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Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT
The United States is the world’s largest foreign aid donor. But foreign aid encompasses a bewildering array of programs, both bilateral and international, that address issues like economic development, fighting disease, supporting a friendly government and providing disaster relief. The ability to evaluate the effectiveness of these programs is elusive. Kenneth Dam says that the next President should follow a strategy which will serve to produce a much-needed discussion on this important issue.
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Fri, 01 Dec 2006 00:00:00 GMT
Dam explores the newly ascendant view that
institutions—in particular, the rule of law—play a critical role in determining which economies thrive and which lag behind.
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Wed, 01 Mar 2006 00:00:00 GMT
No degree of substantive law improvement—even world "best practice" substantive law—will bring the Rule of Law to a country without effective enforcement. A sound judiciary is key to enforcement. No doubt some technical laws can be enforced by administrative means, but a Rule of Law, in the primary economic sense of protecting property and enforcing contracts, requires a judiciary to resolve disputes between private parties. And protection against the state itself is made easier where the judiciary can resolve a controversy raised by a private party against the state based on constitutional provisions or parliamentary legislation. One conclusion widely agreed upon, not just in the economic literature but also among lawyers and legal scholars, is therefore that the judiciary is a vital factor in the Rule of Law and more broadly in economic development.
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Wed, 01 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT
Modern economies are heavily dependent on the corporate form of doing business. The sheer scale of modern commercial activity, once it goes beyond the individual store and workshop, increasingly demands capital beyond the resources of most individual entrepreneurs.
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Wed, 01 Feb 2006 00:00:00 GMT
Credit markets are just as important as equity markets to financial development. And in most countries far more finance is generated in credit markets than in public equity markets. Even in the United States, which is usually thought the country with the most pronounced equity culture, far more money is raised in credit markets than in equity markets.
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Sun, 01 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT
If one wants insight into how the developing world can attain the Rule of Law, one good place to start would be to ask how countries in today's developed world did it. Though the developed world now stretches well beyond the countries of Western Europe where the Rule of Law first arose, developed countries such as the United States, Canada and Australia—and in a less direct fashion, Japan—were blessed with a successful transplant of Western European legal institutions. Perhaps the Western European experience can provide insights into how this process of legal institutional development can succeed in developing countries where the transplant remedy is obstructed by historical, societal, or other differences from Western European nations. Western Europe, after all, was not blessed with a Rule of Law in the Middle Ages but successfully achieved it over a number of centuries.
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Sun, 01 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT
China is the fastest growing country in the world. Moreover, its economy has already become one of the most important in the world. Many commentators predict that China will surpass the size of the U.S. economy some time in the second decade of this century (although it will, to be sure, still be at a much lower per capita income level). Though these predictions are for most purposes quite misleading, China's prowess in manufacturing is already a challenge to the manufacturing sectors of the most advanced economies, at least in labor intensive industries. Moreover, China is going beyond lowwage manufacturing and entering the high technology arena (from the top down, so to speak) through high-level research backed by a growing army of highly educated scientists and engineers completing graduate studies and through the outsourcing to China of research and development activities from some of the world's most accomplished high technology firms.
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Sun, 01 Jan 2006 00:00:00 GMT
Real estate is a major source of value in both developed and developing countries. In the United States households have $9.6 trillion or 16 percent of their wealth in real estate. Farmers have another $1.3 trillion of equity in their farms, bringing total household wealth in real estate to nearly 20 percent of household assets. Hernando De Soto, writing in 1993, said that some 70 percent of Peruvian wealth was in real estate. One study found that in Uganda "between 50 and 60 percent of the asset endowment of the poorest households" was land. The World Bank confirms that the proportion of real property is between one-half and three-quarters of wealth in most economies.
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Sun, 10 Oct 2004 00:00:00 GMT
Paper by Kenneth Dam (10/10/04)