Tag: nigeria

Kurzgesagt on Why South Korea is Dying Out

I struggle to explain how important this point is for the 21st century in class, in part because we had the exact opposite problem in the 20th century.

The study of demographics is ridiculously underrated!

EC101: Links for 31st October, 2019

  1. “To make this easier to navigate, I’ve grouped the publications by one measure of influence, academic citations per year since publication. The categories are not indications of the quality of the research, just its academic influence to date. Within categories, I’ve ordered studies chronologically.”
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    A useful set of links: 100 of Michael Kremer’s most popular papers.
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  2. “Moreover, the key target of economic policy, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), doesn’t provide much help. So with a view to ‘remastering’ macroeconomics, in a new ING report, produced with the help of John Calverley, Carlo Cocuzzo and I investigate how GDP could be remixed. We pay particular attention to the impact of the rapid digitalisation of the economy that has been gathering momentum over the past 25 years. Pursuing the music analogy, our focus is on a digital remix of GDP.”
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    I’m not a big fan of the concept of GDP in the first place, but that being said, this article helps us understand how the digital economy might perhaps be underrated in national income.
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  3. “Nigeria, like other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, is facing a demographic boom. By 2050, its working-age population will have increased 125 percent. At current GDP growth rates, the local labor market will be unable to absorb all the new entrants. One way for Nigeria to reduce this pressure, and make the most of remittance and skills transfers, is to promote new legal labor migration pathways with countries of destination across the globe.”
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    A useful overview of the Nigerian labor market and how it might be made more effective Applies in part to India as well, I’d argue.
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  4. “Trouble is, the rescue is entirely fictional. The only reason it’s even being attempted is to delay — as long as possible — the collapse of this large shadow lender. Such an event, as S&P Global said in a rare show of plainspeak by a credit appraiser, could be powerful enough to deliver a “solvency shock” to India’s troubled banks. Neither the lenders, nor the Indian government, wants to contemplate this grim prospect. Hence, the make-believe restructuring.”
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    Andy Mukherjee explains the mess that is Dewan Housing. Not only is this not going to end well, I’d argue that there are a lot many more skeletons about to tumble out of the closet.
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  5. “The march of technology means oil’s days are numbered. And for the good of the planet, that transition has to happen as fast as possible. But it doesn’t mean the people who gave their lives to getting energy out of the ground should have to suffer.”
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    Noah Smith on the second order effects of the slowdown in demand for oil.

ROW: Links for 31st July, 2019

  1. “There are things government could do if it were bold enough. How about a series of state-specific visas to foreigners, designed to encourage them to settle in Alaska and other underpopulated states? Alaska’s population could well rise to more than a million, and then the benefits of a good state university system would be more obvious, including for cultural assimilation. In fact, how about a plan to boost the population of Alaska to two or three million people? What would it take to get there?”
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    Especially read together with the last paragraph, this article is an excellent example of straight thinking – and one wonders where this might apply in India’s case?
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  2. I’m breaking one of my own rules (but hey, that’s kind of the point of owning this blog), but here’s a short video about a tyre scultpure out of Nigeria.
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  3. “Nonetheless, reading the testaments of people who’d come through a period of great uncertainty in the late 1920s and early 1930s, with the liberal order seemingly spent, it’s hard not to hear faint echoes in our current plight. As they do now, people then craved simple, emotional answers to complex economic and political problems.”
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    Learning more about the lives of ordinary people in the past is something I want to do more of. Germany and Germans when they realized the Russians were coming.
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  4. “The official history of China’s economic reforms is rather more sanitized, but the memoirs of Gu Mu (谷牧), who was vice premier in the 1980s and in charge of foreign trade, do help show how export discipline was applied in the Communist bureaucratic system (see this post for some more interesting tidbits from Gu’s memoir).”
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    If there is one book that I would want a student of modern Asia to read, it would be Joe Studwell’s “How Asia Works”. This article begins by tipping its hat to that book, and speaks about how China instilled a sense of export discipline.
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  5. A very long, mostly depressing article on an intellectual purge in Turkey.