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The article discusses the role that private sector businesses play in economic development in China, comparing it with the impact of state capitalism on China's economic conditions. An overview of Chinese industrial state-owned enterprises (SOEs), including their contribution to China's gross domestic product (GDP), is provided.

In recent weeks The Economist has been following and supporting the Copenhagen Consensus project--an unusual, ambitious and, some have argued, misguided attempt to set priorities among a range of ideas for improving the lives of people living in developing countries. During May 24th-28th, a panel of distinguished economists assembled in Copenhagen with the task of reviewing papers that addressed ten global challenges in order to propose possible responses. The drive behind this venture was supplied by Bjorn Lomborg, a figure of controversy around the world and especially in his native Denmark, where he is currently head of the Environmental Assessment Institute. Mr Lomborg's role, and the somewhat hubristic character of the undertaking, helped to draw attention to the event. This panel of eight included three Nobel prize-winners--Robert Fogel of the University of Chicago, Douglass North of Washington University in St Louis, and Vernon Smith of George Mason University. And the other five, who may collect a few more Nobels in due course, are also eminent in their respective fields--Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University, Bruno Frey of the University of Zurich, Justin Yifu Lin of Beijing University, Thomas Schelling of the University of Maryland, and Nancy Stokey of the University of Chicago. The list of global concerns included water and sanitation, HIV/AIDS, and the lack of treatments for diseases such as malaria. The panel was keen on trade reform, as you might expect, but the issue caused more disagreement than any of the other top four recommendations. The net global benefits of free trade, including the elimination of agricultural subsidies, would be enormous, according to the challenge-paper by Kym Anderson of the World Bank, maybe running into the trillions of dollars. Proposals for spending more on water and sanitation were approved, and ranked high, in places six to eight inclusive, with little to choose among them.

The article presents a paper published by British economist Ronald Coase which pointed out a glaring omission within companies that standard model of economics did not fit with what goes on within them. The paper has raised different questions including why market transactions emerged if firms exist to reduce transaction costs and what decides how the economy as a whole is organised. Also tackled is the management of ties between a firm and its stakeholders.

The article focuses on paper by Gerhard Toews of the New Economic School according to which regions where enemies of the people (EOTP) were jailed reaping economic benefits from forced migration and mentions economic development of prison sites.

The article offers business news briefs across the world as of March 7, 2020. International Air Transport Association has reported that outbreak of coronavirus has caused demand of airline passenger to grow at slowest. Economy of India has seen growth from revised figures of 2019. Officials of New York have reckoned that residents use plastic bags which clog landfills and entangled in trees.

The article reports on the economic conditions of India as of June 2019. Topics discussed include a paper published by Arvind Subramanian, India's former chief economist, in which he argues that India's growth figures have been greatly overstated, indicators that have slowed sharply since 2011-12, and Subramanian's criticism on a method of calculating from 2011-12 onwards.

Discusses a paper written by David Dollar and Aart Kraay of the World Bank, which explains why economic growth is good for those in poverty. Confrontation of several myths; Figures concerning economics and the poor; How the paper serves as an intelligent response to individuals that may perceive globalization as a negative force.

Examines the relationship between economic inequality and economic growth. Question of whether growth creates more or less equality; Problem of unequal societies growing faster or slower than equal ones; Reference to the paper related to income inequality by Klaus Deininger and Lyn Squire, published in the September 1996 issue of the journal "World Bank Economic Review"; Discussion of the paper related to income distribution by Roberto Perotti, published in the June 1996 issue of the "Journal of Economic Science."

This article focuses on United States Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, whose term ends in January 2006. At this year's meeting of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, a collection of central bankers and economists, distinguished even by the elevated standards of Jackson Hole, Wyoming paid tribute to Alan Greenspan's 18 years as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Greenspan gave warning that an unusually long period of economic stability might have encouraged investors to accept lower risk premiums and thus inflated the prices of assets, such as shares and homes. Moreover, Mr Greenspan, who until recently gave short shrift to the idea of a housing bubble in America, said that the property boom was an "imbalance" and that prices of homes could fall. He argued that in future the Fed will need to pay more attention to asset prices. Despite Mr Greenspan's caution, the gathering preferred to focus on his past performance. His chief examiners were Alan Blinder (a former vice-chairman of the Fed) and Ricardo Reis, both of Princeton University, whose paper concluded that "he has a legitimate claim to being the greatest central banker who ever lived". According to Messrs Blinder and Reis, the main ingredients of Mr Greenspan's tenure have been intellectual flexibility, scepticism of economic models and forecasts and a preference for discretion over formal policy rules such as inflation targeting. Mr Greenspan's Fed sees monetary policy as risk management, looking not only at the most likely path for the economy but at all the possible paths it might follow. In any case, Mr Greenspan's words of caution at Jackson Hole were surely an attempt to lean against the current housing boom. Perhaps he is showing more intellectual flexibility on how to respond to asset prices than Messrs Blinder and Reis give him credit for.

Discusses efforts to change methods for dealing with impoverished countries. Why the donation of aid for economic reform seems not to work; The use of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) that uses a participatory process of consultation with all groups of society; PRSP exchange of a long list of specific goals for more general ones; Outlook.

The article focuses on a paper by researchers James Hamilton, Ethan Harris, Jan Hatzius, and Kenneth West, published by the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, which dealt with secular stagnation, a type of economic stagnation stemming from a lack of investment. Topics include if the U.S. is experiencing secular stagnation and the economic recovery of the U.S. after the global financial crisis.

The article focuses on researcher Marcella Alsan's paper "The Effect of the Tsetse Fly on African Development," published in a 2015 issue of "American Economic Review," which examines how the tsetse fly impacted where Africans were able to settle throughout history.

The article suggests that an effective response to the digital divide is to encourage the spread of mobile telephones. On March 14th, the United Nations will launch a "Digital Solidarity Fund" to finance projects that address "the uneven distribution and use of new information and communication technologies" and "enable excluded people and countries to enter the new era of the information society". Fewer people in poor countries than in rich ones own computers and have access to the internet simply because they are too poor, are illiterate, or have other more pressing concerns, such as food, health care and security. Rather than trying to close the divide for the sake of it, the more sensible goal is to determine how best to use technology to promote bottom-up development. And the answer to that question turns out to be remarkably clear: by promoting the spread of mobile telephones. A new paper finds that mobile telephones raise long-term growth rates, that their impact is twice as big in developing nations as in developed ones, and that an extra ten telephones per 100 people in a typical developing country increases gross domestic product growth by 0.6 percentage points.

The article focuses on economic conditions in Antigua and Barbuda. Although Antigua escaped Hurricane Ivan back in September, its finance minister, Errol Cort, had devastation aplenty to deal with in his November 30, 2004, budget. When Baldwin Spencer's United Progressive Party won an election last March, it found the coffers empty--not just of cash, but of any papers to track it. Days before the poll, the prime minister's office was stripped of files detailing debt agreements and spending contracts, a parting kick from Lester Bird and his family's Antigua Labour Party--in office, with one short break, since 1951. Debt is 137% of gross domestic product. Cort's budget is unlikely to provoke unrest. Foreign investor Allen Stanford has now offered to pay for a library and a higher-education complex, write off $18.5 million in debt, set up a $3.7 million fund to help start-up businesses, and outsource building work to local contractors. In return, he will get a green light to buy eight square kilometers to build a $1.1 billion six-star resort with 1,000 staff.

The article offers policy suggestions for economic growth in developing countries. Over the past 15 years or so, economists have developed a long list of now-familiar remedies for developing countries hoping to grow their way to prosperity. This "Washington Consensus" includes the removal of trade protection and the introduction of deregulation, as well as fiscal and monetary discipline. Meanwhile, other economists have suggested that development depends not on specific policies but on "institutional" factors, such as a respect for property rights, which constrain the powers of the state. Two studies argue that institutional overhaul and broad economic reforms are not necessary to spur economic growth. In one of these papers, Edward Glaeser, a Harvard economist, and three co-authors question several prominent studies that treat institutions as a wellspring of development. Researchers at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government looked at 83 instances between 1957 and 1992 in which annual gross domestic product growth increased by at least two percentage points and the higher growth was sustained for at least eight years. These bursts of growth were not normally preceded by a big shift in policy, or by full-blown economic and political reforms--such as liberalisation or a move towards democracy. What struck the authors was the humble nature of the initial triggers of growth. These usually consist of nothing more than relaxing specific constraints on private activity.

If the campaign hype of his opponents is to be believed, Manmohan Singh, India's new prime minister, is taking control of a country well on its way to becoming an economic power. But Singh ascends to power at a time when some economists are starting to question how decisive his reforms in the 1990s actually were. In a recent paper, Dani Rodrik, of Harvard University and Arvind Subramanian, of the International Monetary Fund, argue that India's break with the past happened not in 1991 but in 1980. According to Rodrik and Subramanian, India owes its take-off not to Singh but to Indira Gandhi. When she returned to power in 1980, she stopped breathing populist fire, and sought instead to court the business constituency, whose political backing she craved. This shift in attitude, Rodrik and Subramanian claim, sent a powerful signal to India's cowed industrialists: India was now safe for capitalists to make money.

The article, the first of a series on the Copenhagen Consensus project, looks at financial instability. The severity and frequency of financial crises, especially the combined currency and banking collapses of the past decade, have made financial instability a scourge of our times, one that bears comparison with damage inflicted by famine and war. In a new paper for the Copenhagen Consensus, Barry Eichengreen, from the University of California, Berkeley, has reviewed the literature, attempted to count these costs, and to weigh them against the costs of a particular proposal for remedial action. The costs can be reckoned in stalled growth and stunted lives. The typical financial crisis claims 9% of GDP, and the worst crises, such as those recently afflicting Argentina and Indonesia, wiped out over 20% of GDP, a loss greater even than those endured as a result of the Great Depression. According to one authoritative study, the Asian financial crisis of 1997 pushed 22 million people in the region into poverty. For developing countries, currency crises are an important subset of financial crises. To grow fast, and keep growing quickly, countries need deep financial markets--and the best way to deepen financial markets, most economists agree, is to liberalise them.

Governments have limited resources for addressing the world's economic challenges. This week, Denmark's Environmental Assessment Institute, together with "The Economist", announced plans to ask some of the world's leading economic thinkers where, among all the projects that governments might undertake to make the world a better place, are the net returns to their efforts likely to be greatest. First, the institute assembled a panel of nine of the world's most distinguished economists. This panel will meet in Copenhagen in May to establish priorities for action on ten issues. The panel chose these issues from a much longer list drafted by the institute, drawn in turn from aims identified in various contexts by the United Nations and other international bodies. Then a series of distinguished experts in each field was commissioned to write a review paper on each issue and on actions that might feasibly be taken in response, with due emphasis on costs and benefits.

The author comments on the digital divide as a symptom of inequality, rather than the cause. The digital divide is almost always described in terms of the difference in the number of telephones, internet users or computers per head in rich and poor countries. But the difference in the availability of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is the focus of particular concern among policymakers, academics and non-governmental organisations. The far wider availability of ICTs in rich countries, goes the argument, will therefore enable the rich to get richer, while the poor are left behind. In short, not only is there a worrying "digital divide" between rich and poor, the divide is widening--with ominous consequences. But a new paper by two economists at the World Bank, Carsten Fink and Charles Kenny, questions the logic of this argument. The authors conclude that the divide's size and importance have been overstated, and that current trends suggest that it is actually shrinking, not growing--which means policies designed to "bridge the digital divide" may need rethinking. ICTs might have less impact on productivity in poor countries than in rich countries because of lower adoption levels. It is possible, for example, that a certain threshold level of adoption is required before the productivity benefits of ICTs kick in. The adoption of ICTs within poor countries may be hugely unequal, and limited to a relatively affluent minority, so that the digital divide within countries may grow even as the digital divide between countries shrinks. Moreover, rich countries with high penetration of ICTs may be more likely to do business online with other such countries, at the expense of poor countries. Well, perhaps, but it seems far more likely that access to ICTs will, overall, enlarge poor countries' trading opportunities. And as the authors suggest, growing access to ICTs will improve their plight.

When developing countries turn to economists for advice on trade, they are usually pointed towards David Ricardo. According to his law of comparative advantage, countries should specialise in whatever they are best at producing, leaving their trading partners to provide everything else. As Ricardo Hausmann and Dani Rodrik, two economists at Harvard University, put it in a recent paper, economic development is a haphazard process of 'self-discovery.' Bangladesh, for example, is good at exporting hats, having sold $175m-worth to America in 2000. And why did Pakistan, a country with a similar mix of land, labour and capital, export $130m-worth of bed-sheets to America in 2000 but a mere $700,000-worth of hats? Mr. Hausmann and Mr. Rodrik cite many examples of countries that have happened upon a lucrative export niche -- cut flowers from Colombia, software from India, footballs from Pakistan -- to which raw factor endowments give only the roughest of guides.

Asserts that economists do not know very much about the causes of economic growth. Disagreement among economists about how to foster economic growth; The paper `The Growth of Nations,' by Gregory Mankiw.

The article focuses on the newly formed Commonwealth of Independent States, which was launched by three Slav republics, Russia, Ukraine, and Belorussia, in the Belorussian capital, Minsk, on December 8, 1991. It has already done two valuable jobs. One was to provide the means of a quick, dignified death for Russia. The Commonwealth's other use has been to offer a forum for resolving, or at least discussing, the problems bequeathed by Russia to its successor states. A couple of the most pressing issues have already been settled, on paper anyway.