Agricultural and Applied Economics—Without Apology
Few people outside of Canada have ever heard of Nunavut. The most recent political entity among Canada’s 13 provinces and territories, Nunavut came into being on April 1, 1999 after Parliament voted in 1993 to establish a new territory out of the Eastern half of the Northwest Territories.
Some of the most popular posts on this blog after the one in which I make available my handouts on linear regression and on causality and the one in which I make available my handout on how to do well in econ courses are the series of posts I wrote at the beginning of the year on microfinance.
In that spirit, I wanted to link to this excellent Guardian podcast on microfinance, which popularizes the key issues in coming up with an answer to whether microfinance help reduce poverty. The podcast features host Madeleine Bunting, academics Ha-Joon Chang and David Roodman, as well as CARE International’s Ajaz Khan and SKS Microfinance founder Vikram Akula.
Esther Duflo, First Development Economist Ever? (Updated) (Updated)
From an article on Esther Duflo by
The Guardian‘sIPS News republished by The Guardian:“Doing her PhD at MIT, she was one of the first doctoral students to apply economics to development, linking the two, at a time when there were few university faculties devoted to the subject.”
I don’t mean to add to the considerable amount of snark (see here, for example) but… Really? In the first development economics class I ever took, back in the late 1990s, I was taught that the first article on development economics was Paul Rosenstein-Rodan’s “Problems of Industrialization of Eastern and Southeastern Europe,” which was published in the Economic Journal in 1943.
Could this mean that Esther Duflo was one of the first doctoral students to apply economics to development at MIT?
Even that is unlikely: the first development economics class I ever took was taught by Jean-Louis Arcand, who received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1991.
(Update: A community coordinator at The Guardian Global Development emailed me to draw my attention to the fact that this was originally a story by IPS News, which The Guardian republished.)
(Update: The author of the story comments on how the original story was quickly corrected on the website.)