Pete’s Development Corner
I made this page to be a place where I could gather odds and ends related to development economics. I don’t want to devote any time to it; it’s extraneous to Transrio. But for personal reasons I needed to semi-organize this stuff, put a neat bow around it, and move on.
Right after selling the business in 2001, and later when we were living in Bolivia, I toyed around with different ideas for my next job. I thought for awhile that development work might fit me. I even invested some money into the idea by attending “Eradicating Poverty through Profits” in San Francisco in 2004. While I loved the convention and learned a ton, it also made a big lightbulb go off: I don’t belong in that world.
Even so, new articles and books on the subject catch my eye. I try not to read much in this area, for reasons I’ve discussed. But sometimes I’ll see something so interesting I just can’t help myself. So here’s a collection of miscellaneous links & things I’ve run across, all having to do with that narrow slice of development economics which puts a value on business. I did these as a raw Word Outlines saved to HTML. Pretty basic. But if you’ve already drilled this far down into my blog, hopefully you’re past caring :-) … So here we go:
Two essays by Pete
The first one, “Oil & Water,” is about the inevitable chasm between business-thinking and development-thinking. I wrote it for the blog, but it doesn’t belong there, it belongs here. The second, “Globalization,” I wrote five or six years ago, but I still like it. The newer essay seems negative, the older one positive — I’m hoping that doesn’t mean I’m going downhill. Anyway, both together run three pages.
Five Good Books
I happen to have a little bookshelf on development economics. These particular five, however, I actually read. A book has to be pretty decent for that to happen. With brief descriptions, saying what it was I actually saw in them.
Development quotes & links
Three good articles, two good organizations, and three decent quotes. Annotated of course.
And elsewhere on this blog…
On the FAQ page “Why Argentina?” I link to the most recent Doing Business Rankings and Human Development Index Country Rankings, published by the World Bank and UNDP, respectively. Both of these are great resources to anyone interested in development.
