CAMBRIDGE — Assume you knew nothing about a particular low-income country except the following facts. Its annual income per capita in 2020 was just $509, the seventh lowest in the world.

CAMBRIDGE — Assume you knew nothing about a particular low-income country except the following facts. Its annual income per capita in 2020 was just $509, the seventh lowest in the world.

CAMBRIDGE — The concept of environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting standards has gone mainstream. Major Wall Street firms have adopted ESG standards as a guide to responsible investment, compelling the thousands of corporations in which they invest to do so as well.

CAMBRIDGE — Over the past 60 years, some development gaps across countries have narrowed impressively. But others have persisted.

CAMBRIDGE — Mark Twain purportedly said that “History never repeats itself, but it rhymes”. Typically, however, what rhymes is not the underlying historical facts but the narratives we construct around them.

CAMBRIDGE — Suppose you are a policymaker in a developing economy. Your country’s income per capita is a fraction of that in the United States, Western Europe, or Japan.

CAMBRIDGE — If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, the old adage goes.

CAMBRIDGE — Economics could advance enormously if it relaxed one of its most precious assumptions: Methodological individualism, or the idea that any explanation needs to be related to individuals making sensible decisions.

CAMBRIDGE  —  Poor countries are cheap. In 2019, a dollar could buy more than twice as much in Argentina, Morocco, South Africa and Thailand as it could in the United States.