What is Gordon Brown thinking on the G20 summit?
I joined a roomful of suits today for an hour with the PM. The venue was Lancaster House, the pink marble and gilt architectural cheesecake that will be the venue for the G20 summit on 2 April. Perhaps there’s guilt as well as gilt – Lancaster House previously hosted talks that led to the independence…
Why is development writing so turgid? George Orwell to the rescue
The literature on development can be pretty heavy going, littered with jargon, clunky prose, redundant phrases like ‘in the context of’ and euphemisms like ‘challenge’ (it means a problem). I spend a fair amount of my time reading draft papers, replacing ’employment opportunities are essential constituents of the livelihoods of the excluded population’ with ‘poor people need…
Links I liked: Rodrik reflates; Brown goes Green; Ireland backslides on aid; plus Life of Brian
Dani Rodrik talks sense as always, this time about how to engineer a quick bailout for poor countries – the IMF engineers a massive fiscal stimulus Gordon Brown nails his colours to the climate change mast in Davos: ‘we cannot afford to relegate climate change to the international pending tray because of our current economic…
Is The Economist going socialist?
The back half of The Economist (business, finance and economics) is having an excellent crisis. If you’re willing to filter out the gratuitous (and increasingly defensive) neoclassical riffs, there is some really excellent analysis in there and even some (perhaps inadvertent) progressive thinking. This week’s edition includes a three page briefing on the Asian economies and…
Protectionism – good or bad? It depends……
I wrote this for the ‘Development and the Crisis‘ website I plugged recently, but thought I’d recycle it here: It’s official. Protectionism is the Great Satan. Gordon Brown decries it in Davos; William Easterly crows over what he sees as Dani Rodrik’s conversion to the cause. All countries must eschew protectionism or risk a disastrous return to…