“Between 1820 and 1990, the share of world income going to today’s wealthy nations soared from twenty percent to almost seventy. Since then, that share has plummeted to where it was in 1900. As Richard Baldwin explains, this reversal of fortune reflects a new age of globalization that is drastically different from the old. In […]

” Jeffrey D. Sachs is one of the world’s most perceptive and original analysts of global development. In this major new work he presents a compelling and practical framework for how global citizens can use a holistic way forward to address the seemingly intractable worldwide problems of persistent extreme poverty, environmental degradation, and political-economic injustice: […]

Sometime around 1750, English entrepreneurs unleashed the astounding energies of steam and coal, and the world was forever changed. The emergence of factories, railroads, and gunboats propelled the West’s rise to power in the nineteenth century, and the development of computers and nuclear weapons in the twentieth century secured its global supremacy. Now, at the […]

Mass international migration is a response to extreme global inequality, and immigration has a profound impact on the way we live. Yet our views – and those of our politicians – remain caught between two extremes: popular hostility to migrants, tinged by xenophobia and racism; and the view of business and liberal elites that ‘open […]

Experts have long questioned the effect of currency undervaluation on overall GDP growth. They have viewed the underlying basis for this policy intervention in currency markets to keep the price of the home currency cheap as doomed to failure on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Moreover, the view has been that overvalued currencies hurt economic […]

The World Trade Organization — backbone of today’s international commercial relations — requires member countries to self-enforce exporters’ access to foreign markets. Its dispute settlement system is the crown jewel of the international trading system, but its benefits still fall disproportionately to wealthy nations. Could the system be doing more on behalf of developing countries? In Self-Enforcing Trade, […]

“The role of government in East Asian economic development has been a contentious issue. Two competing views have shaped enquiries into the source of the rapid growth of the high-performing Asian economies and attempts to derive a general lesson for other developing economies: the market-friendly view, according to which government intervenes little in the market, […]

“How can developing countries grow their economies? Most answers to this question center on what the rich world should or shouldn’t do for the poor world. In The Quest for Prosperity, Justin Yifu Lin–the first non-Westerner to be chief economist of the World Bank–focuses on what developing nations can do to help themselves…” [Publisher’s book website] […]

“For a century, economists have driven forward the cause of globalization in financial institutions, labour markets, and trade. Yet there have been consistent warning signs that a global economy and free trade might not always be advantageous. Where are the pressure points? What could be done about them?…” [Publisher’s Book Website] Author’s Book Presentation, August […]