All of Jeffrey Mason's Comments + Replies

Yeah, I think trying to account for the dynamic effects of a significant natural resource endowment is not always easy, and neither is successfully making the transition from exporting unprocessed resources to doing more processing and other activities further up the value chain domestically. 

That being said, I do think the China-West decoupling is an opportunity for some countries to start making that transition, especially places rich in critical minerals. And the same can be said with regard to the nearshoring/friendlyshoring trend in manufacturing. 

Great post, thanks for taking the time to put this together. 

One thing I would add on to your argument in Section 4 is the work of Gollin, Jedwab, and Vollrath (blog, paper) on "urbanization without industrialization." What they document is that there are essentially two types of urbanization -- resource-led and industrialization-led. In the former, you see a higher share of the population going into low value-added services, what they call "consumption cities". This is especially true in much of Sub-Saharan Africa, with the result being rapidly growi... (read more)

Here's a corrective: https://twitter.com/JeffJMason/status/1511663114701484035?t=MoQZV653AZ_K1f2-WVJl7g&s=19

Unfortunately I can't do anything about where it shows up. Elon needs to get working on that edit button.

CCI's recommendation for charter cities is that it would be best to develop the initial infrastructure buildout of a charter city with private capital rather than with public resources, the idea being that a private developer will be more responsive to market forces and take a long-term view of their investment. So this is one type of cost, let's call them infrastructure costs. 

The second set of costs are the resources dedicated to creating and implementing the governance innovation. This is drafting and negotiating legislation or a concession agreeme... (read more)

It's interesting to me that  your takeaway is that pushing for governance innovation is cheaper in existing polities rather than newly created polities. If your definition of "cheaper" factors in the cost of building new cities, then I get your point. I think there are good reasons to discount that cost that are discussed in the report, but regardless, do you think there is something unique about German institutional arrangements that allows for cities to better overcome collective action problems? 

Cities in the US and most (all?) developing coun... (read more)