Bulletin October 2007

IN THIS ISSUE...

The Colonial Secretary, the farmers and the growth of a country
Why did South African farmers in the 1840s suddenly decide to irrigate once barren land, invest in state-of-the-art ploughing equipment, and grow thousands of tonnes more crops? It may seem a dry question best left to agricultural historians, but CEPR Researcher Liam Brunt believes the answer is crucial to understanding which factors allow economic development to take off.

Does increasing the time reduce the crime?
Francesco Drago, Roberto Galbiati and Pietro Vertova use the event of a mass amnesty, instituted in Italy in 2006, to test just how strong the deterrent effect is for particular individuals; and how it changes for offenders who have already served a long prison sentence.

Offshoring and wages back home
Globalization often gets the blame for squeezing the wages of the lowest-paid, as unskilled jobs are 'offshored,' and increasing the rewards of the highly-skilled workers whose talents are in demand in the new hi-tech, interconnected global economy. According to a new paper by CEPR Researchers Karolina Ekholm and Karen Helene Ulltveit-Moe, however, the true influence of globalization on the make-up of the workforce is much more complex.

'One billion euros' sounds a lot, in any language
EU citizens have the right to communicate with its institutions in the language of their choice; and its regulations and decisions must be translated into all of the EU's official languages before they become valid, at a cost of more than €1bn a year. CEPR Researchers Jan Fidrmuc and Shlomo Weber and their co-author, Victor Ginsburgh, set aside fraught questions of national pride, and analyse data about the linguistic abilities of Europe's citizens, to identify the optimal set of official languages for the new EU.