Featured series 
Tag: Economics
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Nation & World
Looking at China’s role in Africa
China’s increasing influence in Africa is a double-edged sword that wields the potential for prosperity and despair.
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Nation & World
Chidambaram talks about ‘rich poor’ India
At 60 years old, India is a young nation. It is also a country that is both rich and poor.
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Nation & World
Nobel laureate Yunus gives Wiener Lecture
On Oct. 13, economist and microfinancing pioneer Muhammad Yunus stood in front of a cheering capacity crowd at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum. One year earlier, to the day, he had received the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize — news that Yunus said “exploded with happiness all over Bangladesh.”
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Nation & World
Newsmakers
It was announced Wednesday (Oct. 10) that the prestigious 2007 IZA Prize in Labor Economics goes to Harvard’s Richard B. Freeman. He was praised by the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Germany for “fundamental contributions that have monumentally shaped modern labor economics.”
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Nation & World
Wade hails ‘African renaissance’
His Excellency Abdoulaye Wade, president of the Republic of Senegal, visited Harvard last week (Sept. 27). Looking younger than his 81 years, he walked onto the stage at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum to the sound of a tama, a West African “talking drum” used to telegraph complex messages.
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Nation & World
Changes to system and self necessary for health reform
Major changes, including personal and market-based reforms, are needed in order to bring health coverage to every American, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt told an audience at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum on Tuesday (Sept. 25).
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Nation & World
State’s health care plan assessed
An architect of Massachusetts’ year-old experiment with universal health coverage said Monday (Sept. 17) that because of the experiment 170,000 people have insurance today who otherwise would not, but that the problem may be bigger than initially thought.
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Nation & World
Great deals can be costly for country
In the relentless pursuit of a good deal, shoppers are elbowing citizens out of the public arena, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich warned Thursday evening during the inaugural Kennedy School Forum of the academic year.
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Nation & World
SAI names 2007 grant, internship recipients
The South Asia Initiative (SAI) recently announced its study grants for Harvard graduate and undergraduate students. Sixteen students have also received SAI internships.
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Nation & World
Harvard professor of economics awarded the John Bates Clark Medal
The American Economic Association has announced that Susan Athey, professor of economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) at Harvard University, is the 2007 recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal.
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Nation & World
French PM: Cooperation is the key
French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said the world now stands at a major crossroads, but that acting together the United States and Europe could lead the way in solving economic imbalances, ethnic and religious tensions, and the threat to the planet’s natural resources.
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Nation & World
High-deductible health plans are linked to fewer ER visits
Patients who switched to high-deductible health plans went to the emergency department 10 percent less than patients who remained in traditional plans, according to a new study by the Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention (of Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care). The study, published in the March 14 Journal of the American…
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Nation & World
Fryer awarded Sloan Award
Assistant Professor of Economics Roland Fryer Jr. recently received the prestigious Sloan Award in the field of economics.
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Nation & World
Economics in the apple heartland
A Harvard doctoral student has traveled to the wild apple’s home in the mountains of Central Asia to lend a hand to an international nonprofit working with local apple farmers to improve how they grow, harvest, and sell their crops. Plamen Nikolov, a first-year Ph.D. student in health economics, has designed an assessment survey and…
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Nation & World
Orangutan research yields conservation dividends
The population of the orangutan, one of humankind’s closest animal relatives, has declined with human expansion. The orangutan population declined by 97 percent in the 20th century and over 90 percent of their rainforest habitat has been destroyed. The factors contributing to that decline – illegal logging, conversion of forestland to agriculture, and hunting to…
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Nation & World
Poor fall behind in birth control
Modern contraception has come a long way in the past 20 years, what with diaphragms, hormones, implants, intrauterine devices, condoms, spermicides, and sterilization. But the boom in birth control has been a bust for the poorest women in the world.
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Nation & World
Enel makes $5 million gift to Environmental Economics Program
In recognition of the continued growth and influence exhibited by the Environmental Economics Program at Harvard University, Enel, a progressive Italian corporation involved in energy production worldwide, will make a gift of $5 million to establish The Enel Endowment for Environmental Economics. The gift was announced during a signing ceremony Tuesday (Feb. 6) at Harvard’s…
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Nation & World
Seven deadly sins on collision course with market forces
Using the seven deadly sins to examine corporate social responsibility, Kennedy School Professor Herman “Dutch” Leonard explained that today’s market-based economy exploits behavior that is deeply embedded in man’s evolutionary history.
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Nation & World
Innovative HBS ‘immersion’ programs flourish
One of the most enduring questions in school is not about the timeless concerns, like the origin of the universe. It’s about passing time: What did you do on your vacation? That simple (and fraught) question applies even to Harvard Business School (HBS), which for nearly a hundred years has been peopled by future captains…
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Nation & World
HBS models look for new markets while serving the global poor
At $55 a copy, “Business Solutions for the Global Poor” (John Wiley & Sons, 2007) won’t be a hot seller in what economists call the base of the pyramid (BOP). That’s the informal, localized, and little-known stratum of the global market in which 80 percent of humanity – living on an average of $700 a…
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Nation & World
Richard Musgrave, renowned pioneer of public finance, dies at 96
Richard A. Musgrave, widely regarded as the founder of modern public finance and an adviser on fiscal policy and taxation to governments from Washington to Bogotá to Tokyo, died Monday (Jan. 15) in Santa Cruz, Calif.
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Nation & World
Microsoft’s Ballmer pulls out the stops at HBS talk
The 24th richest person in the world made a visit to the Harvard Business School (HBS) last week (Dec. 7), and gave an audience of 700 advice on how to…
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Nation & World
Newsmakers
Harvard University graduate students Satoru Takahashi and Gernot Wagner were recently selected by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as two of 50 outstanding research participants to attend the second Lindau Meeting in Economic Sciences. The meeting, held in Lindau, Germany, Aug. 16-19, welcomed winners of the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in memory…
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Nation & World
Deep-sea sediments could safely store man-made carbon dioxide
An innovative solution for the man-made carbon dioxide fouling our skies could rest far beneath the surface of the ocean, say scientists at Harvard University. They’ve found that deep-sea sediments could provide a virtually unlimited and permanent reservoir for this gas that has been a primary driver of global climate change in recent decades, and…
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Nation & World
Beckert tracks cotton trail
Sven Beckert, a professor of history with an expertise in 19th century America, is hoping to understand the roots of the global economic ties that bind the world today by…
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Nation & World
Study finds vaccines boost the economies of poor countries
A study determined that previous measurements of the benefits of immunization have generally underestimated their economic value by focusing solely on health-related impacts such as averted illnesses, hospitalizations, deaths, disability,…