Dambisa Moyo’s new book, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa, has received a great deal of attention in the last few months. Moyo’s book is a must-read for any person interested in the question of why some countries are rich while others remain stagnant or poor.

Under modern ideological conditions, a national emergency produces a virtual free-for-all of policies, programs, and plans that expand the government’s power. This expansion leaves the public with altered political and ideological sensibilities. Efforts to rein in the government’s crisis-driven overreaching must concentrate, first, on affecting the public’s thinking about how the government ought to act during an emergency and, second, on changing the machinery of government so that ill-considered or poorly justified measures cannot be adopted so easily.

In the public sector, no tool adjusts spending to changing conditions. In the current recession, many states have decreased revenues, but little decreased spending has been seen. This pattern raises a difficult question: How do states correct for the inflexibility in spending cuts?

Why is it that some countries adopted growth enhancing institutions earlier than others during the early-modern period? We address this question through a comparative study of the evolution of French and Ottoman fiscal institutions.

In this working paper, Senior Research Fellow Jerry Brito and Andrew Perraut discuss the importance of mandatory transparency to improve performance in the public sector.

This working paper compares and contrasts two books that are intended as invitations to their respective disciplines: Berger‘s Invitation to Sociology and Thomas Mayer‘s Invitation to Economics (2009) and then sees what is common to both invitations concerning the subject matter to which understanding is hoped for.