News and Analysis: 16-27 Feb 2015 | EmergingFrontierMarkets.com

Based in: Manila, Philippines

Posted on Fri, 27 Feb 15:

Vital building in Gaza could take a century, Oxfam (blog), 26 Feb 15:
At current rates it could take more than 100 years to complete essential building of homes, schools and health facilities in Gaza unless the Israeli blockade is lifted, as new figures show the amount of vital construction materials entering Gaza dropped last month. Six months since the end of the conflict, the situation in Gaza is becoming increasingly desperate

Finder of financial fault lines, Finance & Development, Mar/May '15:
When Raghuram Rajan, the IMF's youngest, and first non-Western, chief economist, turned up at the IMF headquarters in '03, many of his peers thought he had entered the wrong building. A decade later, when Rajan reported for his first day as governor of India's central bank, no one doubted that he had entered the right building

Trade, poverty, and shared prosperity, World Bank, 6 Jan 15:
In a departure from more staid formats, the final panel at a recent Bank conference staged a lively debate about the merits of pursuing distributional goals through trade policy. The consequences that trade policy can have on the bottom 40% must be addressed through policy approaches that include taxes and transfer instruments

Posted on Wed, 25 Feb 15:

Greece faces a bumpy ride to reforms, AFP, 25 Feb 14 [via Malay Mail]:
The hard work for Greece's new anti-austerity gov't began today after it secured an extension to its lifeline financial bailout with promises to implement ambitious reforms. Already the plans received a cool response from the European Central Bank and the IMF, which together with the European Commission hold the lion's share of Greece's €320 bil. in debts

Rijkers, Freund, Hallward-Driemeier & Chaubey: Does bribery speed up bureaucracy?, Brookings, 20 Feb 14:
A longstanding question remains at the heart of the fight against corruption: Are bribes 'grease' or 'glue'? Can they enhance efficiency by allocating services to those with the greatest willingness to pay? Or is corruption purely a costly impediment to entrepreneurship?, ask World Bank economists; and Peterson Inst senior fellow

Bart van Ark: Spreading good ideas and developing new ones, McKinsey, Feb '15:
Productivity is the only source of sustainable long-term growth. History also shows, however, that maintaining a high rate of productivity growth is challenging. So how to bend the slowing productivity curve? There is no silver bullet to create productivity, writes Conference Board chief economist

Posted on Mon, 23 Feb 15:

Greece readies reform promises, Reuters, 22 Feb 14:
Greece's gov't prepared reform measures on Sun to secure a financial lifeline from the euro zone, but was attacked for selling 'illusions' to voters after failing to keep a promise to extract the nation from its int'l bailout. Top Marxist members of Syriza party, a left coalition, have so far been silent on the painful compromises made to win agreement from the euro group

John Cochrane: An autopsy for the Keynesians, WSJ, 21 Dec 14 [via Hoover Inst]:
This year the tide changed in the economy. Growth seems finally to be returning. The tide also changed in econ ideas. The brief resurgence of traditional Keynesian ideas is washing away from the world of econ policy. And the land of John Maynard Keynes and Adam Smith is going with Smith, writes U Chicago prof

Why China's bubble won't burst - Lau, Columbia Univ, 20 Oct 14:
Lawrence Lau, Chinese Univ Hong Kong prof, began his talk by outlining China's progress, from an economy of $356.5 bil. in 1978 to $9.32 tril. in 2013. He expects many of the same fundamentals that drove China's 9.8% average growth over the past 36 years to support a more sustainable 7–8% rate (Mitchell: Taiwan is the success story, not China, Cato Inst)

Posted on Fri, 20 Feb 15:

Eurozone may need extra summit to clinch Greek deal, Reuters, 20 Feb 14 [via NDTV/India]:
Eurozone finance ministers will try again today (Fri) to break a deadlock over Greece's urgent need for further financing. Germany rejected a Greek letter on Thu requesting an extension of its loan agreement as a 'Trojan Horse', deceptively designed to enable Athens to dodge past commitments to austerity measures and econ reforms

Chris Blattman: Grading the Bill & Melinda Gates letter on poverty alleviation, Washington Post, 23 Jan 14:
Every year Bill & Melinda Gates write an annual letter, laying out a strategy for eliminating poverty and suffering in the world. These letters are a big event for a lot of reasons: They are smart, brief, readable and backed by a huge chunk of cash. This makes them one of the most widely read influential documents on int'l dev't every year, writes Columbia U prof

Pankaj Ghemawat: What economists know that managers don't (and vice versa), Harvard Business Rev, 6 Nov 14:
Many economists generally gloss over a notion that I will argue is highly complementary to market failures: management failures. For policy-making purposes economists assume that all businesses act rationally in the pursuit of profits. The possibility that that might not be the case is generally ignored, writes NYU Ctr Globalization of Educ & Mgmt dir

Posted on Wed, 18 Feb 15:

Greece to ask eurozone for extension of loan deal but stand firm against austerity, Independent, 18 Feb 14:
The Greek gov't has confirmed it is to ask the eurozone for a 6-month extension of its European loan agreement today. "We believe the terms of the bailout cannot continue by any means," a gov't spokesman said, but that "we are coming to the table to find a solution." It was unclear whether the new terms would be acceptable for Greece's European creditor nations

A US economist's book turns into a hit in China, Businessweek, 29 Jan 14:
Lots of people inside and outside China have heard Premier Li Keqiang promote mass entrepreneurship and innovation in speeches. Far fewer know where he got the idea. It comes at least in part from a 2013 book by Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps (Chinese premier sees innovation countering slowdown, Xinhua)

Enrico Moretti: Tax cuts for innovators are a good economic investment, Cato Inst, Nov '14:
Economists on the right tend to favor tax cuts, while economists on the left tend to oppose them. But there is a type of tax cut that all economists should support, irrespective of their political inclinations. It is an incentive designed to increase investment in R&D and innovation by companies, writes author of The New Geography of Jobs (2012) / UC-Berkeley prof

Posted on Mon, 16 Feb 15:

Greece, eurozone in high-stakes debt stand-off, AFP, 16 Feb 15 [via Times of India]:
Greece goes into talks with its eurozone partners Mon demanding changes to a massive debt rescue program which could ultimately force it out of the single currency bloc and into the unknown. "From what I've heard from the technical discussions, I'm very sceptical" there will be an agreement, the German finance min said

Should financial speculators be stopped?, Stanford Univ, by E Andrews, 26 Jan 15:
If two speculators want to bet against each other on the future price of a stock, or any other asset, should they be protected from themselves? Until recently, most economists and financial regulators answered with a resounding 'no'. But after a financial crisis precipitated in part by reckless speculation on housing and mortgages, regulators pulled a 180

Paul Romer on 'The power of the grid', URB.im (blog), Nov '14:
We recently attended a conference at NYU in which Romer started his talk by suggesting that the interventions we have come to associate with int'l development -- like cash transfers, women's self-help groups, deworming, bed nets and better stoves -- are not necessarily the big drivers of econ growth and dev't

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