- "In
2008, the year China hosts the Olympic Games, will be the best time
to make Renminbi convertible, Nobel Economics laureate and father
of the Euro Robert Mundell, said during his visit to China in May 2002."
(From South China Morning Post)
- Stanley
Fischer, the then First Deputy Managing Director of IMF described
the issues in solving the financial crisis in Asia (http://www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/2000/072600.htm.)
"While
contributing to crisis resolution is in creditors' collective interest,
each individual creditor has an incentive to block the settlement
for their own gain. The problem was nicely illustrated in the
movie Waking Ned Devine, as Steven Schwarcz of Duke Law School has
pointed out. A man with no heirs wins 6.7m in the Irish national
lottery and promptly dies of shock. The remaining 52 residents in
his village decide that one of them should pretend to be Ned, claim
the money and share out 130,000 of the prize money to each of them.
Everyone else simply has to vouch for the fake Ned to the lottery
inspectors. Unfortunately well it all depends on whose side you're
on one villager holds out for a much larger share, threatening to
expose the fraud if her demand is not met."
- The
Chronicle of higher education, From the issue dated December 6, 2002,
http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i15/15a03501.htm
had a discussion about the mismatch in students' effort in studying
and their teachers' expectation:
"The
conventional wisdom for success in college is that students should
simply do their homework. "The most commonly
prescribed amount [by professors] is
at least two hours of class preparation for every hour spent in the
classroom -- meaning 25 to 30 hours a week for a typical full-time
student. The idea is that students should consider college their full-time
job, and that class time and preparation should take about 40 hours
each week. That's long been the conventional wisdom."
- In his
letter to the editor of the Economist magazine (appeared in the December
5th 2002 issue), Professor Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University wrote:
"Clearly
borders are becoming beyond control (Survey of migration, November
2nd 2002 issue of Economist). Many less-developed countries have social
practices, political governance and economic prospects that fall far
short of what developed countries can offer, leaving no policy option
that can cut the outflow of skilled nationals. Developed countries
have the reverse problem; they cannot control the inflow of mostly
unskilled illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers. Civil-liberties activists,
human-rights groups and ethnic voters (who have increased to sizeable
numbers with past immigrations) will not allow draconian measures
against immigrants.
Thus, we need a seismic shift of immigration policy away from attempts
at curbing migration to coping with it. We also
need a World Migration Organisation that could put together an impartial
but complete documentation of the policies of different countries
toward migrants (legal and illegal, skilled and unskilled) and other
asylum-seekers. The contrast alone would propel others towards the
good practices of progressive countries. "
- In his
Lionel Robbins Lectures, which were put into a book Central Banking
in Theory and Practice (1998), Blinder, Alan S. said,
"...
one true test of whether a person is an economist
is how devoutly he or she lives by the principle of comparative advantage."
(p.1)
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