Although the academic year has just begun, quite a few interesting academic articles on economic development have already been published. Among them are several articles that examine the nature of capital flows to developing countries as well as articles addressing problems associated with measuring various aspects of economic development.

Here are some recent articles on the nature of capital flows:

• Banking unconditionally: the political economy of Chinese finance in Latin America by Stephan Kaplan in the September issue of Review of International Political Economy. Kaplan discusses the effects of increased Chinese capital in two of China’s largest debtors, namely Brazil and Venezuela. He finds that Chinese capital is associated with an increase in budget deficits, but also an increase in long-term capital, giving national governments more national policy autonomy.
• IMF conditionality and development policy space, 1985–2014 by Alexander Kentikelenis, Thomas Stubbs and Lawrence King in the September issue of Review of International Political Economy. Dismal reading for anyone hoping that IMF policies have evolved to provide increased policy space for its borrowers. The authors find little evidence of fundamental transformation of IMF conditionality since 1985 and they find that policies introduced to ameliorate the social consequences of IMF macroeconomic advice have not been adequately incorporated into program design.
• Governing Capital Flows by Sunanda Sen in the September issue of Economic and Political Weekly. This is a book review of Ruling Capital: Emerging Markets and the Reregulation of Cross-Border Finance by Kevin P Gallagher (2015).

Here are some recent articles on the measurement of economic development:

• The Misty Grail: The Search for a Comprehensive Measure of Development and the Reasons for GDP Primacy by Emanuele Felice in the September issue of Development and Change. This article attempts to explain why GDP has remained the most used indicator to measure economic progress, and the relative merits of alternative approaches.
• Development by Numbers – A primer by Morten Jerven. This NYU Development Research Institute (DRI) working paper was published this summer. The paper reviews data quality of important databases on economic development and provides guidance on how to use (and how not to use) the numbers provided.
• Book review of Multidimensional Poverty Measurement and Analysis by Inaki Permanyer in the September issue of The Journal of Economic Inequality. The book (2015) is by Sabina Alkire, James Foster, Suman Seth, Maria Emma Santos, José Manuel Roche, and Paola Ballón.

In addition, Jacob Assa published the book The Financialization of GDP: Implications for economic theory and policy earlier this month (watch this blog for a post by Assa himself on the implications of his findings for economic development) and this summer the Journal of Globalization and Development published a special issue on Global Inequality, in which several articles address measurement issues.