Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations - Hardcover

Raymond Fisman; Edward Miguel

3.76

378 ratings by Goodreads

9780691134543: Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691134545 ISBN 13: 9780691134543

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2008

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Meet the economic gangster. He's the United Nations diplomat who double-parks his Mercedes on New York City streets at rush hour because the cops can’t touch him--he has diplomatic immunity. He’s the Chinese smuggler who dodges tariffs by magically transforming frozen chickens into frozen turkeys. The dictator, the warlord, the unscrupulous bureaucrat who bilks the developing world of billions in aid. The calculating crook who views stealing and murder as just another part of his business strategy. And, in the wrong set of circumstances, he might just be you.

In Economic Gangsters, Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel take readers into the secretive, chaotic, and brutal worlds inhabited by these lawless and violent thugs. Join these two sleuthing economists as they follow the foreign aid money trail into the grasping hands of corrupt governments and shady underworld characters. Spend time with ingenious black marketeers as they game the international system. Follow the steep rise and fall of stock prices of companies with unseemly connections to Indonesia’s former dictator. See for yourself what rainfall has to do with witch killings in Tanzania--and more.

Fisman and Miguel use economics to get inside the heads of these "gangsters," and propose solutions that can make a difference to the world’s poor--including cash infusions to defuse violence in times of drought, and steering the World Bank away from aid programs most susceptible to corruption.

Take an entertaining walk on the dark side of global economic development with Economic Gangsters.

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From the Back Cover:

"I already knew Fisman and Miguel were the best and the brightest in the new generation of development economists. Now I know they are great writers--and great detectives. They find ingenious ways to get inside the issues of corruption and violence that leave behind the tired analyses of the past. It's a lively tale that nobody concerned about world poverty or violence can afford to miss."--William Easterly, author ofThe White Man's Burden

"Economic Gangsters reveals the important connections between poverty, crime, and corruption, helping us to see what a small and intertwined world we live in."--Dan Ariely, author ofPredictably Irrational

"Economic Gangsters is a fascinating exploration of the dark side of economic development. Two of the world's most creative young economists use their remarkable talents for economic sleuthing to study violence, corruption, and poverty in the most unexpected ways. Subjected to their genius, seemingly inconsequential events (like New York City parking tickets and Suharto's catching a cold) become potent tools in understanding how the world really works. Rarely has a book on economics been this fun and this important."--Steven D. Levitt, coauthor of Freakonomics

"Those who love to pontificate, unconstrained by data, about the nature of human evil, will hate this book. It takes on corruption, murder, and civil wars, and shows us, step by step, how economic methods, creatively used, can help us find relevant data in unexpected places, data that makes it possible to offer rigorous (and sometimes surprising) answers to questions that, hitherto, had been consigned to the realm of pure speculation."--Abhijit Banerjee, director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

About the Author:

Raymond Fisman is the Lambert Family Professor of Social Enterprise and research director of the Social Enterprise Program at Columbia Business School. He is a columnist for Slate. Edward Miguel is associate professor of economics and director of the Center of Evaluations for Global Action at the University of California, Berkeley.

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