The World’s Sanitation Gap

A production possibilities graph can display the land, labor and capital underutilization that inadequate sanitation creates and indicate a constrained GDP.

Why a Hungry Country Might Have Enough Food

Focusing on production and distribution, economists look at the role of markets and of government when they try to determine what causes and ends famines.

The Tax We Should Like

Among the least popular forms of taxation, property taxes are the most desirable because of their incentives, whom they target and their resilience.

When to Worry About Sovereign Debt

Comparing debt to GDP is like looking at a mortgage loan and household net worth. It can help us decide when a sovereign debt became too large.

A New Kind of Map Where Norway is Next to Peru

To grasp the huge size of the U.S. GDP we can identify countries that have similar nominal output to individual states like California and Brazil.

A Poaching Problem that Regulation Hasn’t Solved

The market solutions and regulatory approaches used to solve the problem of elephant poaching have not worked for wildlife conservation in Africa.

India’s Height Mystery

Long assumed to have a direct relationship, the connection between height and GDP becomes more complex when we compare India and Africa.

The Reversed Role of Chinese Deposit Insurance

While many nations have deposit Insurance and China will have theirs very soon, the quality and the confidence in different deposit insurance schemes vary.

A New Way to Rank the Worst Diseases

While death rates are a seemingly easy way to assess healthcare spending, other perspectives like DALYs could be better when we consider the tradeoffs.

The Vaccine Benefits That No One Talks About

With better school attendance and learning, and then higher work productivity, the positive externalities of childhood vaccination have an economic impact.