John Quiggin is an Australian economist and professor at the University of Queensland. He has also held academic positions at the Australian National University and James Cook University. Best known for his work on utility theory, Quiggin is among the top 500 economists in the world according to...

International development NGOs (IDNGOs) have both flourished and been objects of cogent critique over the past twenty years. The populations and budgets of IDNGOs continue to grow even as concerns about accountability, quality, and cost persist. Meanwhile, major inroads have been made on...

China's remarkable economic growth is often attributed to strong government intervention that can mobilize large amounts of resources to clear any bottleneck to growth or institutional change. This approach is often referred to as the Beijing Consensus (BC) as compared to the Washington...

Countries in the developing world were led to believe that education would put them on the path to becoming modern economies'and they responded enthusiastically. Education for All was a powerful message that has led to a veritable transformation of schooling throughout the world

We are five years away from 2015, the year when the Millennium Development Goal of universal education is supposed to be achieved, and the school attendance numbers do look good. In many parts of both East and West Africa, and almost all of South Asia, school enrollment has grown rapidly, with...

Cities in the modern world are beginning to share some features with the city-states of millennia past. Now, as then, cities are important, even critical, to economic development. Unlike the walled cities that harbored flourishing trade in medieval Europe, today, cities by the thousands all...

Economic development increases the demand for energy. This is true for countries at all income levels, although as economic growth progresses, the demand tends to increase more in the low- and middle-income countries than in high-income ones. But energy remains a key ingredient for economic...

When government officials are involved in land transactions the scope for arbitrary decision making and corruption is large, and the land issue can turn into a political football among rival political parties