Federalism & Inequality, Part Two

In my last post on this topic, I described an ideal system of federalism and its advantages and disadvantages. One of the concerns that progressives often have about this kind of federalism, which I wish to take seriously, is that it will lead to a growing gap between the incomes of rich and poor regions [...]

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Federalism & Inequality, Part One

Constitutional debates swirling around the PPACA’s individual mandate have much to do with federalism. The core issue the Supreme Court is addressing is whether the federal government has essentially unlimited authority in economic policy, or whether they are yet some areas of economic policy-making (such as whether to compel commerce) exclusive to the states. As [...]

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Financial Liberalization: Is It Really Risky for Developing Countries?

Since the East Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, a consensus among even free-market economists has been developing: financial liberalization for developing countries usually don’t make sense. The financial crisis of 2008 and the ongoing Eurozone crisis have only fortified this consensus. The mainstream economic position seems to be that, at least for developing [...]

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Land-Use Regulation and Growth

I want to piggy-back here on Mark’s great post on urban planning and the poor. I’ve been playing around with some state-level data on local land-use regulations and cost of living. The last decade in the U.S. has been one of very slow productivity growth. As a result, fast-growing states tend to be those with [...]

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Stiglitz on Deregulation and the Rich

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz argued recently that both the economic downturn of the last two years and the looming debt crisis are the fault of “a powerful ideology—the belief in free and unfettered markets,” whose “30-year ascendance” has “brought the world to the brink of economic ruin.” As an economist, I can’t hold a [...]

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Liberty as Amenity: Freedom, Migration, and Growth

Is liberty an “amenity” that people find attractive? We know that people do not necessarily tend to vote for liberty, in part because they are politically ignorant or even irrational, but when it comes to where they choose to live, people can be expected to pay close attention to how the laws in different places [...]

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Rearranging the Timing of Economic Growth

Interesting piece on Robert Barro in today’s Telegraph.  Money quotes: On the stimulus package: Turning to the $600bn (£373bn) to $800bn US package, he added it was “mainly a waste of money”. Stimulus programmes, he said, offer little more than “rearranging the timing” of economic growth. “Possibly you could make an argument that it’s worth [...]

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A Deficit-Neutral Plan to Slash Unemployment

While the U.S. economy has been officially out of recession for a while and growing at a decent clip (1.8% at a seasonally adjusted annual rate in the first quarter of this year, 3.1% in the last quarter of 2010 – see chart), unemployment remains very unusually high, 9.0% in April 2011 (seasonally adjusted), compared [...]

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The Future of Free Cities, Part 1

I am currently blogging from Roatán, Honduras, where I am participating in the “Future of Free Cities” conference, sponsored by Universidad Francisco Marroquín. The conference is about the economic and political preconditions for the establishment of free-enterprise zones in developing countries, as well as the internal governance of these territories. In his opening talk last [...]

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Regional Inequality

The latest Economist has an interesting feature on inequalities among regions within countries. The article compares countries on their ranges in GDP per head (the ratio of richest region to poorest). Thus, we get charts like the following: But range is an extremely crude concept for measuring inequality. In the U.S., the District of Columbia [...]

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