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Skill development
Jan Ludvík, World Economics, March 2015
Military expenditure and the number of service personnel are the two features most commonly used to compare national military power. The question remains, however, to what extent these reflect the real-world situation. This study aims to provide an answer by using economic and military data about conflicts between great powers over the last 160 years. Correlations of War data are employed to show that the relationship between pre-war military expenditure and army size on the one hand and outcomes of war on the other, is blurry to say the least. States with higher military expenditure prevailed in only six of the nine conflicts between great powers examined in this research. Only four of the nine were won by the state with the larger peacetime army. Using the case of the Franco-Prussian War, this work illustrates that even the superiority of both mentioned variables cannot ward off a crushing defeat, let alone ensure victory. A nation’s military power stems from its ability to adapt effectively to the realities of modern warfare. This is what neither high military expenditure nor sheer soldier numbers can guarantee.
Nomaan Majid, World Economics, September 2014
This paper is concerned with measuring categories of employment that have an economy-wide meaning in the developing world. Employment has always had two interconnected sides, output and income, and these two dimensions of employment operate under very different conditions in advanced and developing economies. A developing economy is divided into two parts, organised and unorganised in respect of labour. A large amount of surplus labour exists in the unorganised part creating underemployment that manifests itself in a range of forms of employed labour. In this situation the headcount of the employed overestimates economy-wide employment; and the headcount of the unemployed seriously underestimates economy-wide unemployment.
M.G. Quibria, World Economics, March 2013
One of the persistent, unresolved controversies of economic development is the effectiveness of development assistance – whether foreign aid contributes to economic development. This article argues that this controversy is largely an artefact of a methodology that focuses on the ‘averages’ and pays inadequate attention to the specific characteristics of individual societies. For enhancing aid effectiveness, one needs to discard the one-size-fits-all approach, and adopt a more nuanced, tailor-made strategy based on a comprehensive understanding of specific countries.
Neil Gregory, World Economics, September 2012
benchmarking methodologies used by corporates to provide cross-country comparisons of the quality of business regulation. In doing so, it has demonstrated a radical new approach to catalyzing development, which has proven to have high impact in changing government regulations at low cost. It represents an open-source, knowledge-based approach to development which could be replicated across other development topics, taking into account the limitations of the methodology and the complementary elements of analysis and communication which have enabled Doing Business to have impact.
Angus Maddison, World Economics, December 2008
This paper analyses the forces determining per capita income levels of nations
over the past millennium and the prospects to 2030. In the year 1000 AD,
Asian countries were in the lead. By 1820, per capita GDP in Western Europe
and the US was twice the Asian average. The divergence had grown much
bigger by 1950, but by the 1970s, several Asian countries – Japan, South Korea,
Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore – had achieved considerable catch up. Since
then, there has been a major surge in China and the beginning of a similar
phenomenon in India. As a result, the Asian share of world income has risen
steadily and, by 2030, will be fairly close to what it was in 1820. Maddison
concludes by comparing his analysis with the Malthusian interpretation of
Oded Galor.
M. G. Quibria, World Economics, December 2005
The international community is committed to millennium development goals which postulate a vision of global development that makes eliminating poverty and sustaining development the overriding objective of global development efforts. In the hierarchy of the MDGs, the first and foremost goal is to reduce by half, between 1990–2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than a dollar a day (a widely used yardstick to measure extreme poverty). However, estimating such poverty across developing countries and globally is by no means a simple exercise nor has it yielded unambiguous results. This article provides a brief summary of the state of the art in global poverty estimates, including the problems as well as the possible solutions.
David Henderson, World Economics, March 2000
Despite some searching and unanswered criticisms of its treatment of statistical evidence, the UNDP Human Development Report has become established as a widely-quoted and influential survey of the world scene. The 1999 Report, reviewed here, focuses on ‘globalization’. This is described as a dominant influence on the recent economic fortunes of developing countries in particular, and as a primary cause of continuing poverty and growing inequality in the world. The author argues that the Report provides neither argument nor evidence in support of this thesis; that it takes no account of other factors that have strongly influenced economic performance; that its main prescription for the world, of reforms in ‘global governance’, is largely beside the point; and that its whole approach is crudely anti-liberal. The author concludes by placing the Report, as also the economists who have aligned themselves with it, in the wider context of anti-liberalism today.
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