 Featured News How dire is the air pollution problem in India? According to the most recent data from India's Central Pollution Control Board, the 2010 average for respirable particulate matter concentration across 180 cities was six times what the World Health Organization considers safe and twice India's own national standards. In this op-ed for the New York Times, EPoD co-director Rohini Pande and MIT's Michael Greenstone estimate that the 200 million people who live in Indian cities would lose an average of 3.3 years of life because of the high particulate matter concentrations. Pande and Greenstone examine the current system of regulations and suggest policy changes that would allow India to more efficiently regulate pollution. Read more >>
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 Featured Publication
First proposed by David Ricardo in the 19th century, the law of comparative advantage states that countries should specialize in their industries with the highest relative productivity. New research from Ricardo Hausmann, Cesar Hidalgo, Daniel Stock and Muhammed Yildirim extends Ricardian models to include measures of "implied comparative advantage," based on the relatedness of industries and locations. They find that implied comparative advantage is a strong predictor of revealed comparative advantage, including in cases when a country is not yet active in an industry. These findings incorporate the approach of Hidalgo et al. (2007) and Bahar et al. (2014), where implied comparative advantage exploits similarities between technological endowments of locations (the Producer Space), and similarities between technological requirements of industries (the Product Space). Their model also produces significant predictions using employment, payroll and establishment location data for the US, Chile and India, suggesting that patterns of implied comparative advantage exist on a regional level as well. Read more >>
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 Featured PublicationThe intellectually hard question about government produced basic education in South Asia is easily posed: How can it be this awful? How did it get this awful? How does it stay this awful and why are there not effective pressures for improvement? In new research, Lant Pritchett explores how the modern economics of organizations applies to basic education. The research shows that the typical 'top down' (at the national or provincial level) nature of education systems is completely at odds with the structure of basic education suggested by analysis of its characteristics as a 'thick' activity. Pritchett also examines the role of global isomorphism on enrollment and inputs on emphasizing system expansion to the near complete exclusion of quality. Read more >>
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