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Marc F. Bellemare Posts

Published January 23, 2011

On My Nightstand: Famine, Work, and Market Failures

Mao’s Great Famine, by Frank Dikötter. As a development economist working on food policy, I simply had to read this book after reading Pankaj Mishra’s review in The New Yorker. Dikötter, a historian at the University of Hong Kong, has exploited a new Chinese law which has opened up some of the Communist Party’s archives. With an estimated death toll of 45 million, the Chinese famine of 1958 has been one of the worst famines in history, the Chinese version of the Holocaust or the Gulag. This book illustrates the spectacular failings of centrally planned economies, but it is not for the faint of heart, as the final chapters discuss the many ways — including cannibalism — in which people survived. UPDATE: It turns out Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution has also been reading this book. Here is his review.

Continue readingOn My Nightstand: Famine, Work, and Market Failures
Published January 22, 2011

Is China the New Japan?

I grew up in the 1980s and the 1990s. Back then, cultural references to the superiority of the Japanese economic model where everywhere. Most of William Gibson’s Neuromancer takes place in Japan’s Chiba prefecture, which had become a suburb of Tokyo populated with expatriates much like New York or London are today. In John McTiernan’s “Die Hard,” a team of terrorists hijacks the Nakatomi Corporation’s office building in downtown Los Angeles in an effort to steal $640 million in bearer bonds. The first time I visited the United States on my own in 1996, I met people my age who were learning Japanese in college, “to do business with Japan.”

In short, if you grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, some part of your mind probably still equates “Japan” with “economic might.”

Continue readingIs China the New Japan?
Published January 22, 2011

Microfinance: The Conversation So Far

I started the year by blogging about microfinance, discussing the institution’s woes after coming across an article in the New York Times that did the same. A few days later, I snarkily posted about the good news being that microfinance research was not as bad as medical research.

I am not an expert on microfinance. The last time I conducted any kind of research on the topic was for my Masters thesis at the Université de Montréal, which I hope no one ever reads given how embarrassingly bad it was. My knowledge of the institution comes from reading working papers and journal articles on the topic, a module on which I teach each fall in my development seminar.

Consequently, a friend of my wife’s and mine who has been working in the microfinance industry for a while now took me to task and wrote a lengthy reply on Facebook to my initial posts. Given how insightful his detailed response was, I asked him if I could blog it, and he agreed under the condition that he remained anonymous. The five most important points he made in his response follow.

  1. The Opposition is Politically Driven
  2. The Evaluation Timeframe Matters,
  3. The Poor Deserve Financial Services
  4. Governments Need to Regulate the Industry
  5. Microfinance is Here to Stay

These five posts represent my very modest contribution — with the help of a friend — to the policy discussion surrounding microfinance. If you have an interest in the topic, I strongly encourage you to follow senior Center for Global Development senior fellow David Roodman’s blog, in which he shares his insights while writing a book on the impacts of microfinance. I have a feeling his book will be required reading in my development seminar when it comes out.