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How to Help the World’s Least Developed Countries: UNCTAD’s Deb Bhattacharya

7/20/10

Deb BhattacharyaThere are 49 countries in the world that the United Nations classifies as Least Developed Countries (LDCs). How does a country wind up on the list, and how is the international community working to help these countries develop? My guest this week is Debapriya Bhattacharya, currently a Special Advisor to the Secretary General of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), focusing on issues related to Least Developed Countries.

Deb begins by explaining how the official Least Developed Country list is defined. There are three criteria for inclusion, he explains. Obviously, poverty, as measured in per capita income, is one of them. A second is what Deb calls “human assets,” expressed in education and health indicators. And the third is a measure of economic vulnerability to natural or manmade disasters."Haiti is a classic example of how vulnerable these economies are,” Deb explains. “You get hit not only by man-made disasters, but also by natural exogenous shocks."

Paul Romer’s Bold New Idea for Charter Cities

4/26/10

Paul RomerThe planet's population will swell by two to three billion people over the next few decades. Where will all those people live? My guest on this week's Global Prosperity Wonkcast has a bold new idea. Paul Romer is a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, a non-resident fellow here at the Center for Global Development, and one of the world’s leading growth economists. He is proposing brand new cities—he calls them ‘charter cities’—built from the ground up with sound rules designed to promote swift development.

The two ideas at the heart of Paul's proposal are, first, that good rules are fundamental to development and, second, that new cities might be able to draw their rules, people, and land from different sources. He argues that inadequate property rights, legal systems, and other types of rules hold back development in poor countries. If the residents of a poor country could choose to live in a new city, governed by the rules of a well-functioning country, they might benefit enormously. If good rules are in place, Paul says, where that city is located doesn’t matter much.

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