 Featured Research The Atlas online - a powerful interactive tool of the published Atlas of Economic Complexity - has launched several new dynamic features that identify product diversification options for more than 100 countries. The Atlas online shows products exported by any given country, while also suggesting products a country could develop in order to fuel its economic growth. The Atlas online can also answer questions such as: How has a country's trade evolved over time? What are the drivers of export growth? Which new industries are likely to emerge in a given geography? Which are likely to disappear? The Atlas is continually evolving with new data and features to help users analyze economic growth and development. Explore >> |
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Billions of dollars have been spent to "build capacity" in South Sudan, the world's newest country. Emerging from a half-century of brutal civil war, South Sudan presents a complex challenge: how to create a country from scratch? But in response, foreign development agencies have utilized a largely standard approach. Despite countless training workshops, reforms, and a large corps of foreign technical assistants, there is an absence of real change, and South Sudan now "looks like a state" but performs as anything but. Greg Larson, Peter Biar Ajak, and Lant Pritchett argue that the orthodox approach to state building and capacity building is profoundly insufficient for fragile post-conflict contexts. Such complex challenges demand innovative approaches that go beyond importing "best practice" solutions. The authors explore how one such approach, Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA), could be a disruptive innovator for building state capability. Read more >>
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Can protests cause political change, or are they merely symptoms of underlying shifts in policy preferences? In a new paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, David Yanagizawa-Drott and co-authors investigate the effects of the nation-wide Tea Party rallies in the US in 2009. The paper shows that increased attendance due to good weather had significant consequences for the subsequent local strength of the movement, increased public support for Tea Party positions, and led to more Republican votes in the 2010 midterm elections. Policy-making was also affected, as incumbents responded to large protests in their district by voting more conservatively in Congress. Together the results show how protests can build political movements to affect policy making and that they do so by influencing political views rather than solely through the revelation of existing political preferences. Read paper | Media coverage
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