The Chinese white elephant

Chinese involvement in Africa is not a new issue, but the brand new Chinese gift is really a "white elephant" that should have its own weight in the continent's multilateral decisions.

The new headquarters of the African Union (AU) is the tallest building in Addis and had a cost of around US$200 millions....

   

Economic Development in Latin America

A new and revolutionary course about Economic Development in Latin America!

South Sudan facts of the day

South Sudan is about to halt oil production over disputes with their North "friends", from which they have emancipated half a year ago. The problem is that the only way to export the black gold is using the Sudanese pipeline, a fact that the guys from Khartoum are using as a way to retain part of the revenues missed with the partition of the country. 

A big challenge for Juba is that 97.8% of public revenues are actually coming from oil... quite an important share! 

Other horrible interesting facts from the newest country in the world:

- 38% of the population has to walk for more than 30 minutes one way to collect drinking water
- 83% of the population live in tukuls.
- 27% of the 15 years and above population is literate. The literacy rate for males is 40% compared to 16% for females.
- In 2009 there were 129 students per classroom.

More statistics here. 

Once upon a time...

Once upon a time... I was something like a macroeconomist... and now I was reminded about it. 

Les Fleurs du mal

The cultivation of flowers for the European market has become an increasing source of jobs in East Africa. E.g., after the success of the industry in Kenya, Uganda emulated and made flowers one of its main non-traditional exported products in last years.

But, unfortunately, it seems to be that there is something evil in this business. A recent paper claims that women who get an employment in the flower industry in Ethiopia are significantly more likely to suffer domestic violence, and this report shows how international triangulation is used to evade taxes to flowers in Kenya:

Viva la revolution!

From the job market paper of Alex Solis:

Does limited access to credit explain some of the gap in schooling attainment between children
from richer and poorer families? I present new evidence on this important question using data
from two loan programs for college students in Chile. Both programs offer loans to students who
score above a threshold on the national college admission test, providing the basis for a regression discontinuity evaluation design. I fi nd that students from relatively poor families who score just above the cutoff have nearly 20 percentage points higher enrollment than students who score just below the cutoff. Access to the loan program effectively eliminates the family-income gradient in enrollment among students with similar test scores. Moreover, access to loans also leads to higher enrollment in the second and third years of college. These findings suggest that differential access to credit is an important factor behind the intergenerational transmission of income in Chile. 

Here also the blog post about the paper.

This is a very welcome contribution in terms of evidence related to the increase in enrollment when credit constrains are relaxed, but we still need to know what are the dynamic effects of the debt burden for these families and, more importantly, the elasticity price of enrollment, given Chilean higher education is the most expensive in the world..... more than credits are needed to fix the problems that unleashed the student's revolution!

Inflation and the quality of music

WOULDN’T IT BE NICE
(TO HAVE A BIT MORE INFLATION)? (Pierre-Louigi Vezina)

I think that there is a little problem with endogeneity here, but still the message is appealing and make you think about priorities in life...

Louigi finished the PhD in Geneva in my generation and is editor of Rigotnomics. 

surprise, surprise.........

professor doctor was re-elected in The Gambia!!

Political fiction: CIA interventionism and development

In occasion of the upcoming elections in DRC, I am wondering how would this country be if Patrice Lumumba had not been assesinated 50 years ago, in a plot that involved secret intelligence services from USA and Belgium. 


Taking the political fiction exercise further, what if the CIA would have not helped to kill Omar Torrijos and Jaime Roldos?... and if they would have not participated in the military coup in Chile and Cambodia? 


Given the counterfactual does not exist, we can just speculate with the effects. E.g. here there is very powerful empirical evidence of how increased political influence arising from CIA interventions during the Cold War was used to create a larger foreign market for American products.

The earnest search for a mirage

Finally!! my maestro of development, Jean-Louis Arcand, has a blog!!

I had to struggle to understand the meaning of the intricate title, and here I got the answer.

grande maestro!