Making Economics More Useful: How Technological Eclecticism Could Help

Keynes thought it would be “splendid” if economists became more like dentists. Disciplinary economics has instead become more like physics in focusing on concise, universal propositions verified through decisive tests. This focus, the author argues, limits the practical utility of the discipline because universal propositions form only a part of new policy recipes. The author further suggests that, as in engineering and medicine, developing economic recipes requires eclectic combinations of suggestive tests and judgment. Additionally, the author provides a detailed example of how a simulation model can help evaluate new policy combinations that affect the screening of loan applications.     

Migrant remittances and fertility

This study examines the role of migrants’ remittances in developing countries’ fertility transition. Employing an unbalanced panel of South Asian countries and controlling for various economic and socio-demographic factors, we find that remittances are significantly associated with a lower number of children born to women of childbearing age. This suggests the remittances’ substitution effect to be at play rather than the income effect, and may result from decreased need for children for financing the household’s future needs as well as from better access to healthcare and contraceptive methods available to migrant households. Remittances’ association with fertility appears to be more important than the transfer of fertility norms from migrants’ host countries. The monetary aspects of international migration may therefore be more important for the region’s demographic transition than social remittances.     

Stability or growth: The rich nations’ dilemma

The article discusses the economic difficulties from which the industrialized nations have been suffering for the past years giving special regard to the controversy as to what concept of economic policy should be adopted in order to overcome the present problems.     

Symmetric ignorance: The cost of anonymous lemons

Rules that restrict information required in negotiated private transactions have spurred a vast increase in the scope of anonymous financial markets, particularly in the United States. The subtle costs of the information-restricting rules raise questions about the social value of “completing” anonymous markets that would not naturally survive and did not historically exist.     

Making economics more useful: how technological eclecticism could help

ABSTRACT

Keynes thought it would be ‘splendid’ if economists became more like dentists. Disciplinary economics has instead become more like physics in focusing on concise, universal propositions verified through decisive tests. This focus, I argue, limits the practical utility of the discipline because universal propositions form only a part of new policy recipes. I further suggest that, as in engineering and medicine, developing economic recipes requires eclectic combinations of suggestive tests and judgement. Additionally, I offer a detailed example of how a simulation model can help evaluate new policy combinations that affect the screening of loan applications.     

A hybrid multi-attribute decision-making procedure for ranking project proposals: A historical data perspective

This paper develops a hybrid multiattribute decision-making methodology for ranking project proposals (PPs) through a judicious usage of historical data of completed projects to determine attribute weights, enabling elimination of problems associated with projected data such as cost and schedule overruns of real-world projects. The weights generated from data envelopment analysis are explicitly utilized for ranking PPs while allowing subjectivity to be ingeniously incorporated into the decision process. The new approach is implemented for ranking 25 PPs, and the rankings it yields are found indifferent to the decision maker's attitude, which ascertains the robustness of the ranking methodology.     

Imperfect Labor Mobility and Unemployment in LDCs: Reply

In a recent paper (Parai and Beladi 1997; PB hereafter), we have analyzed the implications of growth and trade policies for a small open economy facing imperfect labor mobility and unemployment of the Harris-Todaro variety. We have used the Casas (1984) specification of the labor immobility phenomenon for a Harris-Todaro type economy, and have shown that most of the results in Harris-Todaro framework remain unaltered even under imperfect labor mobility, provided that the elasticity of labor mobility parameter exceeds a critical minimum value. On the optimal tariff issue, Gilbert and Mikic (1997; GM hereafter) find our results counterconventional. In GM's view, the nonconventional result in PB is due to our simplification of the labor mobility specification given by Casas. In this note, we offer our response to GM's comments.