Development
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Rwanda’s Clean Cooking Challenge: Can Community Action Make the Difference?
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Asteria’s hands tremble as she strikes a match, the small flame flickering before catching onto the lump of charcoal. Her youngest daughter, Keza, stands nearby, rubbing her eyes and coughing as the smoke curls toward the low roof of their kitchen. Asteria has been cooking this way for as long…
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The True Cost of Free Parking: A Conversation with Henry Grabar
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Henry Grabar is the author of Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. His book examines how parking shapes Americans’ lives through day-to-day interactions such as violence over a parking spot to its role in affordable housing development. Paved Paradise questions whether parking is the most efficient use of space…
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Effective Recovery as a Path for Progressive Development
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Rimjhim Agrawal is a first year MPP student at Harris School of Public Policy and a Graduate Assistant at the University of Chicago with the Dean of Students Office. India faces rising threats due to natural and anthropological hazards owing to its unique geo-climatic conditions, growing climate change concerns, and…
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The UN’s “Sustainable Development Goals” is a Misnomer
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How do countries pursue socioeconomic development in a sustainable and equitable way? This question has received considerable attention, more so with the COVID-19 pandemic bringing about discussion of a green (economic) recovery. The United Nations formulated 17 Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 to provide a framework for global development, ranging…
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Evading the Taxman: The Effects of Perceived Influence
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Death may be unavoidable, but taxes? Not so much. An estimated $430 billion per year evades capture from tax collecting regimes worldwide. Developing countries are disproportionately harmed by tax evasion, with individual country losses equal to about half of their public health budgets. Generally speaking, tax evasion is any deliberate behavior to avoid…
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An interview with the former head of NATO: defense policy for students
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The following is an edited transcript of part of an interview conducted by Thomas Krasnican and Nick Paraiso, first-year students at the Harris School of Public Policy for their UC3P original podcast series, Thank You For Your Service. The full interview can be found here or at their iTunes page.…
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La democracia paga: nueva evidenca sobre su impacto en el crecimiento económico
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Es tentador ser escépticos sobre la relación causal entre democracia y crecimiento económico, especialmente con ejemplos como China, el eclipse de la primavera árabe o el aumento del populismo en Europa y Estados Unidos. Sin embargo, nueva evidencia empírica muestra que la democratización aumenta el PIB per cápita entre 20…
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The Older, the Better: Aging Nations in the Automation Era
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In 1938, Alvin Hansen—the “American Keynes”—introduced a phrase that would form the basis of worry for policymakers in developed nations the world over. In the face of plunging birth rates and ever-increasing life expectancies, OECD nations were soon to face a “secular stagnation,” with waves of retirees withdrawing from both…
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Connecting the Disconnected: How Technology Can Accelerate Human Progress
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It is impossible to understate the impact that information and communication technology (ICT) has had on the social and political environment of the 21st century. Scholars have argued that improvements in ICT lead to significant economic growth—in part, by development assistance programs aimed at connecting people to the internet. This…
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Incentive Structures, Central Banks, and Economic Policies: A Conversation with Raghuram Rajan
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Raghuram Rajan is the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He is also the Vice-Chairman of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). From September 2013 to September 2016, he was the 23rd Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. Prior…
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The Lefts, Mexico, and Latin America: A Conversation with Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas
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Biography: Mr. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano is the son of late Mexican President and Mexican Revolutionary General, Lázaro Cárdenas del Río. He has been a Mexican Senator, Governor of the State of Michoacán, and the first democratically-elected Mayor of Mexico City. In 1988 he split with the PRI and launched the…