The first is an article by Iliana Olivié (The Guardian) about the importance of looking at rising inequality as the end of the MDGs draws near. Interestingly, you don’t (just) curb inequality by trying to cap the income of the rich, this seems to lead to capital flight or even brain drains. A broad range of interventions are recommended, ranging from investments in education, health, research and development, banking regulation, industrial policy and monetary policy (to cite Iliana).
The second is a recent post by Marcus Jenal. We’ve been working together on trying to understand the implications of the recent developments in complexity theory and systems thinking on economic development. In this post, Marcus explains some of the challenges that we face as development practitioners, especially with regards to the need of development projects to have clearly defined goals while complexity and systems theories all advocate against this approach. I commented on his post, so also take a look at that.
