Jacob Christensen

• Academic Ranking of World Universities – 2008
  (tags: university rankings academic)
• FT.com | The Economists’ Forum | Pranab Bardhan – What does this authoritarian moment mean for developing countries?
  But the relationship between authoritarianism or democracy and development is not so simple. Authoritarianism is neither necessary nor sufficient for economic development. That it is not necessary is illustrated not only by today’s industrial democracies, but by scattered cases of recent development success: Costa Rica, Botswana, and now India. That it is not sufficient is amply evident from disastrous authoritarian regimes in Africa and elsewhere.
  (tags: economics politics development democracy)
• NBER – Is the Washington Consensus Dead?
  We find evidence that a specific treatment, liberalizing tariffs on imported capital and intermediate goods, did lead to faster GDP growth, and by a margin consistent with theory (about 1 percentage point per annum). Endogeneity problems are considered and other observations are consistent with the proposed mechanism: changes to other tariffs, e.g. on consumption goods, though collinear with general tariffs reforms, are more weakly correlated with growth outcomes; and the treatment and control groups display different behavior of investment prices and quantities, and capital flows.
  (tags: trade globalisation economics research)

…I’m still alive. Well, sort of: Catching a nasty cold while I’m supposed to be busy packing and getting rid of stuff is not particularly funny. And the weather up here is truly awful – it feels more like November than August.

Meanwhile in Denmark:

1. Roskilde Bank has folded and had to be rescued by the Central Bank of Denmark. It’s the first time since Landmandsbanken folded in 1922 that the Central Bank has had to intervene directly in this way, but the banking sector could be in for an interesting couple of years.
2. The government presented its proposal for the 2009 budget. This time, negotiations could get interesting because the economy is either overheating or about the get hit by the international housing and banking jitters. And remember that Danes have a lot of exotic loans.
3. TV2 Denmark presents another bad result for the first half of 2008. The government wants to sell the thing: Would you buy it?

And in Sweden:

1. SvT screens “Ashes to Ashes”, the follow-up to the weird “Life on Mars”, but warns us not to watch the series as the BBC only sells a vandalised version overseas. And then corporations complain that things get leaked to file-share sites…
2. The FRA act (aka Lex Orwell) still haunts the government.