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Podcast: New Books in Economics
Episode: Mai Hassan, "Regime Threats and State Solutions: Bureaucratic Loyalty and Embeddedness in Kenya" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
Description: When trying to understand how to help countries escape poverty, economists initially focused on macro topics like inflation, government deficits, trade balances, and capital inflows. Later there was a shift in focus to institutions, looking at whether and how competitive elections, strong legal systems, and other features facilitated investment and growth. More recently micro policy has become a new focus, with experimentalists conducting randomized trials to figure out whether or how much specific policies like de-worming, malaria bednets, or clean cooking stoves helped or why they might fail.But regardless of whether a country is a democracy...