The Ends and the Means of Development

A few months ago, in the course of trying to reestablish contact with a dear friend, Jonathan Schell, I learned, to my consternation, that he had passed away.  It was more than a shock, after the many years of silence that had intervened between us.  It felt like an immeasurable loss, not just to me personally but to the world. I first met Jonathan in 1986 when I invited him to the International Monetary Fund to speak to a group of about twenty colleagues about his brilliant book The Fate of the Earth . I had read it years before and had been impressed not only with the content—a clinical analysis of the after-effects of a limited nuclear war between the two major powers— but also by the elegance of the writing, the beauty of the logic, and the power of Jonathan’s arguments. He combined an incisive mind with an exceptionally articulate pen.  “Usually, people wait for things to occur before trying to describe them,” he writes in the book’s opening section. “But sinc...

Understandably, the literature has often seen gender inequality as a human rights issue. Article 7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights introduces the concept of equal protection under the law. When governments use the law to discriminate against women in some way, to create a legal environment that places her at a disadvantage with respect to men, they are clearly in violation of the letter and the spirit of the Declaration. However, gender inequality obviously has an economic dimension as well. The Women, Business and the Law project (WBL) at the World Bank has, over the years, built up an impressive database that identifies the restrictions faced by women embedded in the law (the Constitution, the Civil Code, family law and other legal instruments) in 173 countries. From this data we have learned, for instance, that the higher the number of such restrictions in a country, the lower the secondary school enrolment rate of girls relative to boys; the bigger the wage ga...

In pursuing meaningful sustainable development, and investing in conservation and redressing the environmental damage caused by decades of neglect, we need to better explore and understand the role of international cooperation and why human values and ethics are central to this debate. International cooperation . A key ingredient for generating a sustainable development path will have to be a significant strengthening of the current mechanisms of international cooperation, which have turned out to be insufficient to meet the global challenges that we face. The process of globalization is unfolding in the absence of equivalent international institutions to support it and harness its potential for good. There is no global environmental authority, for instance. Policy on the climate change front is being done via ad-hoc approaches involving elements of international cooperation, voluntary compliance, and large doses of hope. In the absence of a body having jurisdi...

I’ve suggested recently that although high economic growth in recent decades has greatly improved average life expectancy, infant mortality, and other leading indicators policymakers and development practitioners were still worried about the sustainability of these trends and whether people in developing countries would eventually enjoy the high standards of living of high-income countries. This, against the background of a planet under increasing stress, particularly as a result of climate change. In this blog, I explore some of the actions needed to sustain our global economy. Climate change risks. A key finding of the latest scientific work on climate change is that the annual cost of introducing control measures for greenhouse gases is far smaller than the potential cost of uncontrolled climate change. Duly aware of the margins of uncertainty associated with such calculations, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has, in the past, p...

Global development as a universal objective to improve people’s social and economic wellbeing is a relatively recent concept. It was first embodied in the United Nations Charter, signed in San Francisco 71 years ago this week, which stated: “the United Nations shall promote higher standards of living, full employment, and conditions of economic and social progress and development.” In time, at least among practicing economists in academia and policymakers in government, “development” came to be seen as improved economic opportunity through the accumulation of capital and rising productivity. The implicit assumption here was that economic growth would lead to rising living standards, increases in life expectancy, reduced mortality, and a reduction in the incidence of poverty. And so, between 1950 and 2014, as world GDP per capita expanded at an annual average rate of 2.1 percent, this trend was associated with a remarkable evolution in three key indicators of...