We suggest a three-pronged approach to an enhanced growth strategy for India. The first prong is ... more We suggest a three-pronged approach to an enhanced growth strategy for India. The first prong is export-led growth. Here the lessons of China are particularly instructive, since China achieved in the past fifteen years the kind of export-led growth that India could have achieved, but failed to do so, because of poor public policies. The second prong is rural improvement, especially in the vast population of the Gangetic valley. India needs a specific strategy to bring modern economic growth to rural India, through a concerted campaign of infrastructure upgrading and appropriate re-design of state policy. The third prong is the maintenance of macroeconomic stability, to avoid the kind of crisis that pushed East Asia into economic collapse. The macroeconomic stakes have obviously been raised in the past year.
In this paper we compare the reform experiences of China and India focusing on three specific are... more In this paper we compare the reform experiences of China and India focusing on three specific areas of industrial policy. We begin with a comparison of the macro economic performance of the two countries and find that except on the inflation front China is better placed than India. China has grown at almost double the rate of India largely because of very high savings and investment rates. Of course, economic reforms have provided the necessary policy environment for China to attain and sustain high growth. First we compare the extent of deregulation in China and India in the areas of prices, labor and land laws, and exit policy for firms. We find that the non-state sector of China, which is the main driving force of China's impressive growth has performed so well largely because it operates primarily under market conditions. China has gone far ahead of India in respect of deregulation of their nonstate sector. Price reforms have been extensive, labor is mobile, labor laws are liberal, and firms are free to enter and exit from the market. The results achieved in the process speak for themselves. In India, by contrast, much needs to be done for private sector deregulation, price reform has been limited, labor and land laws are stringent, and while firms have no entry barriers, they do, however, face strong exit barriers. Second, we draw comparison between the Chinese township and village enterprises and the Indian small scale industries. While these have been promoted in both the countries through preferential policies, however, their objectives have been different, and hence the results. Chinese small enterprises are given initial support only as against the policy in India wherein incentives are available as long as a firm remains in small scale. Moreover, in India, items are reserved to be produced exclusively by the small scale industry. While both have grown overtime, the ones in China have grown much faster. Finally, we compare special economic zones of China with export processing zones of India. We find that although both the countries have offered similar incentives to prospective investors, the story is very different in the two countries. The zones in China have been highly successful in attracting foreign investment, promoting exports, and generating employment than they have been in India. We identify a number of factors for the performance differentials in the two countries.
This paper reviews the foreign debt burden in Central America with special emphasis on Honduras a... more This paper reviews the foreign debt burden in Central America with special emphasis on Honduras and Nicaragua, which have a large debt overhang. Several indicators suggest that this foreign debt seriously impedes economic growth in both nations. Honduras and Nicaragua, the poorest countries of Central America, have lagged behind the rest of the region in growth, resulting in an increase in regional income inequality during the 1990s. Analysis suggests that Honduras and Nicaragua require alleviation of their foreign debt as a prerequisite to sustained growth. This paper also evaluates the prospects of these countries to qualify for the new initiative aimed at reducing the debt burden of the highly indebted poor countries (the so-called HIPC Initiative). It concludes that Honduras and Nicaragua have favorable prospects of qualifying for the HIPC Initiative. In general, both countries meet the eligibility criteria. Honduras and Nicaragua face a higher foreign debt burden than three countries that have already qualified for HIPC treatment. The main obstacle, however, is demonstrating successful macroeconomic performance under the supervision of the IMF. The paper ends with a discussion of the strategy that these countries should follow in order to achieve maximum debt relief.
This paper investigates the relationship between economic reforms and constitutional transition, ... more This paper investigates the relationship between economic reforms and constitutional transition, which has been neglected by many transition economists. It is argued that assessment of reform performance might be very misleading if it is not recognized that economic reforms are just a small part of large scale of constitutional transition. Rivalry and competition between states and between political forces within each country are the driving forces for constitutional transition. We use Russia as an example of economic reforms associated with constitutional transition and China as an example of economic reforms in the absence of constitutional transition to examine features and problems in the two patterns of transition. It is concluded that under political monopoly of the ruling party, economic transition will be hijacked by state opportunism. Dual track approach to economic transition may generate very high long-term cost of constitutional transition that might outweigh its short-term benefit of buying out the vested interests.
It is well known that a domestic resource discovery gives rise to wealth effects that cause a squ... more It is well known that a domestic resource discovery gives rise to wealth effects that cause a squeeze of the tradeable good sector of an open economy. The decline of the manufacturing sector following an energy discovery has been termed the "Dutch disease," and has been investigated in many recent studies. Our model extends the principally static analyses to date by allowing for: (1) short-run capital specificity and long-run capital mobility; (2) international capital flows; and (3) far-sighted intertemporal optimizing behavior by households and firms. The model is solved by numerical simulation.
Journal of Chinese Economic and Business Studies, 2003
We assess the prospects of China's future growth performance in two steps. The first step is to p... more We assess the prospects of China's future growth performance in two steps. The first step is to project the potential growth path by determining whether past successes were generated by economic experimentation that produced non-capitalist institutional innovations (e.g. incentive contracts to state enterprises, profit-oriented supervision by state industrial bureaux, collectively-owned rural enterprises), or by institutional convergence toward the advanced WTO economies like France, Japan and the United States-two interpretations known respectively as the experimentalist school and the convergence school. Because WTO membership would harmonise China's economic institutions with those of capitalist economies and reduce the scope for experimentation, the experimentalist school would project a lower potential growth path than the convergence school. The fact that China has sought WTO membership voluntarily and with great tenacity is recognition of the correctness of the convergence interpretation. The second step in assessing China's growth prospects is to project the extent and duration that actual growth would deviate from potential growth. We assess the possibility of a WTO-induced macroeconomic shock that would generate such great political turmoil that prolonged economic stagnation would result. This macroeconomic shock could take two forms: a flood of imports that would cause widespread unemployment; and the entry of foreign banks that would bankrupt the domestic banks, and hence shut down the national credit system, crippling production economy-wide. Our main conclusions are that the government has the technical means to avert such this WTO-induced macroeconomic shock, and that the real threat to macroeconomic stability is China's weak fiscal position.
Many studies of regional disparity in China have focused on the preferential policies received by... more Many studies of regional disparity in China have focused on the preferential policies received by the coastal provinces. We decomposed the location dummies in provincial growth regressions to obtain estimates of the effects of geography and policy on provincial growth rates in 1996–99. Their respective contributions in percentage points were 2.5 and 3.5 for the province-level metropolises, 0.6 and 2.3 for the northeastern provinces, 2.8 and 2.8 for the coastal provinces, 2.0 and 1.6 for the central provinces, 0 and 1.6 for the northwestern provinces, and 0.1 and 1.8 for the southwestern provinces. Because the so-called preferential policies are largely deregulation policies that have allowed coastal Chinese provinces to integrate into the international economy, it is far superior to reduce regional disparity by extending these deregulation policies to the interior provinces than by re-regulating the coastal provinces. Two additional inhibitions to income convergence are the househol...
The Government of India has proclaimed the new decade as a Decade of Development, during which In... more The Government of India has proclaimed the new decade as a Decade of Development, during which India will meet bold targets for economic growth and social development. At his Independence Day speech, the Prime Minister announced that the government had set a target of doubling India's per capita income by the year 2010. This is an ambitious target, but one that we believe is certainly achievable. In order to achieve this target, India needs growth in GNP of the order of 9 percent per year over the next ten years. And in order to achieve this growth rate on a sustained basis, India needs a well-focused growth strategy. This paper outlines some of the key policy challenges in meeting these goals. We believe that India has a chance for a tremendous breakthrough in economic development during the current decade. A decade of opening of the economy has produced new dynamism, most dramatically in the Information Technology sector, but in others as well. The world is waking up to India’...
Princeton Studies in International Economics, 1989
No abstract is available for this item. ... To our knowledge, this item is not available for down... more No abstract is available for this item. ... To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options: 1. Check below under "Related research" whether another version of this item is available online. 2. Check on the ...
We identify the Asian financial crisis to be the result of the instabilities of short-term capita... more We identify the Asian financial crisis to be the result of the instabilities of short-term capital flows, inadequate prudential supervision in the financial markets of the developing countries, mistaken commitments to the fixed exchange rate regime, lack of international coordination in the regulation of international financial markets, absence of an international mechanism for the orderly working out of international debt, and inappropriate "rescue" packages imposed by the IMF. We recommend 30 policy reforms to make the international economy more resilient to financial turmoil, and to reduce the costs of such turmoil. We conclude that there is little particularly 'Asian' about the Asian financial crisis. Even though official Washington, led by the IMF, proclaimed the crisis to be one of Asian capitalism, the more generic character of the crisis became all too clear during 1998, as the crisis spread to Russia, South Africa, and Brazil. Rather than an Asian crisis, ...
American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 2009
In 2005, São Tomé e Príncipe began an initiative aimed at reducing malaria-related mortality to z... more In 2005, São Tomé e Príncipe began an initiative aimed at reducing malaria-related mortality to zero. The program included mass coverage with two antivector intervention methods (indoor residual spraying and long-lasting insecticidal nets), artemisinin-based combination therapy, and intermittent preventive therapy in pregnancy with sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine. At the end of 2007, three years after intensified interventions began, malaria-attributed outpatient consultations, hospitalizations, and deaths decreased by more than 85%, 80%, and 95%, respectively, in all age groups. Mean prevalence of parasitemia and splenomegaly were also significantly reduced to 2.1% (P < 0.0001) and 0.3% (P < 0.0001) after two rounds of spraying from baseline prevalences of 30.5% and 48.8%, respectively. The dramatic reduction in malaria morbidity and mortality now enable serious consideration of new goals and strategies aimed at completely interrupting malaria transmission on these islands. We repo...
Much of Africa has yet to go through a demographic transition; this Malthusian crisis of high mor... more Much of Africa has yet to go through a demographic transition; this Malthusian crisis of high mortality, high fertility, rapid population growth and chronic extreme poverty has been attributed to factors including the status of women, pro-natalist policies, and poverty itself. Large uncertainty exists among demographers as to the relative importance of these factors, mostly since econometric estimation is complicated by the endogeneity of fertility to other variables of interest. We attempt to improve estimation of the effect of the child mortality variable on fertility by deploying exogenous variation in the ecology of malaria transmission. Results show that child mortality is a powerfully robust driver of fertility behavior. Meeting the Millennium Development Goal of reducing 1990 child mortality rates by 66 % in sub-Saharan Africa would translate into a reduction of total fertility rates from around 6.3 in 1990 to 3.3, more than halfway towards achieving replacement fertility lev...
In addition, we thank Lisa Sachs for her coordination and support of the project; Solina Kennedy ... more In addition, we thank Lisa Sachs for her coordination and support of the project; Solina Kennedy for her invaluable editing, research, and other support; Sam Szoke-Burke for his supervision of research, editing, and additional support on the project; Ella Merrill and Jesse Coleman for their edits; and Carolina Ocampo-Maya for her valuable insights. We appreciate the many people who took time to speak with us, and owe particular debts of gratitude to the following: Christian Bunn (CIAT); Mario Cerutti (Lavazza);
On March 30, the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) held an internat... more On March 30, the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) held an international webinar on “the Epidemiology and Economics of Coronavirus”. This event sought to examine the implications of COVID-19 for public health and the SDGs, and make recommendations on policy responses. TUSDG experts, Jeffrey Sachs, Chair of TUSDG International Academic Committee, Professor of Economics at Columbia University, Gao Yuning, Associate Professor of the School of Public Policy and Management of Tsinghua University, and TUSDG researcher were invited to the webinar and shared their perspectives on economic impacts and management under the Covid-19.
This paper was completed on 18 June 2020, in the midst of the fast-moving pandemic. At the time, ... more This paper was completed on 18 June 2020, in the midst of the fast-moving pandemic. At the time, the performance of the Asia-Pacific region in suppressing the epidemic was vastly superior to that of the North Atlantic region (including both North America and Western Europe). A half-year more has now passed. Rather than re-writing the paper, I have allowed the original to stand as was written, but add this postscript for an update. The basic message is clear: The early superior results of the Asia-Pacific region were maintained during the second half of 2020. These superior results were neither early anomalies (such as the particular timing of the arrival of the virus) nor temporary successes that were later overwhelmed by events. The accomplishments have persisted, and reflect a superiority of the public health measures undertaken by the governments, and the public’s compliance with them, in the Asia-Pacific region compared with the North Atlantic region.
The SDGs and Paris Climate Agreement, taken together, constitute the best hope for charting a new... more The SDGs and Paris Climate Agreement, taken together, constitute the best hope for charting a new course for the world's politics and economics, to produce ''the future we want.'' This paper briefly explores the central environmental, social, and economic challenges; the pathways to sustainability; and the central role of companies in achieving our global goals. We are facing four very deep and interconnected global environmental crises: human-induced climate change, unsustainable land use, megapollution, and increased frequency and intensity of pandemic zoonotic diseases. At the same time, we face massive social crises, including increasing inequality. There are six necessary SDG Transformations that each requires a major change in the organization of societal, political, and economic activitieswhich delineates also the critical role of business. The paper specifies four key questions that companies and their stakeholders can ask to effectively align with the ''Decade of Action'' needed to achieve the SDG ambitions.
We suggest a three-pronged approach to an enhanced growth strategy for India. The first prong is ... more We suggest a three-pronged approach to an enhanced growth strategy for India. The first prong is export-led growth. Here the lessons of China are particularly instructive, since China achieved in the past fifteen years the kind of export-led growth that India could have achieved, but failed to do so, because of poor public policies. The second prong is rural improvement, especially in the vast population of the Gangetic valley. India needs a specific strategy to bring modern economic growth to rural India, through a concerted campaign of infrastructure upgrading and appropriate re-design of state policy. The third prong is the maintenance of macroeconomic stability, to avoid the kind of crisis that pushed East Asia into economic collapse. The macroeconomic stakes have obviously been raised in the past year.
In this paper we compare the reform experiences of China and India focusing on three specific are... more In this paper we compare the reform experiences of China and India focusing on three specific areas of industrial policy. We begin with a comparison of the macro economic performance of the two countries and find that except on the inflation front China is better placed than India. China has grown at almost double the rate of India largely because of very high savings and investment rates. Of course, economic reforms have provided the necessary policy environment for China to attain and sustain high growth. First we compare the extent of deregulation in China and India in the areas of prices, labor and land laws, and exit policy for firms. We find that the non-state sector of China, which is the main driving force of China's impressive growth has performed so well largely because it operates primarily under market conditions. China has gone far ahead of India in respect of deregulation of their nonstate sector. Price reforms have been extensive, labor is mobile, labor laws are liberal, and firms are free to enter and exit from the market. The results achieved in the process speak for themselves. In India, by contrast, much needs to be done for private sector deregulation, price reform has been limited, labor and land laws are stringent, and while firms have no entry barriers, they do, however, face strong exit barriers. Second, we draw comparison between the Chinese township and village enterprises and the Indian small scale industries. While these have been promoted in both the countries through preferential policies, however, their objectives have been different, and hence the results. Chinese small enterprises are given initial support only as against the policy in India wherein incentives are available as long as a firm remains in small scale. Moreover, in India, items are reserved to be produced exclusively by the small scale industry. While both have grown overtime, the ones in China have grown much faster. Finally, we compare special economic zones of China with export processing zones of India. We find that although both the countries have offered similar incentives to prospective investors, the story is very different in the two countries. The zones in China have been highly successful in attracting foreign investment, promoting exports, and generating employment than they have been in India. We identify a number of factors for the performance differentials in the two countries.
This paper reviews the foreign debt burden in Central America with special emphasis on Honduras a... more This paper reviews the foreign debt burden in Central America with special emphasis on Honduras and Nicaragua, which have a large debt overhang. Several indicators suggest that this foreign debt seriously impedes economic growth in both nations. Honduras and Nicaragua, the poorest countries of Central America, have lagged behind the rest of the region in growth, resulting in an increase in regional income inequality during the 1990s. Analysis suggests that Honduras and Nicaragua require alleviation of their foreign debt as a prerequisite to sustained growth. This paper also evaluates the prospects of these countries to qualify for the new initiative aimed at reducing the debt burden of the highly indebted poor countries (the so-called HIPC Initiative). It concludes that Honduras and Nicaragua have favorable prospects of qualifying for the HIPC Initiative. In general, both countries meet the eligibility criteria. Honduras and Nicaragua face a higher foreign debt burden than three countries that have already qualified for HIPC treatment. The main obstacle, however, is demonstrating successful macroeconomic performance under the supervision of the IMF. The paper ends with a discussion of the strategy that these countries should follow in order to achieve maximum debt relief.
This paper investigates the relationship between economic reforms and constitutional transition, ... more This paper investigates the relationship between economic reforms and constitutional transition, which has been neglected by many transition economists. It is argued that assessment of reform performance might be very misleading if it is not recognized that economic reforms are just a small part of large scale of constitutional transition. Rivalry and competition between states and between political forces within each country are the driving forces for constitutional transition. We use Russia as an example of economic reforms associated with constitutional transition and China as an example of economic reforms in the absence of constitutional transition to examine features and problems in the two patterns of transition. It is concluded that under political monopoly of the ruling party, economic transition will be hijacked by state opportunism. Dual track approach to economic transition may generate very high long-term cost of constitutional transition that might outweigh its short-term benefit of buying out the vested interests.
It is well known that a domestic resource discovery gives rise to wealth effects that cause a squ... more It is well known that a domestic resource discovery gives rise to wealth effects that cause a squeeze of the tradeable good sector of an open economy. The decline of the manufacturing sector following an energy discovery has been termed the "Dutch disease," and has been investigated in many recent studies. Our model extends the principally static analyses to date by allowing for: (1) short-run capital specificity and long-run capital mobility; (2) international capital flows; and (3) far-sighted intertemporal optimizing behavior by households and firms. The model is solved by numerical simulation.
Journal of Chinese Economic and Business Studies, 2003
We assess the prospects of China's future growth performance in two steps. The first step is to p... more We assess the prospects of China's future growth performance in two steps. The first step is to project the potential growth path by determining whether past successes were generated by economic experimentation that produced non-capitalist institutional innovations (e.g. incentive contracts to state enterprises, profit-oriented supervision by state industrial bureaux, collectively-owned rural enterprises), or by institutional convergence toward the advanced WTO economies like France, Japan and the United States-two interpretations known respectively as the experimentalist school and the convergence school. Because WTO membership would harmonise China's economic institutions with those of capitalist economies and reduce the scope for experimentation, the experimentalist school would project a lower potential growth path than the convergence school. The fact that China has sought WTO membership voluntarily and with great tenacity is recognition of the correctness of the convergence interpretation. The second step in assessing China's growth prospects is to project the extent and duration that actual growth would deviate from potential growth. We assess the possibility of a WTO-induced macroeconomic shock that would generate such great political turmoil that prolonged economic stagnation would result. This macroeconomic shock could take two forms: a flood of imports that would cause widespread unemployment; and the entry of foreign banks that would bankrupt the domestic banks, and hence shut down the national credit system, crippling production economy-wide. Our main conclusions are that the government has the technical means to avert such this WTO-induced macroeconomic shock, and that the real threat to macroeconomic stability is China's weak fiscal position.
Many studies of regional disparity in China have focused on the preferential policies received by... more Many studies of regional disparity in China have focused on the preferential policies received by the coastal provinces. We decomposed the location dummies in provincial growth regressions to obtain estimates of the effects of geography and policy on provincial growth rates in 1996–99. Their respective contributions in percentage points were 2.5 and 3.5 for the province-level metropolises, 0.6 and 2.3 for the northeastern provinces, 2.8 and 2.8 for the coastal provinces, 2.0 and 1.6 for the central provinces, 0 and 1.6 for the northwestern provinces, and 0.1 and 1.8 for the southwestern provinces. Because the so-called preferential policies are largely deregulation policies that have allowed coastal Chinese provinces to integrate into the international economy, it is far superior to reduce regional disparity by extending these deregulation policies to the interior provinces than by re-regulating the coastal provinces. Two additional inhibitions to income convergence are the househol...
The Government of India has proclaimed the new decade as a Decade of Development, during which In... more The Government of India has proclaimed the new decade as a Decade of Development, during which India will meet bold targets for economic growth and social development. At his Independence Day speech, the Prime Minister announced that the government had set a target of doubling India's per capita income by the year 2010. This is an ambitious target, but one that we believe is certainly achievable. In order to achieve this target, India needs growth in GNP of the order of 9 percent per year over the next ten years. And in order to achieve this growth rate on a sustained basis, India needs a well-focused growth strategy. This paper outlines some of the key policy challenges in meeting these goals. We believe that India has a chance for a tremendous breakthrough in economic development during the current decade. A decade of opening of the economy has produced new dynamism, most dramatically in the Information Technology sector, but in others as well. The world is waking up to India’...
Princeton Studies in International Economics, 1989
No abstract is available for this item. ... To our knowledge, this item is not available for down... more No abstract is available for this item. ... To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options: 1. Check below under "Related research" whether another version of this item is available online. 2. Check on the ...
We identify the Asian financial crisis to be the result of the instabilities of short-term capita... more We identify the Asian financial crisis to be the result of the instabilities of short-term capital flows, inadequate prudential supervision in the financial markets of the developing countries, mistaken commitments to the fixed exchange rate regime, lack of international coordination in the regulation of international financial markets, absence of an international mechanism for the orderly working out of international debt, and inappropriate "rescue" packages imposed by the IMF. We recommend 30 policy reforms to make the international economy more resilient to financial turmoil, and to reduce the costs of such turmoil. We conclude that there is little particularly 'Asian' about the Asian financial crisis. Even though official Washington, led by the IMF, proclaimed the crisis to be one of Asian capitalism, the more generic character of the crisis became all too clear during 1998, as the crisis spread to Russia, South Africa, and Brazil. Rather than an Asian crisis, ...
American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 2009
In 2005, São Tomé e Príncipe began an initiative aimed at reducing malaria-related mortality to z... more In 2005, São Tomé e Príncipe began an initiative aimed at reducing malaria-related mortality to zero. The program included mass coverage with two antivector intervention methods (indoor residual spraying and long-lasting insecticidal nets), artemisinin-based combination therapy, and intermittent preventive therapy in pregnancy with sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine. At the end of 2007, three years after intensified interventions began, malaria-attributed outpatient consultations, hospitalizations, and deaths decreased by more than 85%, 80%, and 95%, respectively, in all age groups. Mean prevalence of parasitemia and splenomegaly were also significantly reduced to 2.1% (P < 0.0001) and 0.3% (P < 0.0001) after two rounds of spraying from baseline prevalences of 30.5% and 48.8%, respectively. The dramatic reduction in malaria morbidity and mortality now enable serious consideration of new goals and strategies aimed at completely interrupting malaria transmission on these islands. We repo...
Much of Africa has yet to go through a demographic transition; this Malthusian crisis of high mor... more Much of Africa has yet to go through a demographic transition; this Malthusian crisis of high mortality, high fertility, rapid population growth and chronic extreme poverty has been attributed to factors including the status of women, pro-natalist policies, and poverty itself. Large uncertainty exists among demographers as to the relative importance of these factors, mostly since econometric estimation is complicated by the endogeneity of fertility to other variables of interest. We attempt to improve estimation of the effect of the child mortality variable on fertility by deploying exogenous variation in the ecology of malaria transmission. Results show that child mortality is a powerfully robust driver of fertility behavior. Meeting the Millennium Development Goal of reducing 1990 child mortality rates by 66 % in sub-Saharan Africa would translate into a reduction of total fertility rates from around 6.3 in 1990 to 3.3, more than halfway towards achieving replacement fertility lev...
In addition, we thank Lisa Sachs for her coordination and support of the project; Solina Kennedy ... more In addition, we thank Lisa Sachs for her coordination and support of the project; Solina Kennedy for her invaluable editing, research, and other support; Sam Szoke-Burke for his supervision of research, editing, and additional support on the project; Ella Merrill and Jesse Coleman for their edits; and Carolina Ocampo-Maya for her valuable insights. We appreciate the many people who took time to speak with us, and owe particular debts of gratitude to the following: Christian Bunn (CIAT); Mario Cerutti (Lavazza);
On March 30, the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) held an internat... more On March 30, the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) held an international webinar on “the Epidemiology and Economics of Coronavirus”. This event sought to examine the implications of COVID-19 for public health and the SDGs, and make recommendations on policy responses. TUSDG experts, Jeffrey Sachs, Chair of TUSDG International Academic Committee, Professor of Economics at Columbia University, Gao Yuning, Associate Professor of the School of Public Policy and Management of Tsinghua University, and TUSDG researcher were invited to the webinar and shared their perspectives on economic impacts and management under the Covid-19.
This paper was completed on 18 June 2020, in the midst of the fast-moving pandemic. At the time, ... more This paper was completed on 18 June 2020, in the midst of the fast-moving pandemic. At the time, the performance of the Asia-Pacific region in suppressing the epidemic was vastly superior to that of the North Atlantic region (including both North America and Western Europe). A half-year more has now passed. Rather than re-writing the paper, I have allowed the original to stand as was written, but add this postscript for an update. The basic message is clear: The early superior results of the Asia-Pacific region were maintained during the second half of 2020. These superior results were neither early anomalies (such as the particular timing of the arrival of the virus) nor temporary successes that were later overwhelmed by events. The accomplishments have persisted, and reflect a superiority of the public health measures undertaken by the governments, and the public’s compliance with them, in the Asia-Pacific region compared with the North Atlantic region.
The SDGs and Paris Climate Agreement, taken together, constitute the best hope for charting a new... more The SDGs and Paris Climate Agreement, taken together, constitute the best hope for charting a new course for the world's politics and economics, to produce ''the future we want.'' This paper briefly explores the central environmental, social, and economic challenges; the pathways to sustainability; and the central role of companies in achieving our global goals. We are facing four very deep and interconnected global environmental crises: human-induced climate change, unsustainable land use, megapollution, and increased frequency and intensity of pandemic zoonotic diseases. At the same time, we face massive social crises, including increasing inequality. There are six necessary SDG Transformations that each requires a major change in the organization of societal, political, and economic activitieswhich delineates also the critical role of business. The paper specifies four key questions that companies and their stakeholders can ask to effectively align with the ''Decade of Action'' needed to achieve the SDG ambitions.
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