reading week

do you remember when you were a student and at this time in the year you got a FULL WEEK to do all your accumulated readings? Oh, how much I miss that. Here it is what I will try to read in my non dedicated, crowded working week..

Where have all the Donors Gone? a paper on the neglected development issue of malnutrition and obesity in developing countries.  A silent health revolution? Health conditions in developing countries are becoming more like those in developed countries, with non-communicable diseases (NCDs) predominating and infectious diseases declining. And no one seems to aknowledge this, yet.

Did you know that “Agricultural productivity growth in sub-Saharan Africa has been a qualified success. Total factor productivity growth has increased rapidly since the early 1980s. By the early 2000s, average annual TFP growth was roughly four times faster than it had been 25 years earlier”? Did you even ever suspected that?  The decline and rise of agricultural productivity in Africa argues that “expenditures on agricultural R&D, along with the reform of macroeconomic and sectoral policies shaping agricultural incentives, have played a substantial role in explaining both the decline and the rise in agricultural productivity.” Sounds promising..

And finally,  the first chapter of Kanchan Chandra’s upcoming book on Ethnic Politics, which probably do not really deserve the bad reputation they seem to have. I wish I will have the time to read it in full. “The theoretical arguments challenge the conclusions of
previous theories according to which ethnic diversity and its analogs typically produce
regimes that are less stable, less democratic, less well-governed, less peaceful, poorer,
and marked by slower rates of economic growth than regimes in which the population is
ethnically homogeneous. Taking the possibility of change in ethnic identity into account,
these arguments show, dismantles the logics linking ethnic diversity to such negative
outcomes. Even more importantly, this book changes the questions that we can ask about the relationship between ethnicity, politics and economics.”