter how much — or how often — the cost of a postage stamp goes up. The announcement came on the same day that the Postal Service said it would seek to raise the price of a first-class stamp for the second consecutive year.

The forever stamp, which would cost the same as a first-class stamp, would provide a hedge against future postal rate increases and end the search for 2- or 3-cent stamps that usually follows a price increase…

Consumers could squirrel away forever stamps for months or years; they essentially would gain value every time rates increase… The cost of a first-class stamp has gone up 13 times since 1974, when the price was raised from 8 cents to a dime. Kearney said rate increases soon could become an annual affair. [WaPo]

The AP version of the story that I read in my local paper said that hoarding was not expected to occur.

Hoarding stamps (say, buying one million stamps now, and selling them after the next hike for a price slightly below that offered by the USPS) is profitable if the revenue exceeds the cost of storage and the opportunity cost of rates of return of other financial instruments.

If hoarding is not expected to be a problem, the USPS is saying that it expects future price hikes to be small relative to these costs. What other factors are relevant and what other information does the USPS reveal by saying it doesn’t fear stamp speculators?

David Andrew Taylor predicts fairly sizable stamp price increases in the next two years and estimates that the return on investment would be 7.7%!

I’ve never seen a 55 page long book review. Ed Leamer:

When the Journal of Economic Literature asked me to write a review of The World Is Flat, by Thomas Friedman, I responded with enthusiasm, knowing it wouldn’t take much effort on my part. As soon as I received a copy of the book, I shipped it overnight by UPS to India to have the work done. I was promised a one-day turn-around for a fee of $100. Here is what I received by e-mail the next day: “This book is truly marvelous. It is perhaps the greatest book ever written. It will surely change the course of human history.” That struck me as possibly accurate but a bit too short and too generic to make the JEL happy, and I decided, with great disappointment, to do the work myself.

I’ve also never seen a smiley face in the JEL, but there it is on page seven. I’m still working my way through the section on economic geography, but Leamer also covers trade theory and recent economic history.

[Hat tips]

Europe may be shunning genetically modified foods, but they’re increasingly popular in poor countries, according to this IHT story.

At the moment, the Wikipedia entry says that “Among theoretical academic economists, the infant industry argument is often derided, whereas applied economists and economic historians are generally more charitable.”

Contrarily, most articles I read usually say something along the lines of “At a theoretical level, the infant industry exception to the proposition that free trade is optimal has always been noted” (Krueger & Tuncer 1982).

This story isn’t about international or development economics, but it’s too impressive for me to pass up:

Here is what Senator George Allen of Virginia, who is considering a bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, said when asked his opinion of the Bernanke nomination.
“For what?”

Told that Mr. Bernanke was up for the Fed chairman’s job, Mr. Allen hedged a little, said he had not been focused on it, and wondered aloud when the hearings would be. Told that the Senate Banking Committee hearings had concluded in November, the senator responded: “You mean I missed them all? I paid no attention to them.”…

[Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)], who joked during a 2000 presidential debate that if Mr. Greenspan died, he would “prop him up and put a pair of dark glasses on him,” in a repeat of a prank in the movie “Weekend at Bernie’s,” said he did not know too much about Mr. Bernanke, but was comforted to know that Mr. Greenspan had a high opinion of him.

“It hasn’t gotten a lot of attention,” Senator McCain said, “but I think he’ll be carefully scrutinized in his hearings, and the view that other people have of him will carry a lot of weight in the financial world, particularly Greenspan.”

Mr. McCain was asked if he would be surprised to learn that the hearings were over. He paused, his eyes widening, before giving the verbal equivalent of a knock on the forehead: “You’re right, you’re right, you’re right. Duuuuuh.”

[Hat tip: Hit & Run]