Africa in the World Economy: By William Easterly, Professor of Economics (Joint with Africa House)
How We Can Save Africa will not be answered by this professor, who considers it a pretentious arrogant question and wonders “who is we?”.
Bono will not give a guest lecture.
The list of readings is more extensive than what will be covered in class. Students will be responsible primarily for what is covered in class. There will be one final. Students are encouraged to participate heavily in class discussion. The following are prohibited: fisticuffs, spitting, and unthinking acceptance of conventional wisdom. Introduction: Can the West End Poverty in Africa? UN Millennium Project, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director, Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals, January 2005 (http://unmp.forumone.com/), Overview Chapters One and Two. Jeffrey D. Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, Penguin Press: New York, 2005.
Chapter 1: A Global Family Portrait Chapter 3: Why Some Countries Fail to Thrive;
William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill, and So Little Good, Penguin Press, March 16, 2006 (draft chapters available on Blackboard) (WMB)
Chapter 1: Planners Vs. Searchers. W. Easterly, Review of Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty, Washington Post Book World, March 13, 2005. http://www.nyu.edu/fas/institute/dri/Easterly/File/A255622005Mar10_a%20modest%20proposal.pdf Jeffrey Sachs reply and reviewer’s response, Washington Post Book World, March 27, 2005, http://www.nyu.edu/fas/institute/dri/letters%20WPA64541-2005Mar24.pdf W. Easterly, the Utopian Nightmare, Foreign Policy, September 2005. http://www.nyu.edu/fas/institute/dri/Easterly/File/utopian%20nightmare%20FP.pdf
Historical roots and bad government: pre-colonial conditions, the slave trade, colonialism, and nation formation John Iliffe, Africans: The History of A Continent, Cambridge University Press, 1995 (selected sections, as referenced in WMB chapter below. NICOLA GENNAIOLI and ILIA RAINER, “The Modern Impact of Precolonial Centralization in Africa,” November 2005 Nathan Nunn, “Slavery, Institutional Development, and Long-Run Growth in Africa,” 14002000, University of British Columbia, mimeo, 2005,
http://www.econ.ubc.ca/nnunn/empirical_slavery.pdf Nathan Nunn, "Historical Legacies: A Model Linking Africa's Past to its Current Underdevelopment", Journal of Development Economics, forthcoming 2006. (nontechnical sections only). http://www.econ.ubc.ca/nnunn/legacy_jde.pdf Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, Princeton 1996, Part I: The Structure of Power (selected sections as referenced in WMB chapter below).
Easterly, WMB, Chapter 8, From Colonialism to Postmodern Imperialism (available on Blackboard) William Easterly and Ross Levine, "Africa’s Growth Tragedy: Policies and Ethnic Divisions,” November 1997, Quarterly Journal of Economics. CXII (4), 1203-1250.
R. La Porta, F. Lopez-de-Silanes, A. Shleifer, and R. Vishny "The Quality of Government", Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, 1999. Valerie Bockstette, Areendam Chanda, and Louis Putterman, 2002, States and Markets: the Advantage of an Early Start, Journal of Economic Growth, 7, 347-369
Institutions for Development: History and Prescription Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, James Robinson, Institutions as the Fundamental Cause of Long-Run Growth, April 29, 2004, forthcoming Handbook of Economic Growth, http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~chad/handbook9sj.pdf David Albouy,The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: A Reinvestigation of the Data, Department of Economics, University of California – Berkeley, July 2004, http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~albouy/AJRreinvestigation/AJRreinvestigation.pdf STANLEY L. ENGERMAN and KENNETH L. SOKOLOFF, Factor Endowments, Inequality, and Paths of Development among New World Economies, Economia, Fall 2002 Stanley L. Engerman and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, NBER Working Paper 11057 Colonialism, Inequality, and Long-Run Paths of Development, January 2005 Edward L. Glaeser, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer, DO INSTITUTIONS CAUSE GROWTH? Journal of Economic Growth, September, 2004, http://papers.nber.org/papers/w10568.pdf Jakob Svensson, Eight Questions about Corruption, Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 19, Number 3—Summer 2005—Pages 19–42 W. Easterly and R. Levine, “Tropics, germs, and crops: the role of endowments in economic development” Journal of Monetary Economics, 50:1, January 2003.
D. Rodrik, A. Subramanian, and F. Trebbi, “Institutions Rule: The Primacy of Institutions over Geography and Integration in Economic Development”, Journal of Economic Growth, vol. 9, no.2, June 2004 W. Easterly, WMB, Chapter 4: Planners and Gangsters.
Post-colonial political motivations for foreign aid and IMF lending Alesina, A. and D. Dollar (2000). “Who Gives Foreign Aid to Whom and Why?” Journal of Economic Growth, 5, 33-64. Thacker, S.C. (1999). “The High Politics of IMF Lending,” World Politics, 52, 38-75.
Barro, Robert and Jong-wha Lee, “IMF Lending: Who is chosen and what are the effects?,” Journal of Monetary Economics (2005), (available as NBER Working Paper)
Boone, Peter (1996), “Politics and the Effectiveness of Foreign Aid,” European EconomicReview 40, 289–329.
Foreign Aid to Help the Left-Out and Left-Behind William Easterly, Elusive Quest for Growth, Chapter 2: Aid for investment for growth Burnside, Craig and David Dollar, “Aid, Policies, and Growth,” American Economic Review 90(4) (September 2000): pp. 847–68. William Easterly, Ross Levine, and David Roodman) "New Data, New Doubts: A Comment on Burnside and Dollar's "Aid, Policies, and Growth"(2000). " American Economic Review, June 2004. Peter Boone. “Politics and the Effectiveness of Foreign Aid.” European Economic Review, 1996, 40(2), pp. 289–329. Alberto Alesina and Beatrice Weder, Do Corrupt Governments Receive Less Foreign Aid? American Economic Review, September 2002, 92: 1126-37 http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/alesina/pdf-papers/aidjune10.pdf Jakob Svensson, "Foreign Aid and Rent-Seeking", Journal of International Economics, 2000, Vol. 51 (2): 437-461. UN Millennium Project, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director, Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals, January 2005 (http://unmp.forumone.com/) Main Report, Chapter 13. Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, Penguin Press, 2005 Chapter 12: On the Ground Solutions for Ending Poverty; Chapter 13: Making the Investments Needed to End Poverty. William Easterly, “The Big Push Déjà vu: A Review of Jeffrey Sachs’s The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time,” Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. XLIV (March 2006), pp. 118-127.
William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, Penguin Press, 2006 Chapter 5: The Rich have Markets, the Poor have Bureaucrats Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, Use of Randomization in the Evaluation of Development Effectiveness, MIT and Harvard Working Paper, 2003.
Lant Pritchett, It Pays to Be Ignorant: A Simple Political Economy of Rigorous Program Evaluation; Journal of Policy Reform, December 2002, v. 5, iss. 4, pp. 251-69 Structural adjustment in Africa Dicks-Mireaux, L., M. Mecagni, and S. Schadler (2000). “Evaluating the Effect of IMF Lending to Low-Income Countries,” Journal of Development Economics, 61, 495-526. Przeworski, A. and J.R. Vreeland (2000). ”The Effect of IMF Programs on Economic Growth,” Journal of Development Economics, 62, 385-421. Jakob Svensson, Why Conditional Aid Doesn’t Work and What Can Be Done About It?", Journal of Development Economics, 2003, vol. 70 (2): 381-402. William Easterly, What did structural adjustment adjust? The association of policies and growth with repeated IMF and World Bank adjustment loans, Journal of Development Economics, 2005. Easterly, WMB: Chapter 6: Bailing Out the Poor
Markets, networks, and social capital in the global economy: it’s who you know Easterly, WMB, Chapter 3: “You can’t plan a market” Marcel Fafchamps, Market Institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa, MIT Press, 2004 (Chapters 1, 2, 22, and possibly others)
James Rauch, "Business and Social Networks in International Trade," Journal of Economic Literature 39 (December 2001): 1177-1203. Greif, Avner (1993) "Contract Enforceability and Economic Institutions in Early Trade: The Maghribi Traders' Coalition,", American Economic Review, 83(3), pp.525-548. Conley, Timothy and Chris Udry. 2002. .Learning About a New Technology: Pineapple in Ghana.. Manuscript: Yale. http://www.econ.yale.edu/~udry/pdf/learn.pdf Deepa Narayan, and Lant Pritchett, Cents and Sociability: Household Income and Social Capital in Rural Tanzania , Economic Development and Cultural Change, 1999, vol. 47
(4). Finance and Development Ross Levine, “Finance and Growth: Theory and Evidence,” Chapter for Handbook of Economic Growth, September 2004. available at http://legacy.csom.umn.edu/WWWPages/FACULTY/RLevine/Index.html
Thorsten Beck and Ross Levine, Legal Institutions and Financial Development, July 29, 2003, available at http://legacy.csom.umn.edu/WWWPages/FACULTY/RLevine/Index.html
Globalization, Inequality, and Poverty Traps William Easterly, Globalization, Poverty, and All That: Factor Endowment versus Productivity Views, NBER Globalization Workshop, September 2004. A B Atkinson and A Brandolini (2001), “Promise and Pitfalls in the Use of "Secondary" Data-Sets: Income Inequality in OECD Countries,” Journal of Economic Literature. Costas Azariadis and John Stachurski, Poverty Traps?, Prepared for the Handbook of Economic Growth, 2004, http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~chad/azstach.pdf Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, 2005, Chapter 13: Making the Investments Needed to End Poverty, AIDS: how to respond to a African epidemic Easterly, WMB, Chapter 9: The Healers: Triumph and Tragedy Jeffrey Sachs, Chairman, Report of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, Macroeconomics and Health: Investing in Health for Economic Development, World Health Organization, 20 December 2001, pp. 47-53
David Canning, The Economics of HIV/AIDs Treatment and Prevention in Developing Countries, Harvard School of Public Health, mimeo, 2005.
