Development
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Advanced Graduate Workshop in Development and Globalization
WorkshopJul 4–17, 2016
The Advanced Graduate Workshop in Development, led by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz is interested in identifying the complex interactions that influence well-being, development and growth.
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Tunisia in Turmoil: When Supply-Side Orthodoxy Meets an Angry Citizenry
May 23, 2016
Mass protests challenging the government to focus on job-creation rather than on market liberalization and trade deals may carry a cautionary message to Western policy makers, too.
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The Global Consumption and Income Project
Apr 14, 2016
We have developed over a number of years and now make publicly available a new and unprecedented data resource for understanding levels of living, poverty, inequality and inclusivity of growth and development around the world.
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Inclusive Growth: Making It Happen
Nov 20, 2015
Exploring inequality, gender, and the North-South divide.
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Governance in Africa
Oct 29, 2015
A combination of leeway within the government and constitutional immunity during incumbency enables office holders to abuse their budget at will, which in turn creates a crisis of growth in Africa, relative to other parts of the world.
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$1.90 Per Day: What Does it Say?
Oct 6, 2015
The World Bank’s global poverty estimates suffer from deep-seated problems arising from a single source, the lack of a standard for identifying who is poor and who is not that is consistent and meaningful.
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Is the Devil in the Details? Estimating Global Poverty
Oct 3, 2015
Economists’ assumptions, even about seemingly “small” matters, make an enormous difference to global poverty estimates but their impact often goes unnoticed, and the choices made have been badly justified. We must stop pretending that the World Bank’s “$1 per day” estimates are at all reliable.
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Working paper
Religious Riots and Electoral Politics in India
Sep 2015
The effect of ethnic violence on electoral results provides useful insights into voter behaviour and the incentives for political parties in democratic societies.
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Partnership Paper
Is There a Debt-threshold Effect on Output Growth?
Jul 2015
This paper studies the long-run impact of public debt expansion on economic growth and investigates whether the debt-growth relation varies with the level of indebtedness.
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Ukraine & The Future of Europe
Apr 10, 2015 | 08:00—08:30
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Conference paper
Gordian knot: A panoramic perspective on stemming illicit financial flows from Africa
Apr 2015
Pushing this strand of research brings a certain feeling of trepidation. It comes from recognizing that by openly elaborating on how to catch or deter a criminal, you thereby confer an undue advantage on the criminal through forewarning.
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Conference paper
Capital Flight from Africa and Development Inequality: Domestic and Global Dimensions
Apr 2015
Over the past decades African economies have exhibited two stunning paradoxes: growth acceleration coexisting with stubbornly high poverty rates; increasing capital flight along with widening development financing gaps. There has been no attempt to link the two in the literature.
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The Problem of Capital Flight
Apr 9, 2015 | 11:30—01:00
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Conference paper
Two Paths to War: The Origins of the First World War versus the Dynamics of Contemporary Sino-American Confrontations
Apr 2015
During the past year, there have been numerous and somber reflections, rather like those during a traditional period of mourning, about the great and tragic events that occurred just 100 years ago – the beginning of the First World War. And in the course of these melancholy reflections about the past, there naturally have arisen anxious concerns about the future.
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Northeast Asia: The Balkans of the 21st Century?
Apr 9, 2015 | 09:15—10:45
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Conference paper
Anarchic East Asia on an American Tether—and Cushion
Apr 2015
“Oh, the Chinese hate the Japanese and the Japanese hate the Chinese—to hate all but the right folks is an old established rule. The Koreans hate the Japanese and the Vietnamese hate the Chinese, and the North Koreans hate them all. Oh, the People hate the Communists and the Communists hate the People. The Nationalists hate the Communists and the Communists hate themselves. The Confucians hate the Buddhists and the Muslims hate them all. All of my folks hate all of your folks. But during National Brotherhood Week, be nice to people who are inferior to you. It’s only for a week, so have no fear—be grateful that it doesn’t last all year.”
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Conference paper
Global Crises, Equalizing and Dis-equalizing Capitalist Regimes: The Case of 20th Century Asian Political Economy
Apr 2015
The logic of deep global capitalist crises needs to be incorporated centrally into an understanding of the changes in the within-country inequality levels. I present a theoretical framework that incorporates two levels of political economic processes. First,global capitalist crises lead to the creation of an institutional structure or a regime in the capitalist centers that influences inequality in these core countries and in the periphery. Second the class configuration in the non-core countries - a set of institutional arrangements that can be termed local political economy - also plays a key role in determining inequality outcomes.
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Conference paper
Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession
Apr 2015
The paper presents a newly compiled and improved database of national household surveys between 1988 and 2008. In 2008, the global Gini index is around 70.5 percent having declined by approximately 2 Gini points over this twenty year period. When it is adjusted for the likely under-reporting of top incomes in surveys by using the gap between national accounts consumption and survey means in combination with a Pareto-type imputation of the upper tail, the estimate is a much higher global Gini of almost 76 percent.
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Analyzing Growth & Inequality in the 21st Century
Apr 8, 2015 | 06:45—07:15
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Economic Growth & Inequality across Time & Space: Where Has Growth Lead to Equality and Why?
Apr 8, 2015 | 06:00—06:30
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The Coming China Crisis
Mar 18, 2015
Rapid private-debt growth threw Japan into crisis in 1991 and did the same to the United States and Europe in 2008. China may be next.
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Conference paper
Income Inequality and Growth: Problems with the Orthodox Approach
Mar 2015
This paper discusses the main issues about increasing inequality, whether it matters and its impact on economic activity and growth. It starts by briefly considering the empirical evidence of the share of income going to the top one percent since 1945 in the advanced countries. It then considers whether this represents an increase in the productivity of the top one percent or merely an extraction of economic rent.
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Political Economy of Distribution
Inequality and distribution—areas underserved by mainstream economics—sit at the heart of The Institute’s work. This program brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines to develop alternative approaches to the problem of inequality.
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How India’s Traumatic Capitalism is Reshaping the World
Mar 2, 2015
A British national of Bengali origin, novelist Rana Dasgupta recently turned to nonfiction to explore the explosive social and economic changes in Delhi starting in 1991, when India launched a series of profoundly transformative economic reforms.
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Emerging Markets and the Reregulation of Cross-Border Finance
Feb 13, 2015
Fresh from discussions at the UN regarding the Argentinian debt crisis, Institute grantee Kevin Gallagher tells us about his new book and how developing countries can look for opportunity amidst modern financial obstacles.
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The Brace is On
Feb 3, 2015
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China's Regulation Problem
Jan 4, 2015
Repression in China today is at its most severe point since the aftermath of 1989. David Wu discusses the tensions inherent in a one-party state which is struggling to aspire toward a more predictable rule of law.
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Years granted:
2015
Transport Infrastructure, Long-Run Development, and Policy: Evidence from England and Wales, c.1817 to 2011
This research project will study the long-run interactions between transport infrastructure and economic development using spatially-disaggregated data for England and Wales over the period c.1817—2011. It will look to inform policy toward large investments in physical infrastructures.
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The IMF and Human Development: Little Progress and Worrisome Trends
Oct 13, 2014
The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank celebrate their 70th anniversary this year, yet few countries have been eager to join the festivities.
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Development and Underdevelopment in Postwar Europe
Oct 1, 2014
The question of underdevelopment and development policies in postwar Europe will be the theme of a workshop organized by Michele Alacevich, Sandrine Kott, and Mark Mazower, at Columbia University, the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Friday, October 10, 2014. The program is available here. Below are some of Alacevich’s insights on the issue leading up the event:
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Working paper
Community Networks and the Process of Development
Sep 2014
Anyone who has spent time in a developing country knows the importance of social connections. Among their many roles, these connections help individuals land jobs, and provide them with credit and other forms of support.
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Azim Premji Summer School 2014
WorkshopJun 30–Jul 6, 2014
India has for the last twenty years been undergoing a rapid and abiding structural shift in its pattern of development. The transformation of the economy from the period of the license raj to the post liberalization era has wrought many changes, with somewhat ambiguous implications.
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Worldwide Revolutions: Is History Repeating Itself?
Apr 11, 2014 | 11:00—12:30
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Conference paper
The Arab Spring is Genuine Revolution, But a Bumpy and Arduous Road Ahead
Apr 2014
The Arab Spring has been a fundamental event in the Arab world and yet among Middle East scholars, there is great intellectual and analytical debate about the degree of political change or continuity that the Arab Spring had produced. As reverberations of the global economic crisis have continued and the international rules of the game have fundamentally remained unchanged, the demand on post-Arab Spring governments to change policy course is high.
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Conference paper
Social Power and Development in the Middle East: a transnational perspective
Apr 2014
The chief obstacle to transformative change in the contemporary Middle East is the region-wide configuration of social power which was consolidated in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and which survived the transition from empire to post-Ottoman independent states largely intact.
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Conference paper
The Arab revolutions: any new paths from here?
Apr 2014
While successive waves of democratization over the last half century changed the political landscape in various regions of the world, the authoritarian regimes have maintained their hold on power in the Arab region.
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Innovation and Globalization: Playing Catch-up v. Pushing the Frontier
Apr 10, 2014 | 06:00—07:30
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Integration, Currency Unions, and Balance of Payments
Apr 10, 2014 | 09:00—10:45
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Conference paper
Profits Without Prosperity: How Stock Buybacks Manipulate the Market, and Leave Most Americans Worse Off
Apr 2014
Five years after the end of the Great Recession, corporate profits are high and the stock market is booming. Yet most Americans are not sharing in the apparent prosperity.
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Conference paper
Who should do R and who should do D?
Apr 2014
This article studies the reasons for the under-investment in research vs. development in the decentralized equilibrium and argues that this bias provides a micro-foundation for the government direct involvement in conducting applied research rather than just financing it.
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Roiling India Politics Risks Economic Reforms
Jan 24, 2014
India’s economic leaders are determined to rein in skyrocketing inflation, but the country’s volatile political landscape may prevent reforms from taking hold.
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Finance to Support Growth
Dec 12, 2013
What is most demoralizing to participants in the financial markets? Falling prices? Constant volatility? How about a vacuum of trust?
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What is Economic Success?
Oct 11, 2013
“You are now leaving the world as you know it.”
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Conference paper
The Two Innovation Economies: Follower and Frontier
Sep 2013
Can China lead the way on innovation?
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The Good Life The Challenge of Progress in China Today
ConferenceSep 7–8, 2013
Every nation faces the challenge of imagining what a good life means. Sound nutrition, shelter, health care, personal safety, social stability, security of savings, clean air and water, and the development of children are among the elements of what many envision as vital to a happy and healthy society.
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Aziz Premji Summer School 2013
WorkshopJul 4–11, 2013
Between July 5th and 12th, the second annual summer school in development economics, jointly sponsored by Azim Premji University and the Institute for New Economic Thinking, was held in Bangalore, India.
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Growth, Debt, and Past versus Future: A Visual Elaboration
Jun 5, 2013
How does debt influence growth?
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Conference paper
Poles Apart? Party Polarization and Industrial Structure in American Politics Now
Apr 2013
Only a few years ago, comparisons of American politics to opéra bouffe were not outrageously farfetched at least if you were not poor or sick.
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Conference paper
Austerity, Polarity and the Prospect of Regime Change: China
Apr 2013
Since the dawn of this millennium, and long before the current financial turmoil and the subsequent bitter pill of austerity therapy hit the Untied States and the European Union, the Chinese Communist Government has publicly recognized the monumental challenge of polarity.
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Conference paper
Assessing Development
Apr 2013
There are a number of possible purposes in assessing the level of economic development of a country or part of a country. The assessment may provide an incentive for better development, particularly if it can be compared meaningfully with assessments for other countries.
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Austerity, Polarization, and the Prospect of Social Disorder
Apr 5, 2013 | 06:50—08:20
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What is Development?
Apr 5, 2013 | 08:30—09:15
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Conference paper
Domestic Rebalancing to Reduce Global Imbalances: The Role of Financial Market Measures
Apr 2013
“Taking advantage of the opportunity offered by the structural adjustments of the global economy…”The decisions on the four modernisations taken at the Third Plenum represented a radical change in Chinese domesticdevelopment strategy.
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Conference paper
Meritocracy Is a Good Thing
Apr 2013
Political meritocracy is the idea that a political system is designed with the aim of selecting political leaders with above average ability to make morally informed political judgments. That is, political meritocracy has two key components: (1) the political leaders have above average ability and virtue and (2) the selection mechanism is designed to choose such leaders.
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China in the World: Growth, Adjustment and Integration
Apr 4, 2013 | 11:45—01:15
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Capitalism and the Rule of Law
Apr 4, 2013 | 02:30—04:30
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Conference paper
Is Mercantilism Doomed to fail? China, Germany, and Japan and The Exhaustion of Debtor Countries
Apr 2013
Mercantilism, Accumulation of Foreign Exchange Reserves, and RMB Internationalization
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The RMB and The Future of Asian Finance
Apr 4, 2013 | 05:15—06:45
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Conference paper
Renminbi Internationalization: Tempest in a Teapot?
Apr 2013
Internationalization of the renminbi is a stated goal of the Chinese government, its brief flirtation with Special Drawing Rights and an Asian Currency Unit notwithstanding. Chinese officials understand that a dollar-centric international monetary and financial system is a mixedblessing.
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Conference paper
Something for Everyone: Building Incentives for Innovation Ecosystems
Apr 2013
Healthy innovation economies are the main driver of prosperity in the 21st century. But the three players that have traditionally sponsored basic research and invention in those economies are no longer willing or able to perform that role.
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Growth Adjustment and Convergence in Asia: The Challenge Ahead?
Apr 3, 2013 | 08:20—09:15
The developed economies of Europe, North America, and Japan are facing tremendous challenges related to indebtedness and stagnation. How will the developing economies of Asia respond to this challenge as they reorient their growth strategies to meet the rising aspirations oftheir people?
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Innovation Systems
Apr 3, 2013 | 09:15—10:15
The Foundations of Economic Prosperity: The Lessons of Innovation Process and History
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Global Inequality @Columbia
DiscussionFeb 21, 2013
The relatively new field of inequality studies is gaining increasing momentum as economic disparity grows throughout the world, in advanced countries as well as less developed ones—especially in the United States.
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Azim Premji Winter School 2013
WorkshopJan 6–17, 2013
The Azim Premji University-Institute for Economic Thinking Advanced Graduate Workshop in Poverty, Development and Globalization is interested in identifying the complex global interactions that influence poverty and development as well as the development strategies that have proven successful in promoting equitable growth, promoting capabilities, and reducing poverty.
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Conference paper
Revitalizing the Eurozone without Fiscal Union
Apr 2012
The ongoing eurozone crisis has prompted many to argue that monetary union withoutfiscal union was bound to fail.
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Overhangs, Uncertainty and Political Order: Where Do We Go From Here?
Apr 13, 2012 | 03:15—05:15
Leading thinkers from outside the developed countries look to the future, spotlighting the pitfalls and opportunities thatawait us.
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Conference paper
Towards an Ecological Macroeconomics
Apr 2012
Three major crises are confronting the world. The first is the increasing and uneven burden of humans on the biosphere, and the observation that we have already surpassed the ‘safe operating space’ for humanity with respect to three planetary boundaries: climate change, the nitrogen cycle and biodiversity loss.
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Managing the Global Commons: Growth, Inequality, and New Thinking for Sustainable Economics
Apr 13, 2012 | 03:45—05:35
How can we distribute growth globally when the developed world needs growth to emerge from debt overhangs and inequality between nations is still quite formidable?
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Is Mercantilism Doomed to Fail? China, Germany, and Japan and the Exhaustion of Debtor Countries
Apr 12, 2012 | 10:00—12:10
A country that produces goods of high quality at a competitive price is likely to be rewarded for its ingenuity with a trade surplus. Small countries often achieve great development success through export-led growth. At the same time, the entire economic system must be balanced.
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Conference paper
The Culprit of the Global Crisis – German Mercantilism!
Apr 2012
These are truly testing times. The world economic order – capitalism – is being called into question following the Lehman crisis. The world’s best form of societal organization – democracy – is being challenged by the economic success of autocratic countries such as China and Singapore.
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The Future of Europe
Apr 12, 2012
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Rising to the Challenge: Equity, Adjustment and Balance in the World Economy
Apr 9, 2011 | 01:50—03:20
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Conference paper
High Wealth Concentration, Porous Exchange Control, and Shocks to Relative Return: the Fragile State of China’s Foreign Exchange Reserve
Apr 2011
At a time when China is the favored investment destination in the global market, it seems unlikely that it would ever face capital flight.
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Conference paper
Legislators Never Bowl Alone: Big Money, Mass Media, and the Polarization of Congress
Apr 2011
This is a small paper on a big subject: the polarization of American politics since the mid-1970s. In its early stages this process bore more than a passing resemblance to the opening scenes of a Grade B disaster movie: With almost everyone’s attention focused elsewhere, a series of tiny, seemingly insignificant departures from long standing routines took place.
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Conference paper
Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Jail
Apr 2011
The theme of this session is very timely and controversial, on the ability of sovereign governments to supervise Large Complex Financial Institutions (LCFIs), now officially described as G-SIFIs, global systemically important financial institutions.
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Conference paper
Global Imbalances: Past, Present and Future
Apr 2011
After the inception and, hopefully, the passing of the most dangerous phase of the international financial crisis, economists have returned to the long favoured subject of global imbalances.
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The Political Economy of Structural Adjustment: Understanding the Obstacles to Cooperation
Apr 9, 2011 | 03:15—05:10
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Conference paper
Evolving Economic and Financial Systems in India
Apr 2011
The presentation explains that Indian Economy is basically a market-oriented economy with constant rebalancing between state andmarket.
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The Architecture of Asia: Financial Structure and an Emerging Economic System
Apr 9, 2011 | 11:45—01:35
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Conference paper
Corporate Citizenship in a Civil Economy
Apr 2011
Many companies around the world have discovered they can benefit financially from integrating environmental, social and governance (ESG) targets in their daily operations and strategy.
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Can Sovereignty and Effective International Supervision Be Reconciled? The Challenge of Large Complex Financial Institutions
Apr 8, 2011 | 11:05—01:05
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Sovereignty and Institutional Design in the Global Age: The Global Market and the Nation States
Apr 8, 2011 | 09:00—10:50
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Conference paper
Political Economy of Controlling Systemic Risk: What Governments Can Do Vs. What Governments Are Willing to Do
Apr 2010
In directing panelists to distinguish between what governments “can” and “will” do, this session’s title frames economic policymaking as a balancing act. Principled efforts to define and pursue the public interest are contested and repeatedly knocked off course by conflictingpersonal, bureaucratic, and political concerns that impinge on government decisionmakers.
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Conference paper
When Wolves Cry “Wolf”: Systemic Financial Crises and the Myth of the Danaid Jar
Apr 2010
Financial crises are staggeringly costly. Only major wars rival them in the burdens they place on public finances.
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Conference paper
Marcello De Cecco: Political Economy: What Can Government Do? What Will Government Do?
Apr 2010
The crisis of the export led model in the EMU countries and its monetary and financial consequences on European integration.
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Political Economy: What Can Government Do? What Will Government Do?
Apr 9, 2010 | 12:15—02:05