Profiles

That students are in the streets demonstrating against this pension reform suggests professors and politicians have failed to explain what economists call the lump-of-labor fallacy. Jobs are not fixed and do not depend exclusively on the supply of labor.

Corruption breeds poverty. That is the conclusion of the latest World Development Report, in which the World Bank cites "evidence that higher levels of corruption are associated with lower per capita income" (World Bank, 2002). The story told is that bribes raise the costs of doing business, so...

Scrooge came in the form of government last year. The company Bill Gates built into the planet's leading money machine is still the target of a federal probe and a senate inquiry. The charge: anti-competitive behavior.

Performance budgeting (PB) is the newest strategy to make the public sector work. Yet as with other similar strategies, PB is fundamentally flawed. Without a system of profit and loss, a bureaucracy not only has trouble motivating its employees; it can't determine the value of what they are doing...