I’ll opine that this reference doesn’t seem as positive as Mark had me thinking. In particular, I assumed that they would say something to support Mark’s claim that “I don’t think my estimates of growth are substantially different from the average economist” and they did not.
Additionally, I’ll note that their criticism that “charter cities are unlikely to hold the key to sustained growth in developing countries for the very good reason that the internal political compulsions the charter is intended to hold at bay often have a way of biting back” seems like a poor reason not to invest in more charter city experiments. Duflo and Bannerjee seem to be drawing this conclusion merely on Romer’s one failed experiment and it’s not at all clear from that that all charter city efforts must be doomed to fail in the same way. Even if most failed in that way, if you could setup a significant fraction of charter cities well such that a significant fraction of charter cities did generate significant growth, that would likely be very much worth doing despite not being the result 100% of the time.
I’ll opine that this reference doesn’t seem as positive as Mark had me thinking. In particular, I assumed that they would say something to support Mark’s claim that “I don’t think my estimates of growth are substantially different from the average economist” and they did not.
Additionally, I’ll note that their criticism that “charter cities are unlikely to hold the key to sustained growth in developing countries for the very good reason that the internal political compulsions the charter is intended to hold at bay often have a way of biting back” seems like a poor reason not to invest in more charter city experiments. Duflo and Bannerjee seem to be drawing this conclusion merely on Romer’s one failed experiment and it’s not at all clear from that that all charter city efforts must be doomed to fail in the same way. Even if most failed in that way, if you could setup a significant fraction of charter cities well such that a significant fraction of charter cities did generate significant growth, that would likely be very much worth doing despite not being the result 100% of the time.