Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307%2F3343168.pdf

Development as Freedom

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

This report focuses on the dimensions of poverty, and how to create a better world, free of poverty. The analysis explores the nature, and evolution of poverty, and its causes, to present a framework for action. The opportunity for expanding poor people's assets is addressed, arguing that major reductions in human deprivation are indeed possible, that economic growth, inequality, and poverty reduction, can be harnessed through economic integration, and technological change, dependent not only on the evolvement of markets, but on the choices for public action at the global, national, and local levels. Actions to facilitate empowerment include state institutional responsiveness in building social institutions which will improve well-being, and health, to allow increased income-earning potential, access to education, and eventual removal of social barriers. Security aspects are enhanced, by assessing risk management towards reducing vulnerability to economic crises, and natural disasters. The report expands on the dimensions of human deprivation, to include powerlessness and voicelessness, vulnerability and fear. International dimensions are explored, through global actions to fight poverty, analyzing global trade, capital flows, and how to reform development assistance to forge change in the livelihoods of the poor.

World development report 2000/2001 : attacking poverty

Closer international integration is putting increasing pressure on existing national tax structures. This paper uses a simple two-country model to address a range of consequent policy concerns, focusing particularly on the role of country size. Differences in size exacerbate the inefficiency from noncooperative behavior, harming both countries. The smaller country loses from harmonization to any tax rate between those set in the noncooperative equilibrium, but both countries gain from the imposition of a minimum tax anywhere in that range. The fully optimal response to freer cross-border trade, however, may be to do nothing. (JEL H20, H77)

Jeux sans frontieres: tax competition and tax coordination when countries differ in size

The paper constructs and analyzes a long-run time series for regional inequality in China from the Communist Revolution to the present. There have been three peaks of inequality in the last fifty years, coinciding with the Great Famine of the late 1950s, the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s, and finally the period of openness and global integration in the late 1990s. Econometric analysis establishes that regional inequality is explained in the different phases by three key policy variables—the ratio of heavy industry to gross output value, the degree of decentralization, and the degree of openness.

/pdf/fifty-years-of-regional-inequality-in-china-a-journey-j6a2dnkq6r.pdf

Ravi Kanbur

Papers

World development report 2000/2001 : attacking poverty

Jeux sans frontieres: tax competition and tax coordination when countries differ in size

Fifty Years of Regional Inequality in China A Journey through Central Planning, Reform, and Openness

The Standard of Living.

Which Regional Inequality? The Evolution of Rural–Urban and Inland–Coastal Inequality in China from 1983 to 1995☆