"Whatever one thinks of China’s political system, these (economic, social, and climate achievements) are the hallmarks not of a failing state, but of a society whose people are, in many respects, flourishing as never before."

From @KaiserKuo's fantastic essay. Link in replies. Here's the full essay: theideasletter.org/essay/the-grea…

One of my main issues with Western discourse on China is that it often assumes liberal democracy is the only path to state legitimacy, and the model every society around the world should adopt.

China has built legitimacy differently—through delivering economic development. There are of course lots of important critical questions we should ask regarding governance in China: for example, is less censorship and more pluralism desirable?

But, please, don't hold up Western liberal democracy as the beacon of light.

The course I teach at Cambridge has become exorbitantly expensive and is inaccessible for most people.

So I've decided to share the entire reading list with the public — here, via this thread.

My course is called "Development Economics" and consists of 8 lectures. 🧵

NEW 🧵: Should industrial policy target manufacturing or services?

It should target both, but focus more on manufacturing as it remains the backbone of productivity growth and innovation. First, let's not dismiss the growing ability of services to drive productivity growth and trade.

In particular, we are seeing economies of scale more often in services that use digital technology or are themselves digitalized (e.g. Netflix and Spotify).

This article on the "manufacturing delusion" in The Economist gets some things right but many things wrong.

Here's a thread on what I see as the shortcomings of the article. I'm using a lot of evidence from my book, The Future of the Factory, which I'll link in at the end. /1

https://twitter.com/COdendahl/status/1680180097494446081

First, some of the data is dubious. The claim that the world has gone through deindustrialization is controversial. A recent paper finds that, rather than global deindustrialization, there's been a relocation of manufacturing to (primarily) China. /2

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Talk of deglobalization and reshoring of supply chains has hit a high. But is reshoring actually accelerating?

A thread 🧵. 1/6 This piece by the FT is a great example of how reading the fine print on supply chain and reshoring articles is important. It gives the impression that reshoring is accelerating, citing a survey by Make UK, the manufacturers' organization in the UK. 2/6

ft.com/content/8127db…

1) If you would like to learn more about labour challenges in Ethiopia's factories, Vincent Hardy and I just published a paper on this in @AfrAfJournal: doi.org/10.1093/afraf/…. You can request a free version here: repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/28….

Summary follows in this thread 👇 2) This has been quite some time in the making. Lots of time spent in factories in Ethiopia. Interviews with workers, managers, and policymakers.