Transparency and International Investor Behavior

In this new World Bank Policy Research Report, Moving for Prosperity: Global Migration and Labor Markets, Çağlar Özden attempts to address the tension between the academic research and the public discourse on migration by focusing on the economic evidence. The report suggests a labor market–oriented, economically motivated rationale as an alternative to the political opposition to migration. Global migration patterns lead to high concentrations of immigrants in certain places, industries, and occupations. These geographic and labor market concentrations of immigrants lead to increased anxiety, insecurity, and potentially significant short-term disruptions among native-born workers.

Understanding (and empathizing with) these legitimate economic concerns is critical to informed and effective policymaking. The goal should be to ease the costs of short-term dislocations of native-born workers and distribute more widely the economic benefits generated by labor mobility. Proactive interventions to ease the pain and share the gain from immigration are essential to avoid draconian restrictions on immigration that will hurt everybody. Ignoring the massive economic gains of immigration would be akin to leaving billions of hundred-dollar bills on the sidewalk.

Industrialization was never an accident but an outcome of a well- crafted industrial policy. Analyzing the capacity and limits of the (developmental) state in the industrialization process and in economic development in general, Murat Yülek’s new book, How Nations Succeed: Manufacturing, Trade, Industrial Policy, and Economic Development, sheds light on how today’s governments can design industrial policy and how they can identify strategic sectors to break out of Low and Middle Income Traps. Explaining technical concepts in understandable terms, the book introduces a stylized industrialization process in four stages and locates different countries on the process map. He illustrates how picking-the-winner type industrial policies –a controversial issue among the economists –have worked in different countries. It also discusses how industrial policy and science, technology and innovation policies should be sequenced for best results. As trade wars and (pre-mature) de-industrialization become the zeitgeist of today, the book shows the links between global (im)balances and economic development explaining export-led growth as well as import-led slowdowns.