The Origin of Third World and Some Ruminations
Back in the late 1970s when I was first reading about the world economy in any serious way, it was still common to describe the world as divided into "first world" market-driven high income economies, "second world" command-and-control economies, and "third world" low-income countries. Jonathan Woetzel offers a commentary on the sources of that nomenclature, and how outdated it has come to sound, in "From Third World To First In Class: Rapid economic growth is blurring the distinctions among developing, emerging and advanced countries," appearing in the most recent Milken Institute Review(Second Quarter 2019, pp. 22-33). Woetzel writes:
- 18/05/2019
- 6
Time for a Return of Large Corporation Research Labs?
It often takes a number of intermediate steps to move from a scientific discovery to a consumer product. A few decades ago, many larger and even mid-sized corporations spent a lot of money on research and development laboratories, which focused on all of these steps. Some of these corporate laboratories like those at AT&T, Du Pont, IBM, and Xerox were nationally and globally famous. But the R&D ecosystem has shifted, and firms are now much more likely to rely on outside research done by universities or small start-up firms. These issues are discussed in "The changing structure of American innovation: Cautionary remarks for economic growth," by Ashish Arora, Sharon Belenzon, Andrea Patacconi, and Jungkyu Suh, presented at conference on "Innovation Policy and the Economy 2019," held on on on April 16, 2019, hosted by the National Bureau of Economic Research, and sponsored by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
- 18/05/2019
- 3
Alice Rivlin, 1931-2019, In Her Own Words
Alice Rivlin, who died on the 14th May 2019, was a legend in the Washington policy community. In "Alice Rivlin: A career spent making better public policy," Fred Dewes interviewed Rivlin for the Brookings Cafeteria Podcast on March 8, 2019.
- 17/05/2019
- 6
Does the Federal Reserve Talk Too Much?
For a long time, the Federal Reserve (and other central banks) carried out monetary policy with little or no explanation. The idea was that the market would figure it out. But in the last few decades, there has been an explosions of communication and transparency from the Fed (and other central banks), consisting both of official statements and an array of public speeches and articles by central bank officials. On one side, a greater awareness has grown up that economic activity isn't just influenced by what the central bank did in the past, but on what it is expected to do in the future. But does the this "open mouth" approach clarify and strengthening monetary policy, or just muddle it?
- 16/05/2019
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Are Firms Doing a Lousy Job in How they Hire?
In a lot of economic models, firms decide to hire based on whether they need more workers to meet the demand for their products; in the lingo, labor is a "derived demand," derived from the desired level of output. Beyond that, economic models often don't pay much attention to the details of how hiring happens, assuming that profit-maximizing firms will figure out relatively cost-effective ways of gathering and keeping the skills and workers they need. But what if that hypothesis is wrong?
- 15/05/2019
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