Monday, November 17, 2008

Links of Interest (11/16/08)

Back again!

What happened at the G20 Summit on Saturday? 

Bill Easterly reviews The Bottom Billion (Two criticisms of Paul Collier’s book: (i) correlation does not equal causation…military intervention does not cause reduction in civil wars and poverty level and (ii) selection bias…that Collier cherry-picks troubled nations and timeframe of growth rates to show that they are trapped in low income and low growth state. (Africa left behind by Collier here)

Rethinking the growth diagnostics approach: Questions from the practitioners

The Politics of Hunger: How Illusion and Greed fan the food crisis (Paul Collier says three policies can be helpful in solving the food crisis: expanding large commercial farms, ending the GM-crop ban, and doing away with the U.S. subsidies on ethanol)

The birth of doing business report

Macro policy in a liquidity trap

Buddha boy reappears in Nepal

The IMF in focus

Dr Keynes’s Chinese patient