More on the Foreign Aid Curse

I’ve mentioned the aid curse before. Well, the topic of provisioning public goods came up today, so I ended up doing some more research on it, to see just how bad it was. Seems its pretty bad, and someone has already studied it.
The Aid Curse originally followed from its better understood counterpart - the “resource [...]

Random Nuggets: Patents, Generics, and Climate Change

The IHT reported two interesting pharma related news items.

It may be high season for patent reform in the US. According to the IHT, Democratic control of Congress, pressure to control healthcare costs, and lobbying by the high-tech industry for weaker patent legislation and protection from frivolous patent infringement suits might finally overturn the stranglehold of [...]

Stiglitz on Patents and Health R&D

The topic of Advanced Market Commitments has been in the news recently, with several weighty proponents pushing it as a way to close the global drug research gap, particularly for vaccines. Now, Joseph Stiglitz has a very interesting article on patents, “prize funds”, and the problems of both. Reading it is particularly rewarding because it [...]

India Nuggets: Readings from the Brookings Institution

On March 8, The Brookings Institution hosted an event titled Is India’s High Growth Sustainable. I could not attend as I live a quarter of a world away, but the even announcement also included some other interesting articles, worth checking out:

Energy Security Series: India (full PDF here): A rather long report on the use and emerging [...]

Economics and Ethics: What they don’t say about Adam Smith

While doing some research, I came across this interesting article (PDF) by Peter Ulrich, professor of business ethics at the University of St. Gallen (HSG) in Switzerland (the premier university for business and management studies in Switzerland). Written as a conversation with Adam Smith, the article brings out fabulously some of the problems with our current thinking [...]