Tag: economic growth
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Three Cheers for the Cheapeners and Cost-Cutters
Wall Street Journal: Three Cheers for the Cheapeners and Cost-Cutters … A feature of innovation is that the greatest impact of a new idea comes not when the light bulb goes on over the geek's head, but when the resulting technology eventually becomes cheap enough for many people to use—perhaps decades later. The first plane…
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Measuring growth from outer space
Aid Watch: Cool Maps: Measuring growth from outer space For many of the world’s poorest countries, figures measuring economic growth are unreliable, and in some cases they don’t exist at all. In an NBER working paper, Brown University professors J. Vernon Henderson, Adam Storeygard, and David N. Weil came up with an interesting proxy for GDP growth:…
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The lion kings?
Economist: The lion kings? Africa is now one of the world’s fastest-growing regions. MUCH has been written about the rise of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and the shift in economic power eastward as Asia outruns the rest of the world. But the surprising success story of the past decade lies elsewhere. An…
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Why growth will stay too weak to ease unemployment
Yahoo! Finance: Why growth will stay too weak to ease unemployment WASHINGTON (AP) — An economy growing 2 percent a year might be tolerable in normal times. Today, it's a near-disaster. A growth rate of 5 percent or higher is needed to put a major dent in the nation's 9.6 percent unemployment rate. Two reasons…
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India’s Smaller Cities Show Off Growing Wealth
New York Times: India’s Smaller Cities Show Off Growing Wealth … Economists and government officials have long acclaimed India’s so-called second-tier cities as new founts of prosperity and incubators of India’s growing middle class. Cities like Pune, a manufacturing and information technology hub a few hours outside of Mumbai, and Ahmadabad, the biggest city in…
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The Mystery of Economic Growth
New York Times: The Mystery of Economic Growth …For all its temptations, however, the search for a policy toolkit toward development is fraught with pitfalls. Over the last 60 years or so, the international development community has come up with model after model, theory after theory, in search of just such a toolkit. It has,…
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Does culture affect long-run growth?
Vox: Does culture affect long-run growth? Does culture affect long-run growth? This column argues that countries with a more individualist culture have enjoyed higher long-run growth than countries with a more collectivist culture. Individualist culture attaches social status rewards to personal achievements and thus provides not only monetary incentives for innovation but also social status…