By: Lykke E. Andersen* Despite my initial hesitations about going ahead with the 8th Bolivian Conference on Development Economics much too late and without any confirmed sponsors, I have to admit that the 8th BCDE conference, carried out at UPB-Cochabamba this week, was once again a big success, and that …
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Agnes Medinaceli Baldivieso* Most people try to avoid procrastination. However, I’m pretty sure that everyone has fallen into this pit, at least once. Of course, putting off things has its benefits from time to time (1). Some even think that procrastination is the fuel of creativity (2). Apparently Steve Job’s …
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By: Lykke E. Andersen* According to official statistics from the National Statistical Institute, the number of people injured in traffic accidents in Bolivia has more than tripled between 2000 and 2013 (the latest year for which data is available). Figure 1 shows the number of non-fatal traffic injuries rising from …
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By: Lykke E. Andersen* For more than a year now (since 20 July 2016), the road between Santa Barbara and Caranavi (on the primary road between La Paz and Rurrenabaque) has been closed from 7 am to 5 pm, Monday to Saturday, due to road construction activities. We didn’t know …
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By: Lykke E. Andersen* According to Nina and Arduz (2016), the density of roads in Bolivia is about 8 km per 100 km2 of territory, which is less than half the average density in Latin America and less than a third of the world average of 28 km/100 km2. By …
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By: Lykke E. Andersen* Academic research is rarely nauseating, and I did not expect to get sick to my stomach from a research project we have with Boston University called “Safeguarding Sustainable Development.” The project is simply trying to find out whether the social and environmental safeguards of the institutions …
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By: Lykke E. Andersen* Last month I participated in a very interesting workshop on water and sanitation in rural Bolivia organized by the Ministry of Environment and Water. I learned from the engineers and sociologists there that things are never as simple as economists tend to think. But as the …
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By: Lykke E. Andersen* Stories about sexual violence against girls and women are common in the Bolivian news, but recently the stories have escalated to such hideous levels that the Vice-President of Bolivia has announced a referendum on whether to re-institute life-in-prison and death penalty in Bolivia (1). For example, …
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By: Lykke E. Andersen* To celebrate Earth Day 2017, which is tomorrow, I would like to highlight the important findings of a paper by Campbell et al. published earlier this month in Nature (1). The paper documents, through the analysis of air trapped in ice from Antarctica, that the growth …
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By: Lykke E. Andersen* At INESAD there is no gender discrimination in salaries. But there ought to be. As I will show in this blog, women at INESAD are on average about four times more productive than men. Admittedly, it is a small sample. We are currently only six senior …
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Development Roast Giving international development a proper roasting