Views of a Nepali Economist

Paul Krugman on Economic Barbarism

Services offshoring increases wage inequality

The effects of offshoring on wages remain a hotly debated issue. This column explores the case of UK firms between 1992 and 2004, recognising that offshoring in one particular industry may also affect labour demand in other industries. It suggests that services and materials offshoring increase the wages of high-skilled workers and decreases the wages of low- and medium-skilled workers, thus contributing to a rising wage inequality.

Why Not Just Give Poor People Cash?

What happened to the WTO's original Food Security agenda?
 The graph below shows the trade balance of least developed countries shifting after 1980.

Africa's population: Miracle or Malthus?

When fertility started to fall in Asia after 1960 and Latin America after 1970, it did so quickly, ineluctably and universally. The number of children a woman could expect in her lifetime fell from six to two in a generation. The fertility fall was continuous. And contraceptive use spread rapidly. Family planners were amazed to discover that only a year or two after contraceptives had appeared in cities, illiterate women were using them in remote villages. The pattern of swift, uninterrupted decline is now taken as the norm: the UN uses it to project a worldwide convergence towards the replacement rate of fertility (2.1, the rate at which a population stabilises in the long term).......But convergence is not happening in Africa. In a few countries, including Niger and Uganda, the fall in fertility has barely begun. Where it has started, the decline is usually slower than it was in Asia. East Asian fertility fell by more than half in the 20 years to 1985. In Cameroon fertility has fallen only one point (from 5.7 to 4.7) in the past 20 years. And in eight African countries, including Ghana and Kenya, the decline has stalled—that is, after falling for a while, the rate got stuck at about five. Fertility stalls are not unknown elsewhere: Argentina’s fertility remained at three for decades; South Korea and Costa Rica also experienced hiccups. But no continent has experienced so many stalls, or so early in the process of decline, as Africa.