Globalization: Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads

In my view, successful economic communication of facts in a useful way starts with an anecdote���about, say, Cosette���which is then followed by "Cosette's experiences are typical", and then the numbers. But that is not how we economists talk. So even the best of us do not... get the mindshare that our ideas and our expertise deserve: Stefanie Stantcheva: The Fog of Immigration: "Surveyed 22,500 native-born respondents from France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the UK, and the US. We concluded that much of the political debate about immigration takes place in a world of misinformation...

Doug Irwin: Trump���s Trade Policy Is An Exercise In Futility: "Yet for all the Sturm und Drang of his trade policy, the president is likely to end up being terribly disappointed by the results of his efforts...

It is also possible that harmonization, labor standards, investment measures, investor-state dispute settlement procedures, etc. will not empower but rather disempower "a different set of rent-seeking interests and politically well-connected firms". Certainly putting the US in the same basket as the EU as far as food health and safety is concerned would strengthen the left's hand inside the United States���and the Naderites frothing denunciations of the Codex Alimentarius were in bad faith. Rodrik's presumption that regulatory barriers are produced by good social democracy rather than bad rent-seeking has always seemed to me highly questionable: Dani Rodrik: What Do Trade Agreements Really Do?: "New (and often problematic) beyond-the-border features of current trade agreements... regulatory rules and harmonization...

Dan Drezner: Robert Gilpin, R.I.P.: "I never met Gilpin in person���in contrast to many colleagues, once he retired, he left the field for good. It���s my loss. I became enamored with his ideas while in graduate school... an excellent intellectual history of how realists thought about the politics of the world economy...

Brad Setser: Can Anyone Other than the U.S. Fund a Current Account Deficit These Days?: "To exaggerate a bit, the world may soon only have one borrower...

Barry Eichengreen and Poonam Gupta (2016): Managing Sudden Stops: "The recent reversal of capital flows to emerging markets has pointed up the continuing relevance of the sudden stop problem...

David Pilling: African economy: the limits of ���leapfrogging���: "The rapid spread of technology has raised hopes for Africa, but digital services cannot take the place of good governance...

An interesting paper saying that Glick and Rose's findings are not robust. I am generally pro-customs unions. I was taught when I was knee-high to a grasshopper that the Zollverein was a big deal. And I have always been impressed by the scale of cross-state trade in the U.S., which dwarfs cross-nation trade within Europe. But I may have to rethink���and I believe I certainly have to revise up my beliefs about how precisely these effects can be estimated: Douglas L. Campbell and Aleksandr Chentsov: Breaking Badly: The Currency Union Effect on Trade: "A key policy question is how much currency unions (CUs) affect trade...

Santiago Levy Algazi: Under-Rewarded Efforts: The Elusive Quest for Prosperity in Mexico: "Why has an economy that has done so many things right failed to grow fast?...

Encyclopedia of Chicago (1899): Mr. Dooley Explains Our "Common Hurtage": "In the late 1890s, Finley Peter Dunne's newspaper columns in Irish dialect brought to life a fictional Bridgeport bartender, Mr. Dooley...

Assessing the "China Shock": I enter into a conversation between Noah nd Larry to give my views:...

Caroline Roullier, Laure Benoit, Doyle B. McKey, and Vincent Lebot: Historical collections reveal patterns of diffusion of sweet potato in Oceania obscured by modern plant movements and recombination: "The history of sweet potato in the Pacific has long been an enigma...

Alberto Alesina, Armando Miano, and Stefanie Stantcheva: Misperceptions about Immigration and Support for Redistribution: "The debate on immigration is often based on misperceptions about the number and character of immigrants...

How, again, is Donald Trump supposed to win a breath-holding contest with an authoritarian r��gime that both controls its media and sees little downside in redirecting resources to cushion the impact on potentially noisy losers?: Paul Krugman: How to Lose a Trade War: "Trump���s declaration that 'trade wars are good, and easy to win' is an instant classic, right up there with Herbert Hoover���s 'prosperity is just around the corner'

But are we sure that our debts are in dollars? Would we know it if the big New York banks had been trying to boost their earnings by selling unhedged dollar puts, in the (probably correct) belief that if they all do this together they do not have a problem, the rest of us have a problem?: Paul Krugman: Opinion | Partying Like It���s 1998 - The New York Times: "Those of us who devoted a lot of time to understanding the Asian financial crisis two decades ago were wondering whether Turkey was going to stage a re-enactment. Sure enough...