The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf |
| Posted: 28 Sep 2012 05:17 PM PDT Every Leader is an Artist: How the world's greatest artists can make you a more creative leader Every leader, the authors believe, is an artist for the simple fact that in order to lead, one has to be creative. This creativity may take various forms. The authors outline several areas where the leader and the artist overlap in their dealings with the people around them. These include imagination, authenticity and individuality and engagement because both leader and artist have to engage an audience. Communications is another. Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic: How microlending lost its way The author is of the view that microfinance, or micro loans, will not help the poor as long as maximising profits is the aim. Exorbitant interest rates, aggressive collection practices can, and has, resulted in child labour, forced prostitution and suicide. He outlines the reforms needed to make it work. Leaders Make the Future: Ten new leadership skills for an uncertain world How good are you at turning challenges into opportunities? Author Bob Johansen deals with two new forces that are shaping the future – people 15 years and younger who grew up in a digital world, and the second is cloud-served super-computing, which will enable rich new forms of connection, collaboration and commerce. |
| Posted: 28 Sep 2012 05:15 PM PDT His ideas represent a welcome change at a time when this area of economics is hardly mentioned despite development remaining a big challenge today Evidence-based Development Economics: Essays in Honor of Sanjaya Lall DEVELOPMENT economics has seen better times. At its height in the 1960s and 1970s, names like Arthur Lewis, Walt Rostow, Gunnar Myrdal and Albert Hirschman were household names in the economics profession. But while development has remained as big a challenge since, this area of economics is hardly mentioned today. The recent publication of the book Evidenced-based Development Economics, edited by Carlo Pietrobelli and Rajah Rasiah, therefore represents a welcome change. This book honours the life and work of Sanjaya Lall, a giant among development economists whose work covers diverse but critical areas of development. The editors classify his work into four areas – the role of multinationals, industrial policies, acquisition of technological capabilities, and the notion of competitiveness. Each area has been the subject of intense research and intellectual debate. Four essays are written for each area, which, with an introductory chapter on Lall's work, makes a total of 17 chapters in the book. Within the broad ambit of these areas, contributors dealt with a wide array of topics, ranging from international comparisons to specific case studies, from industrial powerhouses to less-developed nations, and from theory to empirical analysis. The role of institutions and governance, currently receiving particular emphasis as being critical for economic growth, is evident everywhere in the book. That of the state, an area of intense debate between proponents of neoliberalism and statism, is also on display. These essays by eminent economists make for a rich discourse on development and have something for everyone interested in the economics of development. As befitting a book of this kind, the views expressed by the many contributors were largely consistent with those of the honouree himself. These views, according to the editors, were his abhorrence of "the neo-liberal siege of development economics", aversion to the use of mathematics by "mathematical economists who neither had the understanding nor the feel for development economics", and the importance of evidence in the study of development economics. Thus Ha-Joon Chang wrote of the failure of the international trading system to lift poor nations from the throes of underdevelopment. The use of mathematics in the chapters has been extremely restrained, consisting mainly of tabulations and charts rather than elaborate mathematical models. And the use of evidence is pervasive; the book itself has the word "evidence" in its title. These views deserve some comment. The view that neoliberalism is wrong when it comes to development is enjoying great currency after the global financial crisis of 2008 savaged its principal proponents/practitioners. The contest between it and the alternative development paradigm is sometimes seen as one between neoliberal ideologues and those whose arguments are grounded on evidence. In reality, this contrast is nowhere as sharp. For one thing, ideologues exist in both camps. And the use of evidence is not exclusive to either of them. Indeed the same evidence can be used to defend opposing positions. There is no better example of this than in the now famous volume The East Asian Miracle published by the World Bank in 1993. The same set of data which underpinned this study was used by neoliberals to support their argument that it was liberalisation reform that produced stellar East Asian growth, and by supporters of government intervention to highlight the role of the state as the real source of growth. The World Bank itself, in efforts to bridge this divide, took the middle path of espousing market-friendly government intervention using the same data set. Evidence, then, can be all things to all people. Rare indeed is the ideologue who does not support his/her position with a measure of supporting "evidence". In as much as one has to agree with Lall's view about the excessive reliance of economics on mathematics, with its image of precision in a discipline that is anything but – it was reportedly Einstein who remarked that "not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted" – that does not mean mathematics has no place in the field of development economics. Economists from Robert Solow onwards have made major contributions to explaining economic growth through mathematical growth models. And even Schumpeter's evolutionary growth theory, about which Nelson wrote in this volume, has its mathematical manifestation. We should also remember that it was Stiglitz's highly mathematical work on information asymmetry that led him to doubt the existence of the invisible hand and his belief that there is a proactive role for the state in development. It makes no sense to throw out the baby with the bath water. What really matters, then, is the judicious use of qualitative and quantitative approaches to analyse the challenges of development. This area of economics is certainly big enough to require all available analytical tools to be used. One would hope that readers of this volume, which is sympathetic to the approach that Lall himself preferred, do not come away with a binary view of how development should be viewed. |
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