Quotes
  1. "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)

  2. 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.)
  3. "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."

  4. 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."

  1. 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. "

  1. 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)