The process of selecting a new World Bank president has started. Pundits are already criticizing the process for being rushed, closed, and favoring the re-selection of the current President Jim Kim. This serves as a reminder of how political the international financial institutions are, although they often present themselves as being technical and apolitcal.
A new report by Alvin Mosioma titled Panama Papers and the Looting of Africa provides insights into how complex corporate structures are used deliberately to hide away massive amounts of capital in tax havens. His findings depart from the popular discourse and approach to illicit financial flows, which has generally focused on how developing countries are poorly governed (the so-called anti-corruption consensus), rather than on systemic failure in the global financial architecture.
By Collin Constantine (Kingston University) and Johanna Renz (University of Oxford)
A powerful core and a powerless periphery – these are features of the European Monetary Union (EMU). The union has gone much further than Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) in its integration efforts and has suffered from a severe economic crisis. Since LAC’s economic integration is still ongoing, it can and should learn from the EMU’s mistakes before it is too late.
Recent research by Wits University’s National Minimum Wage Research Initiative (NMWRI) argues that workers receiving relatively more income from the implementation of a national minimum wage could boost domestic output and spending.
Several analysts, including Terry Bell in Fin24, and economist Dawie Roodt on Business Day TV, disagree.
I recently read Claudia Sahm’s piece on why there are very few female economists in the blogosphere. As a blogger herself, as someone who is active on Twitter, and as a follower of approximately eighty blogs, she states with no hesitation: “It’s true, very few female economists blog. Period.” For her, three hypotheses may explain this absence: women with opinions are not well received, women are busy with other forms of service, and women underestimate what they would contribute by blogging. But aren’t these actually manifestations of a deeper issue?
What is development economics? The answer will undoubtedly vary widely depending on whom you ask. I’ve said that this blog aims to take a critical approach to development economics, but what does that mean?
By Douglas McDonald [re-blog from NSER]
Last Friday was the Debating Development conference, organized by the titular scholars of INET’s Young Scholars Initiative, a group coordinated by NSSR’s own Ingrid Kvangraven. The conference put many scholars of different regions and different theoretical perspectives in conversation. Although it was titled “debating development,” as NSSR economics professor Sanjay Reddy noted in his opening remarks, most of the perspectives presented were more intersecting than mutually exclusive, so the conference could also be understood as a means to compound or complexify perspectives, rather than adopt or discard them.
This week it became clear that the World Bank has chosen Paul Romer as its next Chief Economist. As Chief Economist he’ll have the overall responsibility of the Bank’s research program and be able to shape the developments of the highly influential development institution. Commentators have named the choice of Chief Economist impressive, great, huge news, bold, and forward-thinking. The choice of World Bank Chief Economist rarely garners this much attention – so, why the fuss?
Developing Economics 