Darryl Mcleod

Fordham Department of Economics

Colombia Case Study

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A November 17th Wilson Center talk by Vice President Oscar Naranjo former director of Colombia’s National Police and member of the government team that negotiated the peace accord with the FARC. He speaks in Spanish but some interesting quotes are translated automatically if you open this link using Chrome …  More controversial is this 2013 Washington Post story on U.S. role in Colombia conflict…

Dealing with Impunity: there are two sides of the Colombian drug/violence problem.  One is gang violence in Colombia (now Central American and Mexico): the para military forces and FARC which recruited many poor young men and women in rural areas.  The other problem is the impunity of the wealthy exporters and managers that process and ship cocaine and other drugs to the United States.  Despite progress in ending the reign of the Cali Cartel and Pablo Escobar, as chronicled in NARCOS (on Netflix) the drug trade continues, as suggested by recent arrests in the LA Times September 15th    (Colombian leader of global drug ring extradited, charged in L.A.).  Note that the key was again extradition (charging suspects to U.S. courts). Why does this matter?

 

Argentina

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Folklore has Noble Laureate Simon Kuznets telling his students “there are four kinds of countries in the world: developed countries, undeveloped countries, Japan and Argentina” meaning Argentina is in a class by itself.  Though due to a war involving Malvinas Islands (Falklands) in terms of nuance, The Economist is not an entirely reliable source, the 100+ years of data is from reliable sources.      

Reporting Accurate Inflation

Note IMF spreadsheet has n/a for Argentina’s inflation rate.  This is due a remarkable turn of events where the government began reporting low inflation making it illegal for even private firms to report inflation above the official figures, which was almost always just below 10%.  In yet another twist of fate, Albert Cavallo was studying at economics at MIT during the “wrong inflation period” (he is the son of Domingo Calvo Argentina’s  Finance Minister during the currency board regime that ended in 2000 (when the Nestor and then Cristine Kirchner took over).   He and his Venezuela born mentor  Roberto Rigobon started the Billion Prices Project which uses online and cell phones to collect data on prices (as a check on country statistical offices).  The problem is the definition of real GDP, the government collects data on

 

References:

Cavallo, Alberto. “Online and official price indexes: Measuring Argentina’s inflation.” Journal of Monetary Economics 60, no. 2 (2013): 152-165.

Alberto Cavallo and Roberto Rigobon,  The Billion Prices Project: Using Online Prices for Measurement and Research Journal of Economic Perspectives , Spring 2016, Vol 30(2): 151-78

Download Paper

New data-gathering techniques, often referred to as “Big Data,” have the potential to improve statistics and empirical research in economics. This paper presents one example of how this can be achieved by using the vast number of online prices displayed on the web. We describe our work with the Billion Prices Project at MIT, and emphasize key lessons that can be used for both inflation measurement and some fundamental research questions in macro and international economics. In particular, we show how online prices can be used to construct daily price indexes in multiple countries and to avoid measurement biases that distort evidence of price stickiness and international relative price

Real Inflation Argentina

Inflacion Verdadera Venezuela (Beta)