CAMBRIDGE – Manufacturing industries are no longer the labor-absorbing sectors they used to be, and that is a big problem for developed and developing economies alike. Achieving sustainable, inclusive growth will now depend on creating opportunities in services – a sector not generally associated with good, productive jobs. Conventional ...

CAMBRIDGE – While economists and policymakers have long appreciated the economic significance of knowledge, they have paid insufficient attention to the conditions that make knowledge useful. Technologies, traditions, and ideas that work well in one setting may not when they are adopted elsewhereor maintained after conditions change. ...

CAMBRIDGE – Experiments that depart from conventional economic policy can be costly. But this does not mean that there are universal rules in economics or that the prevailing view among mainstream economists should determine what policymakers do. The specter of inflation is once again stalking the world, after a long period of dormancy ...

CAMBRIDGE – The structure of great-power rivalry may exclude a world of love and harmony, but it does not necessitate a world of immutable conflict. Structure is not destiny: It does not preclude any of the myriad alternatives that lie between these extremes. US President Joe Biden's economic and foreign policies may represent a sharp ...

CAMBRIDGE – Industrialization has been essential to reducing poverty historically. But today's global and technological context implies that economic growth in developing countries is now possible only by raising productivity in smaller, informal firms that employ the bulk of the poor and lower-middle classes. Development policy has long ...

CAMBRIDGE – The G7 agreement on taxation of global corporations still needs formal approval from a wider set of countries, and there remain many details to be worked out for it to be effective. Nonetheless, it would not be farfetched to describe the deal as historic. On June 5, the world's leading economies announced an agreement that will ...

CAMBRIDGE – US President Joe Biden's administration has embarked on a bold and long-overdue departure from the economic policy orthodoxy that has prevailed in the US and much of the West since the 1980s. But those who are seeking a new economic paradigm should be careful what they wish for. Neoliberalism is dead. Or perhaps it remains very ...

CAMBRIDGE – Understanding the advantages and limitations of economists' method clarifies the value they can add to analysis of non-economic questions. Equally important, it underscores how economists' approach can complement but never replace alternative, often qualitative methods used in other scholarly disciplines. Economists have never been ...

CAMBRIDGE – Recent patterns of technological change in the rich world have made it more difficult for low-income countries to develop and converge with income levels in the developed world. These changes have contributed to deepening economic and technological dualism even within the more advanced segments of developing countries' ...