When calculating the cost of Turkish membership for the incumbent members, one must appreciate that this process is highly speculative. Not only Turkey, but also the EU are evolving and changing constantly. In addition, one cannot know with certainty what the rules concerning the budget will be...

Since its launch in 1990, the Human Development Index (HDI) has been an important marker of attempts to broaden measures of progress and serves multiple functions for academics and policymakers, as well as activists. This paper reviews the contributions of the human development approach and, in...

The Arab Spring constitutes perhaps the most far-reaching political and economic transition since the end of communism in Europe. For too long, the economic aspirations of the people in the region, especially young people, have been ignored by leaders in Arab countries and abroad. Competing...

The World Development Report (WDR) has become such a fixture that it is easy to forget the circumstances under which it was born and the Bank's motivation for producing such a report at that time. In the first chapter of this essay, the authors provide a brief background on the circumstances of...

The policy advice given by economists in international institutions is influenced by their prior academic work. In my case, applied general equilibrium work resulted both in a belief in the necessity of decentralized markets and in a distrust of their ability to be stable. A career in...