Development Roast Giving international development a proper roasting

By: Lykke E. Andersen* A phobia is an irrational fear of something. We all suffer from phobias of some kind. My worst phobia is arachnophobia, which is one of the reasons I love living in the (almost) safe haven of La Paz. Instead of trying to confront and overcome my …

By: Lykke E. Andersen* Max Roser, who created and maintains Our World In Data at the University of Oxford, complains that we never see such a headline in the newspapers, although, on average, this would have been an accurate title every single day during the last 25 years.

By: Lykke E. Andersen* Today is the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, and I wanted to share some data from the latest Bolivian Population Census (2012), which was unusual, because it included questions about disabilities for the first time. According to this census, disability is not that common in …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …