Anne Krueger Reflects on 50 Years of Rent-Seeking, Trade, and Economic Development

Ideas of India

Today my guest is Anne O Krueger. She is a Senior Fellow at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and the Herald L. and Caroline Ritch Emeritus Professor of Sciences and Humanities in the Economics Department at Stanford University. She served World Bank’s Chief Economist from 1982 to 1986, and the first deputy managing director at the IMF from 2001 to 2006. We talked about her famous 1974 paper “The Political Economy of a Rent Seeking Society” on its 50th anniversary, her experience understanding the license permit raj system in India, the 1991 trade liberalization, the Washington consensus, decline of the WTO, the new protectionism in the US, reforming Argentina and much more.

Recorded May 17th, 2024.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

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Timestamps

(00:00:00) - Intro (00:01:24) - Rent-Seeking in Turkey and India

(00:10:49) - Professional Influences (00:15:35) - South Korean Miracle (00:18:53) - Korea vs. India (00:26:19) - Import Substitution and Rent (00:29:15) - Turning Around the World Bank (00:38:59) - The Krueger Consensus (00:42:18) - Africa

(00:45:39) - India's 1991 Reforms

(00:50:52) - World Trade Organization

(00:53:53) - United States and Free Trade

(01:02:14) - License Permit Raj in the US

(01:04:36) - International Monetary Fund

(01:06:47) - Hope for Milei and Argentina

(01:11:30) - Looking Back on Success

(01:13:31) - Outro