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 …
Read More »Procrastination and Public Policy
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 …
Read More »Road blog No. 4: Traffic accidents in Bolivia have tripled since 2000
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 …
Read More »Road Blog No. 3: On the opportunity costs of road closures and construction delays
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 …
Read More »Road blog No. 2: Bad roads are debt traps as well as death traps
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 …
Read More »Road blog No. 1: Murderous road signs
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 …
Read More »Chasing a moving target: 100% coverage of water and sanitation in Bolivia by 2025
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 …
Read More »Death penalty versus castration: A thought experiment
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, …
Read More »Are we inadvertently doing something good for the environment?
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 …
Read More »Equal pay for unequal work: A gender analysis of productivity at INESAD
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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