Siam News

Author: Arvind Subramanian, PIIE On 1 April 2013, the Indian Supreme Court dismissed the attempt by Novartis, a Swiss pharmaceutical company, to obtain patent protection for a new version of the leukaemia drug Glivec. The court made its decision on the grounds that the drug is not a new medicine, but an adjusted version of [...]

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Authors: Wolfgang Lutz, IIASA and Samir KC, IIASA Asia today is home to more than four billion people — more than 60 per cent of the total world population — yet its influence in world affairs remains disproportionately small. The reason for this imbalance is that, while influence on the world stage is partly a [...]

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Days after the death of one of China’s most famous practitioners of capitalist socialism, China Real Time talks to Hou Xiaoshuo, author of a timely book on the country’s successful village-level experiments in mixing the communist ethos with market economics. Measured on a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis that adjusts for price differences, China in [...]

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The Valve Corporation’s former economist-in-residence explained how a trendsetter in the video game industry can function without management.Imagine being a part of a company with no bosses, upper-level management, or HR where bonuses, hirings, and firings were all determined by peer consensus. Imagine a company like this going on to become one of the most successful in its space. This isn’t a joke: It’s the real story of video game developer and publisher, Valve Corporation.In an interview late last month with the Library of Economics and Liberty, Valve’s former economist-in-residence Yanis Varoufakis (that’s right, a video game company with a staff economist) described the flat management model behind the Seattle-based, 400-employee company that could be worth up

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Authors: Frank Jotzo, ANU, and Yongsheng Zhang, DRC China’s economic transformation is so rapid that around two decades from now, the country is likely to join the ranks of high-income societies, according to the joint report China 2030 by the Development Research Center and World Bank. Quality of life for most of its people is [...]

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So much for the revenge of the nerds. Research suggests high school popularity may set the stage for more success later in life.It turns out life may be a popularity contest, after all. Studies show that looks, and now high school popularity, may be reliable indicators for employees’ success at work.According to a study conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research, people who were viewed by their classmates as popular in high school earn 2% higher wages than their peers 35 years later. The study also found a 10% wage gap 40 years later between people ranked in the 20th percentile of popularity versus those ranked in the 80th percentile.The study uses the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study of students, which, The Wall Street Journal reports, has

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Authors: Peter Drysdale and Luke Hurst, ANU Africa’s low-income resource-rich nations are now at a fork in their road to development. Taking one turn will result in the resource curse wiping away the significant economic and political progress that has been made over the past decade; taking the other could result in the creation of [...]

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Author: John Gibson, University of Waikato There is a growing literature that uses sub-national data from China to measure trends in regional inequality. In their analysis they often ignore the fact that China’s local GDP per capita data cannot be interpreted in the way that economists would expect, by measuring value-added per resident. For most [...]

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