Building socially and economically sustainable business models in Africa: Energy for Development

It was September 2012, and the Energy for Development (E4D) team was returning from their first visit to Kitonyoni, an off-grid, rural market district in Makueni County, Kenya. An hour into the flight, they were discussing why so many rural electrification projects in developing countries tend to fail and fall into disrepair. Determined not to […]

Can we sustain an inclusive EU monetary system? Overcoming design failure and a look at the Eurozone 2018

Last night, Professor Domenico Siniscalco (Vice Chairman of Morgan Stanley) gave his views on ‘The Eurozone 2018: what should we expect ten years after Lehman Brother’s collapse?’ The overarching theme of the lecture was tied to system design failure and how European leaders would sustain a political vision for an inclusive monetary union despite huge discrepancies […]

Singapore A*STAR: Designing a World-Class Innovation Ecosystem

Over twenty years, Singapore has transformed itself from an entrepôt economy to one driven by knowledge and innovation. This important transition has resulted from strategic investment by the government, in science, technology and medicine, enabling it to improve its position in the global value chain and overcome its size limitations to become Asia’s ‘innovation capital’ […]

Is 2% enough or is time for basic income? Reforms to make India’s ‘Invisible Hand’ more visible (LSE Review of Books)

How do you ensure the distribution of wealth in one of the world’s poorest countries, when it has one of the highest number of billionaires in the world? An interesting intervention by the Government of India was revealed by the World Economic Forum today… When corporation tax and tax breaks for corporate philanthropy are not enough to […]

‘Saving Economics from the Economists': A Tribute to the Late Ronald Coase

Another tribute to the British economist and Nobel Laureate, Ronald Coase who died this week at the tender age of 102. Best known for his seminal contributions to the fields of management, law and economics, in particular: ‘The Nature of the Firm’ (1937), in which he introduced the concept of transaction costs to explain the […]

Political Innovation in Patri-Dishes: Building a Start-up Sector for Government

Two hundred nautical miles from the US coastline, purposefully located outside the ‘exclusive economic zone’ – the UN-prescribed area over which a state has special rights – eccentric tech billionaire, Peter Thiel and the grandson of Nobel prize-winning economist, Milton Friedman are sowing the seeds for a movement which if successful, could threaten the very […]