A statistical snapshot of where you live

zipskinny via Freakonomics

Quote of the Day

"Economics is a difficult and technical subject, but nobody will believe it"
-Keynes

Cool Stuff from IMF

Simon Johnson's Research Blog

Data Mapper

IMF Survey

A Taxi Driver started the Iraq War?

Curveball-Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War by Bob Drogin;

Curveball answers the crucial question of the Iraq war: How and why was America’s intelligence so catastrophically wrong? In this dramatic and explosive book, award-winning Los Angeles Times reporter Bob Drogin delivers a narrative that takes us to Europe, the Middle East, and deep inside the CIA to find the truth–the truth about the lies and self-deception that led us into a military and political nightmare.

In 1999, a mysterious Iraqi applies for political asylum in Munich. The young chemical engineer offers compelling testimony of Saddam Hussein’s secret program to build weapons of mass destruction. He claims that the dictator has constructed germ factories on trucks, creating a deadly hell on wheels. His grateful German hosts pass his account to their CIA counterparts but deny the Americans access to their superstar informant. The Americans nevertheless give the defector his unforgettable code name: Curveball.
The case lies dormant until after 9/11, when the Bush administration turns its attention to Iraq. Determined to invade, Bush’s people seize on Curveball’s story about mobile germ labs–even though it has begun to unravel. Ignoring a flood of warnings about the informant’s credibility, the CIA allows President Bush to cite Curveball’s unconfirmed claims in a State of the Union speech. Finally, Secretary of State Colin Powell highlights the Iraqi’s “eyewitness” account during his historic address to the U.N. Security Council. Yet the entire case is based on a fraud. America’s vast intelligence apparatus conjured up demons that did not exist. And the proof was clear before the war.

Most of the events and conversations presented here have not been reported before. The portrayals–from an obdurate president to a bamboozled secretary of state to a bungling CIA director to case handlers conned by their snitch–are vivid and exciting. Curveball reads like an investigative spy thriller. Fast-paced and engrossing, it is an inside story of intrigue and incompetence at the highest levels of government. At a time when Americans demand answers, this authoritative book provides them with clarity and conviction

Game Theory at Google

Al Roth on Market Design via Mankiw;



Related;
Economics 2040 : Experimental Economics
Auctions: Theory and Practice -online book
Didactic Web-Based Experiments in GAME THEORY

Economics 2056 : Market Design
Axiomatic Models of Bargaining
When Auction Theory Was Put to Work
Game theory discussion (podcast)

Can we ever settle this issue?

HAS WORLD POVERTY REALLY FALLEN? by Sanjay G. Reddy and Camelia Minoiu

via New Economist

Related;
Absolute poverty measures for the developing world, 1981-2004

Yet Another Econ Blog

econoadjunct

Nobel Podcasts

From Bloomberg, assorted on the Noble Economics Prize;

Sen Says Nobel Picks Help to Grasp `Welfare Economics'

V.V. Chari, professor of economics at the University of Minnesota, spoke about the 2007 Nobel Prize in economics. Eric S. Maskin and Roger B. Myerson won the Nobel in economics for theories that analyze imperfections in the marketplace and help set rules for transactions ranging from government-bond auctions to elections

Schelling Says Nobel Picks Focused on `Modern' Economics

Samuelson Says Game Theory `Helpful' to Global Economy

Fudenberg of Harvard Is `Very Happy' With Nobel Picks

Related;
Mechanism Design for Grandma

The Nobel Prize in Economics
What is Mechanism Design?
This is another Nobel for the Hayek tradition of political economy
Reflections on the Nobel Prize in Economic Science

Boettke on the New Laureates
What New Nobel Laureate Roger Myerson Is Talking about Tonight

Blog of the Day

The Blog of Diminishing Returns (an applied economist, Assistant Professor of Economics at Towson University)

Maths in Econ

I came across the following at Cornell Economics Faculty website;

The student must have at a minimum two semesters of calculus as well as some linear algebra. This is an absolute minimum and is rarely seen as competitive for a financial aid offer. There is a strong admissions and financial aid bias towards students with more mathematics: differential equations, real analysis, mathematical probability and statistics.

Courses called Mathematics for Economists, Mathematics for Social Scientists, and Econometrics are not a substitute for formal Mathematics

We have a system where the engineer or the physicist has greater chance of getting accepted to a PhD in economics than someone who has studied economics at graduate or undergraduate level- don't we need to completely change the content and approach of teaching undergraduate economics?

The World Bank Annual Report 2007

The World Bank Annual Report 2007

Related;
Will Bob Zoellick Be a Good World Bank President--Or a Great One?

Hydropower and ‘Dutch Disease’ in a Tiny Country

The Economy in Pictures- Bhutan;

Hydropower cycles governed the rhythm of economic activity during the last decade and will likely do so in the next decade as well.

Three key features of the Bhutanese economy are embedded in the hydropower cycles. First, the need for an extended horizon to assess fiscal and project sustainability given the long duration of hydropower cycles. Second, India’s role as Bhutan’s principal trading partner, sole purchaser of electricity exports, and largest donor/lender for hydropower projects. Third, the high ratio of external aid to GDP and domestic revenues (together with the high aid and revenue volatility) require careful, medium-term planning.

Which Developing Countries don't like Globalisation?

Gary Becker writes about the recent WEO , chapter on Globalization and Inequality by IMF;

Is this greater gap between the earnings of more and less skilled workers a good or bad result of globalization? Let us accept that greater inequality is not good, other things the same, but other things are different in the IMF results on inequality. The increased earnings gap between persons with more and less education in developing countries reflects that the earnings of more educated individuals rose faster than the earnings of the less educated. The IMF report clearly shows that generally the poorer and less educated in developing nations also became better off in that they have more to spend on food, shelter, health, automobiles, and the other goods that they desire. This improvement in wellbeing at the lower end of the income distribution surely should count as a benefit of globalization.

The larger earnings gap by education essentially means that the returns on investments in schooling increased. Few critics of globalization would claim that its effects were bad if globalization significantly raised the returns to financial or physical capital owned by local investors in developing countries. So how can one complain that globalization is bad because it raises the returns on the education of local human capital investors? Higher returns to human capital investments as well as greater returns to plant and equipment mean that the economy is more productive, which should be a welcome development to poorer as well as richer countries.

Yet intellectuals and politicians in many countries of Latin America, Africa, and even parts of Asia have heavily criticized globalization and its effects. I believe that developing countries in which the criticisms are strongest are generally countries that have done a bad job of educating its population. Higher returns on investments in education and other human capital are small comfort to the children of poor families who often do not have easy access to secondary schools, let alone to universities and other forms of advanced investments in human capital. The lesson of the IMF report and other studies is that globalization is not the source of these serious problems. Rather, the lesson is that many developing countries have to do much more to open up access to better and greater education for children coming from lower income families. Only then would these families be able to take advantage of the higher returns to education produced by greater trade and the inflow into their economies of modern technologies and foreign capital.

Must Listen Podcast

Robert Frank on Economics Education and the Economic Naturalist

Blog of the Day

Three blogs by the same person-Ivan Kitov, Doctor of Physics and Mathematics and Lead Researcher at the Institute for the Geospheres' Dynamics;

Real economic growth in the USA

Inflation in the USA

Economic inequality in the USA

Dear IMF,

Dear IMF,

Some university professors at US Ivy league universities often appear very critical of the IMF approach to diagnosing and reviewing country economic prospects- that Article IV style analysis of economies’ they say are very flawed. Growth diagnostics suggested by Rodrik is more realistic they say. Is this allegation justified?

Best regards,

Marshall Jevons


Related;
Rodrik on Economic Freedom;

"He is more favorable to us than I'd expected, but does criticize us for overselling the case,

El Salvador is a prime example of the "build-it-and-they-will-come" fallacy: all you need to do is to get the basics right, and then markets will do the rest.

This criticism may have some merit. I do tend to believe that if a group of people (e.g., a nation state) gets the institutions and policies consistent with some notion of economic freedom, then that group of people will grow and prosper economically. I don't believe this is a "day follows night" kind of thing however, and freely admit that some countries could do well for a time without a lot of economic freedom and some with a lot of economic freedom could do poorly. There are long and variable lags and other things matter.

But having said that I see El Salvador differently. First, I see a nation with a history of low economic freedom and political stability with little credibility in the eyes of domestic and foreign investors. It has only recently begun to stabilize and improve its economic institutions. I would not expect it to grow quickly immediately. These things take time. I would predict things to improve only after some degree of credibility is earned. In El Salvador's case, this could take a long time.

Second, maybe El S will never grow for some reason. Maybe the culture is messed up. Maybe the climate is a killer. Maybe God hates them. I don't know. Maybe El S will defy my world view that economic freedom leads to growth and prosperity. I doubt it (see the first point) but it could happen. Does this invalidate the general model? Sure a lot of examples like El Salvadors would force us to question the general model, but there are very few exceptions to the general rule that economic freedom and growth/prosperity are related

Hoisted From Comments, IMF Clarifies

Michel Lazare from IMF comments on our post- Does IMF recommend Free Balance?

Thanks for reading the PFM Blog (http://blog-pfm.imf.org/)

The simple answer to your question is NO. The IMF does NOT recommend Freebalance or any other provider of public sector Integrated Financial Management Information Systems (IFMIS).

It is true that PFM blog includes a link to FreeBalance blog. But it also includes links to other IFMIS providers (SAP website and ORACLE blogs).

We would be open to provide links to other IFMIS provider sites, as soon as we aware of these sites.

Please continue visiting PFM Blog as we may be posting information on IFMIS reform in the not too distant future.

Thanks again.

Thanks for commenting and clarifying.

Statitical Applets

Applets for the Cybergnostics project

Power of a Hypothesis Test Applet

Central Limit Theorem Applet

Mean vs Median

Hypothesis tests for a proportion

Assorted Development

When restricting competition is good

Battle Over Bednets

An Alternative Way to Look at Progress on Compact Implementation (If Only We Could…)

How Al Gore Helped Green the World Bank: A Personal and Professional Appreciation

Transition to Accrual Accounting -- IMF Technical Guidance Note

International Business Forum

Zoellick: Globalization Must Benefit the World’s Poor

Dev't Committee Papers

The Development IMpact Evaluation (DIME) Initiative

World Bank Research E-Newsletter

Knowledge in Development Notes

Working Papers;

Early identification of at-risk youth in Latin America : an application of cluster analysis

Public expenditure and growth

Governance indicators : where are we, where should we be going ?

Fiscal policy in developing countries : a framework and some questions

Toward a Robust Fiscal Framework for Iceland: Motivation and Practical Suggestions

Public Infrastructures, Public Consumption, and Welfare in a New-Open-Economy-Macro Model

Movie Recommendation- The Darjeeling Limited

Fun with STATA

STATA do files for the following publication;

The analysis of household surveys : a microeconometric approach to development policy

How to Classify an African!

From the blog of Farouk;

My contribution focussed on objects related to 'racial classification'. For this purpose, I visited the Wits Anatomy Museum where the following instruments of measurement and African face masks were sourced.

Related;
Entry for Negro from the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1798;

“NEGRO, Homo pelli nigra, a name given to a variety of the human species, who are entirely black, and are found in the Torrid zone, especially in that part of Africa which lies within the tropics. In the complexion of negroes we meet with various shades; but they likewise differ far from other men in all the features of their face. Round cheeks, high cheek-bones, a forehead somewhat elevated, a short, broad, flat nose, thick lips, small ears, ugliness, and irregularity of shape, characterize their external appearance. The negro women have the loins greatly depressed, and very large buttocks, which give the back the shape of a saddle. Vices the most notorious seem to be the portion of this unhappy race: idleness, treachery, revenge, cruelty, impudence, stealing, lying, profanity, debauchery, nastiness and intemperance, are said to have extinguished the principles of natural law, and to have silenced the reproofs of conscience. They are strangers to every sentiment of compassion, and are an awful example of the corruption of man when left to himself.”

Chart of the Day- Inequality and Technology

Source; Chapter 4. Globalization and Inequality, WEO

See also Rising Inequality Slide Show

Related;
Growth and Inequality
Global income inequality : what it is and why it matters
Visualizing Global Inequality

Inequality around the World
Measurement of Inequality

Does IMF recommend Free Balance?

The IMF blog on Public Financial Management has a link to the FreeBalance consultancy group;

FreeBalance is a global provider of software solutions for public financial management (PFM). PFM is an essential part of the international development process. FreeBalance solutions support government modernization, fiscal decentralization, and public finance reform across all levels of government.

Related;
Conference on Public Expenditure Management
Country Budget Laws

Public Finance Analysis & Management Core Course
Handbooks and Manuals

Public Expenditure- OECD
Public Sector Performance Budgeting: Linking Funding to Results

Workshop on MediumTerm Frameworks : 28-30 November 2006
Handbook #1 : Medium Term Frameworks in Public Finance
Dr. Allen Schick on Budget Tools and Rules

Dear World Bank, Please Advice

Dear World Bank and IMF,

Is their a justification for small countries having national carriers at such huge fiscal costs (4.5 percent of GDP)? Please advice.

Although the public debt-to-GDP ratio rose, debt service obligations remained manageable. Public debt doubled to over 80 percent of GDP at end-2005/06 from mid-2000. The bulk of the increase was rupee borrowings from India for Tala. Domestic financing of budget deficits—in particular, purchase of an aircraft at a cost of about US$39 million (4½ percent of GDP) for state-owned Druk Air—also contributed to the increase in the public debt ratio. However, with debt service payments on Tala scheduled to begin only in 2007/08, the debt service ratio remained around 6(10) percent of exports (revenue) during the past five years....

Bhutan's economic prospects are bright. Construction of two hydropower projects will help sustain real GDP growth over the medium term. With the exchange rate peg to the Indian rupee, inflation is expected to be in line with price developments in India. The overall balance of payments is projected to be in surplus and would help maintain adequate international reserves.

Do you want to live in the following house?

Thanks to Borjas

How a Fatwa Caused a Mutation

Vaccine-linked polio hits Nigeria;

Nigeria is fighting a rare outbreak of a vaccine-derived form of polio, says the UN's World Health Organization.

It says 69 children in the north have caught the paralysing disease from others who had already been immunised.

The WHO says such rare outbreaks have occurred where immunisation campaigns did not reach enough of the population.

In 2003 Islamic leaders brought a temporary halt to the vaccine campaign in the north saying it was a Western conspiracy to sterilise Muslim women.

The WHO says this rare outbreak of vaccine-derived polio demonstrates the need for more vaccination, not less.

But the concern is that the cause of the outbreak could be misinterpreted by people here and reinforce their scepticism of the whole vaccine campaign.

related;
Polio vaccine caused Nigerian kids to get polio
Implications of circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus

Assorted Rated 5 Star

How the wind made some rich, while others stayed poor…;

In a recent paper, economists James Feyrer and Bruce Sacerdote have found the following: the longer time a small island state has been colonised, the richer it now is. And there is a reason why some have had a longer colonial experience than others: wind patterns. Islands located near routes in the prevailing winds made useful stopovers and were more easily revisited and colonised.

There is a growing literature on the colonial origins of present-day income disparities among former colonies. Possibly the most influential paper is that of Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2002), who study a sample of 64 former colonies. They argue the following: colonies experienced different intensities of European settlement and the higher the intensity of settlement centuries ago, the richer a country is now. European settlers went in large numbers to North America and Australia, but in small numbers to sub-Saharan Africa. Why? Because diseases such as malaria and yellow fever were killing them fast in sub-Saharan Africa. So, while in Northern America, Australia and New Zealand, European settlers created ‘Neo-Europes’ by building schools, protecting property rights and ensuring checks against government power, in places such as the Congo, mere ‘extractive states’ were created with just enough settlers to ensure the transfer of wealth from the colonies to Europe. Prevalence of diseases some centuries ago, explains why some countries now lack the right institutions and lag behind.

Looking at a data set of 81 islands, Feyrer and Sacerdote’s result is similar in spirit: what mattered some centuries ago in an age of sail, namely wind direction and speed, has an impact on the lives of people today. The following table captures the positive relationship between the length a small island has stayed as a colony and (the log of) its GDP per head....

The problem with this relationship is causality. It could well be that European settlers chose to settle in the ‘best’ islands first (i.e. which had the highest potential for growth) and these islands are, not surprisingly, richer now. This would mean that colonial experience has nothing to do with current wealth. This possibility is however eliminated in the paper. Indeed, Feyrer and Sacerdote show that early settlement was not because these countries had the highest growth potential, but simply because they were ’stumbled upon’ more frequently. The following graph shows that islands that experience weak wind speed (east-west wind vector close to zero) spent less time as colonies, possibly because they were difficult to attain with sailboats. Islands that experience stronger east-to-west winds (negative east-west vector of wind) have stayed longer as colonies:

Not enough corruption?

At a recent talk, the speaker made the interesting observation that one of the problems in Bihar (one of India’s traditionally under-performing states) has been that it’s not corrupt enough. Following the famous “Fodder Scam” (buying lots of fodder for non-existent cattle), a signal was sent out that there should not be a whiff of corruption from projects in the state. The bureaucracy clamped down and for 15 years the best way to avoid accusations of corruption was to do absolutely nothing.

Resolving the Bangladesh paradox;

Not only has it scored at or near the bottom of Transparency International's corruption perception index, but Bangladesh also scores in the bottom quartile of many of the Worldwide Governance Indicators. Yet this same country has seen its per capita income rise by one percentage point every decade (it is now close to 5 percent). It has already achieved universal primary enrolment, and an equal number of girls and boys in secondary school. It is on track to reducing child mortality by two-thirds (relative to 1990 levels) by 2015. Finally, Bangladesh reduced poverty by eight percentage points in five years—a rate of poverty reduction that is twice as fast as India’s.

What can explain this apparent paradox? One response is that the data about Bangladesh’s development successes are inaccurate. This reminds me of a poster a colleague had in his office: “If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts”. But anyone who has studied or visited Bangladesh knows that the growth and dynamism of the place is real. Another response is that the governance indicators are mis-measured. True, alongside these indicators of high corruption is a vibrant free press, an active NGO community, and since 1991, democratic elections.

What can economic science say about the Iraqi surge?

The World Inverted: Does It Matter That Yield Curves Are Sloping Downward?

IMF World Economic Outlook on Managing Large Capital Inflows


The Dollar Is Sinking, but What Does That Mean to Me?

Should the Government Tax Consumption or Income?

Speculating about the Nobel

Escaping Poverty: Foreign Aid, Private Property, and Economic Development

Fridays Academy: Land, Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction

Is the Surge Working? Ask the Data, Not the Politicians

Bad Medicine For Health Care

Free Speech in American Universities--Posner

Rating agencies, shoddy risk analysis, and sukuk

Whatever Happened to the Efficient Market Hypothesis?

Does Greg Mankiw Think the Long-run Budget Constraint is “Cute”?

Solow Growth Model: Increase in Savings Rate

What you need to know about China's Communist Party Congress

The Cotton Family’s Lucky Day

The Rarity of Triplets

More economic simulations in Excel

On the cost of reducing CO2 emissions

The Industrial Revolution Unplugged: An Interview With Author Gregory Clark

The Ig Nobel Prize in Economics Sucks!

Democratic and Republican Approaches to Social Security

Ear boxing apparently a cure for mental illness

Are You Just Shy or Do You Have a Social Phobia?

Spontaneous brain activity causes 'unforced errors'

African conflict costs $300 billion

Poststroke Laughing and Crying

Rock, Paper, Scissors, Politics, and Reptile Sex

Video games may reduce gender gap in spatial ability

Why we curse.

Fucking became the subject of congressional debate in 2003, after NBC broadcast the Golden Globe Awards. Bono, lead singer of the mega-band U2, was accepting a prize on behalf of the group and in his euphoria exclaimed, "This is really, really, fucking brilliant" on the air. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is charged with monitoring the nation's airwaves for indecency, decided somewhat surprisingly not to sanction the network for failing to bleep out the word. Explaining its decision, the FCC noted that its guidelines define "indecency" as "material that describes or depicts sexual or excretory organs or activities" and Bono had used fucking as "an adjective or expletive to emphasize an exclamation."...

Language Evolution

Traumatic therapies can have long-lasting effects on mental health

Worst Hotels You've Visited

Let us hear from the readers. Mine below;

Ramada Plaza, JFK

Quote of the Day

"When I was growing up, I was into movies like Ace Ventura and Billy Madison and Airplane. You know, movies where it’s like, 'Welcome to Crazy World!' That to me was so refreshing and freeing—that people actually made a whole movie about bullshit."

-Andy Samberg

Via Grant McCracken



One reason why the rest of the world has a hard time understanding American culture?

How to Talk like a Pirate

Craziest Search Word of the Day

From Pakistan;

eid sex in pakistan

Ovulatory cycle effect on tip earnings by lap dancers

Working Paper of the Day- Ovulatory cycle effect on tip earnings by lap dancers: economic evidence for human estrus;

Geoffrey Miller and his team at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, compared the earnings of lap dancers who were menstruating naturally with those of dancers taking the hormonal contraceptive pill. During the non-fertile periods of their menstrual cycle, both sets of dancers earned similar tips. But when naturally cycling lap dancers entered their fertile period they earned significantly more in tips than their co-workers on the pill

Via Gene Expression;

This is a nice way at getting around subjective measures of "attractiveness" in studies like this-- the amount of money made by a stripper probably corresponds pretty well to how physically attractive the males in the audience find her. And as seen in the graph on the right, there's a noticeable peak in earnings among normally-cycling women at around 10 days (ovulation).

Excerpt from the conclusion;

We found strong ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings, moderated by whether the participants were normally cycling. All women made less money during their menstrual periods, whether they were on the pill or not. However, the normally cycling women made much more money during estrus (about US$354 per shift)—about US$90 more than during the luteal phase and about US$170 more than during the menstrual phase. Estrous women made about US$70 per hour, luteal women made about US$50 per hour, and menstruating women made about US$35 per hour. By contrast, the pill users had no midcycle peak in tip earnings. As in other previous research, the pill eliminates peakfertility effects on the female body and behavior by putting the body in a state of hormonal pseudopregnancy (e.g., Gangestad, Simpson, Cousins, Garver-Apgar, & Christensen, 2004; Gangestad et al., 2005; Macrae, Alnwick, Milne, & Schloerscheidt, 2002). This also results in pill users making only US$193 per shift compared to normally cycling women making US$276 per shift—a loss of more than US $80 per shift.

This is the first direct economic evidence for the existence of estrus in contemporary human females. Under the “revealed preference” doctrine in behavioral decision theory (Camerer, 2003; Hensher, Louviere, & Swait, 1999), real consumer spending patterns reveal human preferences more reliably than verbally stated judgments do, especially for socially stigmatized products such as pornography or sex work (Salmon & Symons, 2001). When women and men interact intimately over the course of several minutes through conversation and body contact, women apparently either “signal” or “leak” cues of their fertility status, and these cues influence spending patterns by male consumers. These results argue against the view that human estrus evolved to be lost or hidden from males (e.g., Strassmann, 1981; Turke,
1984). …

This study has several limitations. The sample size of participants is small (N=18), although we gathered many data points per participant, which allowed us to use a statistically powerful repeated-measures design (including 296 work shifts reflecting about 5300 lap dances). Although the modest number of participants does not increase type I errors (i.e., false positives) in our statistical tests, it may reduce the generalizability of the results across populations —although it is unclear why different populations of sexually mature, normally cycling, human females would show different ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings, if they work in the same industry.

What Al Gore learned from Supply Siders!

Mankiw asks;

Consider a person who

A. takes an important truth developed by others,
B. exaggerates it for dramatic effect,
C. as a result, draws public attention to this important truth, and
D. also brings acclaim to himself as a profound, far-sighted, truth-telling guru.

Who do I have in mind?

Maybe you think it's Al Gore, and if so, you are correct. But I also have in mind the supply-side economists of the 1980s. The more I think about it, the more similar Al Gore and the supply-siders appear.

They both noticed something that many serious scholars had been working on (human carbon emissions are causing the planet to overheat, high tax rates are causing the economy to underperform.)

Above video via Heavy Lifting (Do we ever hold politicians to what they said in the past?)

EconTalk in Video- Russell Roberts speaks on Robert Frost and the Chinese Economy

Watch Russel Roberts sing and lecture- a great talk- a must watch.

Russell Roberts speaks on Robert Frost and the Chinese Economy: Is Chinese Growth Good for the United States?

Related;
A Year Without "Made in China": One Family's True Life Adventure in the Global Economy

Can You Live Without China?

Amazon has an interview with the author

What Are We to Make of Junky Chinese Imports?

Data Fun

A Real-Time Database for GDP

stats.oecd

Should Statisticians go on strike?

More than 540 staff at Statistics NZ, who belong to the PSA, are stepping up their industrial action.

They stopped working overtime on Sunday September 30. The overtime ban will continue and a series of new actions will start on Sunday. (October 14)

“The new industrial action will disrupt the flow of data that Statistics NZ needs to compile key economic indicators,” says PSA National Secretary, Richard Wagstaff.

These indicators include the Household Labour Force Survey, that measures unemployment. The Food Price Index, that measures food prices every month, and the Consumer Price Index that tracks the rate of inflation.

From 10pm on Sunday (October 14) Statistics NZ field interviewers will start a four day ban on feeding data they’ve gathered, from throughout the country, into the department. The ban will continue until 10pm on Thursday. (October 18) Normally the field interviewers send the data direct from their lap top computers, or by post or courier, at least once a day.

“They will stop sending that data for four days, which will mean Statistics NZ will have to wait four days before it can begin analysing it,” says Richard Wagstaff. “We believe the department will find it hard to make up that delay because the staff who belong to the PSA have stopped doing overtime.”

“The Statistics NZ staff are stepping up their industrial action to show that they’re serious about their claims,” says Richard Wagstaff. “They’re frustrated that their negotiations have been going on since June and the department refuses to take their claims seriously and negotiate a fair settlement.”

The Statistics NZ staff are claiming the right to negotiate their pay, to hold onto extra leave for long serving staff and for field interviewers to be paid the same as their workmates who do interviews by phone. The field interviewers are paid $3.18 to $4.40 an hour less than phone interviewers for doing the same job.

-Statistics NZ Staff Step Up Industrial Action

Does anybody know some good economics blogs from New Zealand?
The visible hand in economics
Blessed Economist
Economics Library Blog


Related;
The mathematics of electoral district allocation in New Zealand
Framework for the Measurement of Social Capital
Imputation of Maori Descent for Electoral Calculations
Simpson's Paradox
A Guide to Good Survey Design

One more reason why New Zealand is not a growth dynamo
My favorite things New Zealand
Adverse Selection among the Kiwis
What is the New Zealand accent?
Have New Zealand market reforms failed?

Market Reform: Lessons from New Zealand
A Small New Keynesian Model of the New Zealand economy
Monetary Policy Simulation game

Babajob- Moving Out of Poverty

Manohar Lakshmipathi does not own a computer. In fact, workmen like Manohar, a house painter, are usually forbidden to touch clients' computers on the job here.

So you can imagine Manohar's wonder as he sat dictating his date of birth, phone number and work history to a secretary who entered them into a computer. Afterward, a man took his photo. Then, with a click of a mouse, Manohar's very own social-networking page popped onto the World Wide Web, the newest profile on Babajob.com.

Babajob, an Indian start-up aiming to bring the Facebook/MySpace revolution to the world's poor, is just one example of an unanticipated byproduct of the outsourcing boom: Entrepreneurs and large multinationals are making India a hub of computer innovation targeting the poor....

Babajobs is a quintessential example of how Indian back offices have spawned poverty-inspired innovation.

The best-known networking sites connect the computer-savvy elite to one another. Babajob, by contrast, connects the Indian elite to the poor at their doorsteps, people who need jobs but lack the connections to find them. Job seekers advertise skills, employers advertise jobs and matches are made through "friend-of-a-friend" networks.

For example, if Rajeev and Sanjay are friends, and Sanjay needs a chauffeur, he can surf onto Rajeev's page, travel onto the page of Rajeev's chauffeur and then see which of the chauffeur's friends happen to be looking for similar work.

Blagsvedt, 31, joined Microsoft in Redmond in 1999. Three years ago, he was sent to India to help build the local office of Microsoft Research, the company's in-house institute.

But the Microsoft employees who worked here led very different lives than their counterparts back home. They had servants and laborers. They read newspaper tales of undernourishment and illiteracy. The Indian employees were not seeing such conditions for the first time, but many of them felt newly empowered to confront them.

Equipped with world-class computing skills, many felt an urge to do something to help their society.

At the same time, Microsoft, with software piracy limiting revenues in India, was looking to low-income consumers as a vast commercial opportunity, so engineers' altruistic urges were encouraged.

In Blagsvedt's research office, poverty became a major focus. Anthropologists and sociologists were hired to explain things like the effect of the caste system on rural computer usage. One day, in the course of that work, Blagsvedt stumbled on an insight by a Duke University economist that first unnerved and then inspired him.

The economist, Anirudh Krishna, found that many poor Indians in dead-end jobs stay poor not because there are no better jobs, but because they lack the connections to discover such jobs. Any Bangalorean could confirm the observation: the city teems with laborers desperate for work, and yet wealthy software tycoons complain endlessly about a shortage of maids and cooks.

Blagsvedt's epiphany? "We need village LinkedIn!" he recalled saying, referring to a professional networking site. He quit Microsoft and, with his stepfather, Ira Weise, and a former Microsoft colleague, built a social-networking site to connect the yuppies of Bangalore with its wage laborers. (The site, which Blagsvedt began this summer and runs out of his home, focuses on Bangalore for now, with plans to spread to other Indian cities and perhaps globally.)

Building a site meant to reach laborers earning $2 to $3 a day presented special challenges. The workers would be unfamiliar with computers in general and with Babajob in particular. Moreover, wealthy employers would be reluctant to let random applicants tend to their gardens or their newborns.

-Internet revolution reaches India's poor

Are women family doctors bad at diagnosing heart disease?

Assorted Podcasts;

Is Capitalism Moral? The full unedited inaugural Macquarie University Vice-Chancellor's debate on Capitalism and the Soul

DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS

In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the character Malcolm describes the magical healing powers of the king:

“How he solicits heaven,
Himself best knows; but strangely-visited people,
All swoln and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye,
The mere despair of surgery, he cures;
Hanging a golden stamp about their necks,
Put on with holy prayers...”

The idea that a monarch could heal with his touch flowed from the idea that a king was sacred, appointed by God and above the judgement of earthly powers. It was called the Divine Right of Kings and it entered so powerfully into British culture during the 17th century that it shaped the pomp and circumstance of the Stuart monarchs, imbued the writing of Shakespeare and provoked the political thinking of Milton and Locke.

God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World

Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan

'Unwarping' biometrics

Doctor’s gender a factor in the diagnosis of coronary heart disease
Dr Ann Adams, principal research fellow at the Health Sciences Research Institute, talks about her work which shows that women family doctors are not picking up on an important risk factor in the diagnosis of heart disease

Francis Brabazon: Farm hand, Poet and Sufi Sheikh

Islam in Italy

Who is Fethullah Gulen? He's been described as Turkish Islam's Billy Graham

Spiritual Classics: Rumi

Cult of Death
What makes an educated person from a good family join extremist groups and volunteer to become a suicide bomber? Al-Qaeda expert, Abdel Bari Atwan, explains it as desperation and indoctrination into a culture of death, while cult expert Steve Hassan, describes the mind-control techniques methods used to turn vulnerable people into new recruits

Iran's Nuclear Industry- a backgrounder

Oil, democracy and a CIA coup

Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and autoimmune disorders

Drugs and the teenage brain

Overseas trained doctors

Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life

Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World

What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building

Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them

Peter Doherty
Our guest this week is Nobel Prize winner Peter Doherty. He reflects on what it is like to expect a Nobel Prize and one's response on being given the nod from Stockholm.

Every American Insured: Expanding Access to Health Care

The World Next Week

A discussion with Vijay Vaitheeswaran of The Economist
“The natural instinct is to think that innovation has to do with invention. That's the smallest part...the real essence of innovation is fresh thinking that connects with value creation.”

Watch A Beautiful Mind on You Tube

A Beautiful Mind- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

What's your favorite scene from the film?

For Discussion: What's wrong with the following scene?

Nash's Theorem;
A theorem in game theory which guarantees the existence of a set of mixed strategies for finite, noncooperative games of two or more players in which no player can improve his payoff by unilaterally changing strategy

Some Blogs

Tim Kane

I am an economist in Washington, DC, and the lead author of the 2007 Index of Economic Freedom. I have also been a college professor, software entrepreneur, and an Air Force officer

ataxingmatter

Warning to China?

The cover of this week's The Economist;

Eid Mubarak

Table talk for monotheists

Junior Economists Peer Reviewed Series

JEPS Rules;

• Only junior economists are eligible to submit papers and to be editors - by junior we understand any researcher in economics without a tenured position.

• One-to-two policy: each submitted paper is assigned two referees

• There is no submission fee. However, by submitting a paper, an author agrees to referee two papers in the future. The author's name will be added to the list of JEPS Referees.

• An author's failure to honour their commitments results in the author's removal from the list of JEPS referees and the exclusion from future submissions.

• Acceptance policy: JEPS aims to host original contributions, that is papers that are complete and have both original and relevant content.

• Authors may be asked to revise and resubmit at most twice if the paper's shortcomings can be mended with reasonable effort.

A Quick and Dirty Course in the Use of Economic Data

From Glen Whitman- Use & Interpretation of Economic Data

Bollywood's Kings

Crime, Celebrity, and Kissing On Screen: A Q&A on The King of Bollywood;

But a combination of factors transformed Bollywood. A key event was the arrival of multiplexes in 1997. Prior to that, Hindi cinema usually played in 1000-seat halls, leaving no outlets for smaller, niche films — if you couldn’t fill a hall that large, you were, financially speaking, dead on arrival. Multiplexes offered filmmakers a chance to speak exclusively to educated, urban Indians who, thanks to liberalization and the ensuing affluence, didn’t hesitate before spending 200 rupees ($5) on a movie ticket. The high ticket prices (single-screen theaters, by contrast, only cost 40 to 80 rupees, or $1 to $2) then made smaller films financially viable. This created what we call “The Multiplex Film” (essentially the equivalent of the Hollywood Indie film).

At the same time, the overseas market (the 20-million odd non-resident Indians residing outside of India) also became a source of revenue. Now, if a film was successful in urban India and overseas, it made far more money than if it was a success in the Indian heartland, where the ticket prices were still comparatively low. At the same time, a new generation of younger, slicker filmmakers entered cinema and started to cater to these new, more sophisticated markets. The result was a more polished Bollywood product. Films were better crafted, and directors no longer tried to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Today, Bollywood is a corporate entity. The industry is overrun by educated, thirty-something filmmakers who are attempting to redefine what makes a Bollywood film. Since the returns on movies have increased tenfold, legitimate investors are no longer hard to find. Many Bollywood studios are listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, and several large corporations have bought into them. Even Hollywood wants a piece of the action — Sony Pictures Entertainment and Warner Bros. are currently co-producing Hindi movies.

*The video above is from Old Bollywood

Northeast Universities Development Consortium Conference

Northeast Universities Development Consortium Conference- Harvard

One of speakers is Rodrik

Assorted Krugman

Krugman: Income Inequality Pricks 'Conscience'

Faces for radio: spiteful economists on inequality

The World According to Paul Krugman;

Mr. Krugman has written a sweeping political history of the past 135 years from a stridently liberal Democratic viewpoint. In Krugman's worldview, noble Democratic progressives have long battled a conspiracy of Republican knaves who are themselves the pawns of selfish plutocrats.

He advances his viewpoint not by misstating facts but by omitting those parts of the past that make history messier. He expresses outrage that Democrat Samuel Tilden "essentially had the electoral vote stolen" in 1876, but does not mention that Tilden's Southern victories were achieved through the violent suppression of black votes by Democratic henchmen and the Ku Klux Klan. He derides Barry Goldwater for his long-standing support of Joseph McCarthy, but does not seem disturbed that John F. Kennedy also chose not to censure "Tailgunner Joe." We read a great deal about Nixon's Southern strategy and implicit Republican appeals to racism after 1964, but little about the explicit Democratic strategy of race hatred that was the norm among many of leading Democratic legislators such as Theodore Bilbo. But while Mr. Krugman's prose is one-sided, his two major themes are correct. His first theme is that the Democratic party has long battled inequality. His second theme is that Republicans have done a lot of dubious things in their quest for political dominance.

Paul Krugman, pussycat

Bastiat vs. Krugman

The free trade perspective lives on;

The most striking dissent over free trade, the equivalent of a category five storm, came from Paul Krugman. He extended the theory of imperfect competition to international trade and began to argue in the late 1980s that “free trade was passé after all”. The effect on the media, and on the opponents of free trade, was electric, largely because the rise of Japan, and the allegations that it was protectionist while the US was a free trader, had fed the frenzy that called for a reputable economist to be an icon for “reactive” protectionists.

Robert Kuttner, now the editor of The American Prospect and long a sceptic on free trade, celebrated Mr Krugman’s apparent heresy. Karen Pennar wrote in Business Week (February 27 1989), under the heading “The Gospel of Free Trade is Losing Its Apostles”, that: “Free trade is good for you . . . Now more and more economists aren’t so sure”.

Mr Krugman was right at the level of theory. For two centuries, we had known that imperfect competition among producers could undermine the case for free trade: Mr Krugman’s brilliant work had deepened that insight. But eventually Mr Krugman and other trade economists came back to free trade, abandoning Mr Kuttner et al to twist in the wind. Some returned to the fold by saying that “there was no beef” – that the product market imperfections were, on empirical investigation, not substantial enough to warrant departing from free trade. Others, Mr Krugman among them, bought into the conservative argument that protection in practice would make matters worse, not better.

The protectionists who had celebrated Mr Krugman as their icon were disappointed, even furious: Mr Kuttner would write fierce critiques of Mr Krugman for years. Moreover, even as these economists came back to the fold on free trade, with the consensus on free trade reinvigorated, Japan ceased to be a threat and protectionist demands against Japan subsided

What makes me happy

A very good economics blog

Stephen Kinsella

Quote of the Day

"The banking system will never take you to paradise, but it can bury you in hell in an afternoon."
-Julio Maria Sanguinetti, the former Uruguayan President