Is globalization overrated?

Here

Is there evidence for unconditional convergence?

From Opalo's Weblog

When we look at the same question at the level of individual industries rather than countries a surprising finding emerges. Suppose we focus on, say, plastics, furniture, or the auto industry in developing countries. Does productivity in these (and other) industries experience automatic convergence with the technological frontier? Or is convergence once again conditional, depending on a host of country-level variables?

The interesting (and I think new) finding is that productivity convergence appears to be unconditional at the industry level – at least for manufacturing industries and for the period since the 1980s.

This addresses a very relevant question. Lets say, for example, that may be Guatemala's income per-capita is not converging with Germany's unconditional of education, investment, and population growth; but it might be the case that income of the Telecom sector is indeed converging to Germany's unconditional of those factors. What makes those sectors so especial?

What are "Mechanism Experiments"?

Development Impact answers and discusses.

Democratizing Development Economics, what is that?

We need to recognize that development knowledge is no longer the sole province of the researcher, the scholar, or the ivory tower. It’s about the health-care worker in Chiapas recording her results; it’s about the local official posting the school budget on the classroom door so that parents can complain when their children are shortchanged; it’s about the Minister, the academician, the statistician, and the entrepreneur comparing notes on the impact of incentives. Here

Sound like a movement in the right direction. Technology makes this possible. This goes hand in hand with other recent concepts such as "citizen science" and "crowdsourcing." One of the challenges of development policies is to include informal and local institutions. The idea behind "democratizing economic development" might be able to do more of that. I was surprised by the tone of "humility" in the statement.

What is the effect of drug law enforcement on drug market violence?

[i]ncreasing drug law enforcement is unlikely to reduce drug market violence. Instead, the existing evidence base suggests that gun violence and high homicide rates may be an inevitable consequence of drug prohibition and that disrupting drug markets can paradoxically increase violence. Source.

Does social capital affect homicides?

[The authors] find weak support for the beneficial consequences of social capital on homicide. One dimension of social capital, however, does exhibit a significant negative association with homicide rates, net of other influences: social activism.

Social activism is defined as:

the total number of collective activities in which each respondent has participated

The data on social capital is taken from the World Values Survey.

Is US higher education a bubble?

Free exchange says:

For one thing, it's hard to agree on what price [of higher education] should be the focus. Advertised topline tuition? Few people pay that. Average tuition paid? Average student loan debt? Is the bubble in higher education present at all universities, or just top universities, or just for-profit universities? And how is whatever rising price that is the focus connected to changes in the benefits of a higher education? Indeed, what are those benefits?

One could have asked similar questions for the housing market:

Average prices of houses paid? Average mortgage debt? Is the bubble in housing prices present in all neighborhoods, states, or regions (urban vs rural, safe vs dangerous neighborhoods). And how is whatever rising price that is the focus connected to changes in the quality of housing?

One has to take into consideration public education and government funding which is ultimately a price charge to taxpayers.

Looking at tuition only might be misleading. The price might stay constant but if the quality has gone down, there is also a bubble (prices are not going down to match a possible lower quality of higher education). Granted, I don't know of any comprehensive study on quality of higher education in the US [this might be an exception], but without one it is not possible to reject the possibility of  bubble in higher education.

How does education affect religion?

[h]igher levels of education lead to lower levels of religious participation later in life. Source.

The regressions model:

gpyc none = β edgpyc +γ Xgpyc +φp +ϕy +θc +ϑa +Tpy +τ pa +ε gpyc .

The variable gpyc none in the equation denotes the fraction of all individuals in a cell who report no religious affiliation. The variable edgpyc represents average years of educational attainment, and Xgpyc represents a set of controls including a dummy for gender, the fraction of a province’s population that is rural at the time a respondent was 12 years old, and the fraction of a province’s workers in manufacturingat age 12.

I wonder how much is due to education itself and how much to the indirect effect of education on income. The paper is here.

How do violence affect Latin America?

This is from Youth homicides: Latin America's public health problem By Barbara J. Fraser, Catholic News Service.

Andres Marroquin experienced this in his native Guatemala, where he regularly saw police and ambulances retrieving bodies along public thoroughfares."I have friends who have been murdered," said Marroquin, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin in Superior. "It's a problem that affects us directly."

The result, he said, is "paranoia -- you're afraid to go out of the house."

His concern about the problem led him to study factors contributing to violence in countries around the world. In a statistical analysis, he found that some of the factors often blamed for rising violence -- poverty, increasing urbanization, even income inequality -- were not significant.Worldwide, the most violent countries had more ethnic and linguistic diversity, lower educational levels and weak rule of law. The highest rates were in Latin America, he said.

Homicide rates in Latin America could be affected by the availability of guns, especially after the Central American civil wars of the 1980s, the long-running conflict in Colombia and Peru's insurgency in the 1980s and 1990s. But efforts to calculate the impact of factors such as guns and drug trafficking are stymied by a lack of data, Marroquin said.

In his 2009 study of worldwide homicide rates, "the strongest variable is governance," particularly the effectiveness of the judicial system, Marroquin told CNS. The implication for policy makers is that scarce resources might best be used to reduce corruption and increase effectiveness in a country's legal system, he said.

Marroquin stressed that his study looked at worldwide factors in violence and that there is probably variation from region to region, between countries and even within countries. In Guatemala, for example, he has found that homicide rates in eastern Guatemala are three times those of the West. He suspects that could be due to drug trafficking routes, but lacks the data for detailed analysis.

"We know that drug trafficking affects" homicide rates, "but we don't know how much," he said.

Thanks to Barbara for writing this.

What explains civil wars?

[o]nce you start thinking about civil war, it’s hard to think about anything else.

That is the last line of the article: Blattman, Christopher, and Edward Miguel. 2010. "Civil War." Journal of Economic Literature, 48(1): 3–57. See it Here

This is the more comperhensive review of the literature on civil wars I have seen, especially from the perspective of economics and political science [but it also includes studies from other social sciences]. 

The authors claim:

In our view, the most interesting directions for research include the internal organization of armed groups, rebel governance of civilians, the strategic use of violence, counter-insurgency strategy, and the roots of individual participation in violent collective action. Each is ripe for the concerted application of contract theory and mechanism design and insights from behavioral economics and industrial organization.

I found very interesting the discussion on: 

• The importance of polarization, as opposed to ethnic fractionalization, and the measurements of polarization. 
• Looking at civil wars beyond country borders. 
• The duration of conflict.
• Regarding post war recovery, cities that were bombed by US in Japan or Germany during WW II recovered faster. This as also found in Vietnam.
• The positive effect of postwar conflict aid. 

Some specific facts are interesting as well:

• Increases in coffee prices decrease conflict in coffee production zones in Colombia. But the increase in world cocaine prices lead to more conflict in coca growing regions. 
• Perpetrators in the Rwanda genocide were mainly poor wage earners or land renters . . . the victims were mainly land owners [although this might be explained by the colonial history, and consistent with the socioeconomic facts of Tutsis and Hutus]. 

I wanted to see more on:

• Social capital
• Why civil wars stop?
• The importance of religion.

See the blog of Chis Blattman, one of the authors, here. 

See the impressive TED video by photographer James Nachtwey here.

Can fiction be used to explore the social sciences?

Research

One of the advantages of using fiction to explore the social sciences is that one can incorporate the insights from some social sciences into others more easily. For example, a work of fiction can be used to understand economic behavior, but also to understand how this behavior is affected by the physiology, culture, and history. This is very valuable to generate new hypothesis. The main value of using fiction to advance and study social sciences is to understand the importance of interdisciplinary research. Behavioral Economics is one example. 

Teaching

Students can get confused at the beginning (because they begin to realize that other aspects of human behavior affect the strictly rational assumption of economics, for example), but they come up with a lot of questions and develop a more critical attitude towards the mainstream approaches of economics, or sociology, or physiology, etc.  

My best experiences teaching economics (institutional economic in particular) with fiction have been when using:

The Bible (the book of Genesis, Kings, and Romans)

J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the barbarians

C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the witch, and the wardrobe

C. Achebe's Things fall apart

This post was motivated by the reading of this review of The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement. The author wrote this book (somewhat unsuccessfully according to the review) as a way to explain his theories of the mind. 

Main points of the review:

• Nondeliberate emotion, perception and intuition are much more important in shaping our lives than reason and will.

• “Emotion assigns value to things,” Brooks writes, “and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations.” The deeper level of the mind also holds a great store of information, coming from genetics, culture, family and education. “Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it.”

• Similarly, in morality and politics. “The adult personality — including political views — is forever defined in opposition to one’s natural enemies in high school,” Brooks writes. His analysis of what he calls the “underdebates” in American politics — the web of associations and sympathies that divide Republicans and Democrats — is plausible, if familiar: snowmobiles versus bicycles, religious versus secular morality, and so forth.

Can twitter be used to detect earthquakes?

From the article: Earthquake Shakes Twitter Users: Real-time Event Detection by Social Sensors, WWW ’10: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on World Wide Web, 2010, by Takeshi Sakaki, Makoto Okazaki, and Yutaka Matsuo: 

Twitter, a popular microblogging service, has received much attention recently. An important characteristic of Twitter is its real-time nature. For example, when an earthquake occurs, people make many Twitter posts (tweets) related to the earthquake, which enables detection of earthquake occurrence promptly, simply by observing the tweets. As described in this paper, we investigate the real-time interaction of events such as earthquakes in Twitter and propose an algorithm to monitor tweets and to detect a target event. 

What determines the homicide rate variation across countries?

From the article: Cole J., Marroquin A., 2009. Homicide Rates in a Cross-Section of Countries: Evidence and Interpretations. Population and Development Review 35, 749-776:

• Latin America tend to have homicide rates that are, on average, roughly twice as high as those in similar countries located outside this region (e0.7133 = 2.041). 

• An increase in the ELF (Ethnolinguistic Fractionalization Index) from 0 to 1 (i.e., the difference between a totally homogeneous population and a totally fragmented one) implies a roughly 250 per cent increase in the average homicide rate (e1.2607 = 3.528). 

• Other things equal, an increase of one year in the average level of male schooling reduces the homicide rate by about 29 percent . . .  

• A one point increase in the World Governance Index reduces the average homicide rate by about 74 percent. The WGI is defined over a range from –2.5 to +2.5, with countries with “average” governance having a rating of 0. Therefore, other things equal, countries at the extreme low end of this range (worst possible governance) would be expected to have a homicide rate about 6 times higher than a country with “average” governance (e–0.7377•(–2.5) = 6.323), while a country at the high end of this range (best possible governance) would have a homicide rate about 6 times lower than a country with average governance (e–0.7377•2.5 = 1/6.323 = 0.158). 

What are the negative effects of radioactivity?

Radiation, even in small doses, can cause cancer in humans and other living things. Fast moving photons (gamma rays), electrons (beta rays) and helium nuclei (alpha particles) can crash into other molecules and change their structure. If this happens to a DNA molecule, it can damage the genetic information, and sometimes turn a cell cancerous. Radiation also causes burns, much like sunburn, in large doses over short amounts of time. 

Radioactive iodine is also readily absorbed by the body and becomes incorporated in bones, and is therefore difficult to eliminate from the body. The radiation it emits can cause bone cancer over long periods of time. 

Source

How much radiation is too much radiation? See the answer here.