Words matter. These are the best Michael Spence Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
My mother was strong-willed, demanding, and very supportive all at the same time.
Productivity gains are vital to long-term growth because they typically translate into higher incomes, in turn boosting demand. That process takes time, of course – especially if, say, the initial recipients of increased income already have a high savings rate.
In economies with excess productive capacity, targeted investment can yield a double benefit, generating short-run demand and boosting growth and productivity thereafter.
Although everyone does benefit from lower-priced goods and services, people also care greatly about the chance to be productively employed and the quality of their work. Declining employment opportunities feel real and immediate; the rise in real incomes brought by lower prices does not.
China’s continued growth and rising household income are creating opportunities for lower-income economies in low-cost manufacturing.
Monetary policy should never have been expected to shift economies to a sustainably higher growth trajectory by itself.
Reforms aimed at increasing an economy’s flexibility are always hard – and even more so at a time of weak growth – because they require eliminating protections for vested interests in the short term for the sake of greater long-term prosperity.
Properly targeted public investment can do much to boost economic performance, generating aggregate demand quickly, fueling productivity growth by improving human capital, encouraging technological innovation, and spurring private-sector investment by increasing returns.
Whatever advantage Trump thinks he will gain by positioning the U.S. in opposition to its natural allies will be dwarfed by the losses.
Developing economies may not have much control over the headwinds that they face today, but that does not mean that they are powerless. Much can be done not just to sustain moderate growth but also to secure a more prosperous and resilient future.
The combination of a workable basic formula and the capacity to improve over time is what one hopes for in any aspect of society: business, government, the non-profit sector.
Digitally enabled supply chains initially increased efficiency and dramatically shortened lead times. Capital was mobile; labor, less so. Economic activity (production, research, design, etc.) moved to any accessible country or region that had relatively inexpensive labor and human capital.
It is a wonderful and unexpected honor to receive the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Receiving this prize with Joseph Stiglitz and George Akerlof, whose work I have learned from and admired, makes it even more gratifying.
During my Ph.D. program, I became interested in the informational structure of markets that turned into the work on signaling, which was the part of my early work that was recognized for the Nobel Prize, but it was not really a subject at the time.
On their own, tariff and trade barriers, if viewed as transitory negotiating tactics, will not significantly change global investment patterns or the structure of global supply chains and employment.
Globalization has redefined the competition for employment and incomes in the United States. Tradeoffs will have to be made between the two.
With external help, even the countries ravaged by World War II recovered.
For highly indebted governments, low interest rates are critical to keep debt levels sustainable and ease pressure to restructure debt and recapitalize banks. The shift to a high sovereign-debt-yield equilibrium would make it impossible to achieve fiscal balance.
All countries will eventually need to rebuild their growth models around digital technologies and the human capital that supports their deployment and expansion.
