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Leadership and Growth : Commission on Growth and DevelopmentIn May 2008, the commission on growth and development (the growth commission) issued its report entitled 'the growth report'. In it the commission attempted to distill what had been learned in the past two decades, from experience and academic and policy research, about strategies and policies that produced sustained high growth in developing countries. It became clear in the course of the work that politics, leadership, and political economy (the interaction of economic and political forces and choices) were centrally important ingredients in the story. Dealing with the politics and the interaction of political and economic forces is a work in progress in research, an important one. Given this breadth, one of the editors' roles is to focus the reader's attention on what they take to be common issues across these chapters. These common problems are fourfold: (1) promoting national unity; (2) building good, solid institutions; (3) choosing innovative and localized policies; and (4) creating political consensus for long-run policy implementation. This report represent an excellent first step toward understanding the role of leadership in generating economic growth, and the author hope that they generate ideas and lead to new research on the problem of leadership in economic growth.
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Some Thoughts on Making Long-term Forecasts for the World EconomyCountries and international organizations working on longer-range development issues depend on long-term quantitative projections and scenario analysis. Such forecasting has become increasingly challenging, thanks to the rapid pace of globalization, technological progress, the interplay among them, and enhanced connectivity among people. As a result, seemingly isolated events can quickly lead to wide-ranging and lasting regional or even global consequences. This paper examines the problem of long-term economic forecasting in the face of increased complexity and uncertainty. With the benefit of hindsight, it scrutinizes past long-term qualitative and quantitative projections for the 1990s in order to draw lessons on how an institution can and should conduct long-term forecasting and policy analysis. The main conclusions are that policy makers and researchers across the world urgently need to see the big picture if they are to deal with the specific challenges and opportunities they will face over the long term as economies and global linkages undergo major structural changes under conditions of considerable uncertainty and volatility. Global institutions need to have strong research programs that work in close collaboration with other international organizations, academic centers, and independent experts on important long-term development issues ("blue sky" issues) and megatrends. These institutions need to build on their comparative strengths and form teams of in-house researchers and global experts who work on state-of-the-art models related to globalization, technological progress and innovations, climate change, demographic shifts, population, and labor force quality and their policy implications at both the global and country levels. Researchers should be encouraged to consider how global challenges such as financial crises, climate change, and infectious diseases can lead to breaks in economic trends and regime change and how such breaks affect economic activity. Alternative scenarios need to be created that incorporate the views of contrarian forecasters, including forecasts of possible shocks.
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U.S. and Them : The Geography of Academic ResearchUsing a database of 76,046 empirical
 economics papers published between 1985 and 2004 in the top
 202 economics journals, the authors report two associations.
 First, per-capita research output on a given country
 increases with the country's per capita gross domestic
 product (GDP). Regressions controlling for data availability
 and quality in the country, indicators of governance and the
 use of English yield an estimated research-GDP elasticity of
 0.37; surprisingly, the United States (US) is not an outlier
 in the production of empirical research. Second, papers
 written about the US are far more likely to be published in
 the top five economics journals, even after the quality of
 research has been partially controlled for through
 fixed-effects for the authors' institutional
 affiliations; the estimates suggest that papers on the US
 are 2.6 percentage points more likely to be published in the
 top-five journals. This is a large effect because only 1.5
 percent of all papers written about countries other than the
 US are published in the top-five journals. The authors
 speculate about the interpretations of these facts, and
 invite further analysis and additions to the public release
 of the database that accompanies this paper.