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Today’s guest is Arvind Panagariya of Columbia University. We discuss his book, Free Trade and Prosperity: How Openness Helps Developing Countries Grow Richer and Combat Poverty.

Free Trade and Prosperity offers the first full-scale defense of pro-free-trade policies with developing countries at its center. Arvind Panagariya, a professor at Columbia University and former top economic advisor to the government of India, supplies a historically informed analysis of many longstanding but flawed arguments for protection. He starts with an insightful overview of the positive case for free trade, and then closely examines the various contentions of protectionists. One protectionist argument is that “infant” industries need time to grow and become competitive, and thus should be sheltered. Other arguments are that emerging markets are especially prone to coordination failures, they are in need of diversification of their production structures, and they suffer from market imperfections. The panoply of protectionist arguments, including those for import substitution industrialization, fails when subject to close logical and empirical scrutiny.

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Today’s guest is Robert Krol of California State University. Our topic is a recent policy paper he wrote for The Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University entitled Can we Build our way out of Urban Traffic Congestion?

This paper examines the impact of highway expansion on congestion. Because highway expansion lowers travel times, expanded highways attract additional vehicle traffic—so-called induced travel. The empirical evidence indicates that the magnitude of induced travel is economically significant. Some researchers find cases where, despite highway expansion, congestion changes very little owing to high levels of induced travel. These results suggest that costly highway expansion will increase access, which is beneficial to a community, but highway expansion is generally an inefficient solution to the high time costs of urban congestion. Instead, variable tolling of some or all lanes could manage traffic flows efficiently and reduce congestion.

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Today’s guest is Vlad Tarko of Dickinson College. We discuss the life and work of Elinor Ostrom, the 2009 winner of the Nobel Prize in economics. Vlad is the author of Elinor Ostrom: An intellectual biography.

We discuss Elinor Ostrom’s work on polycentric governance, the management of common-pool resources, and policing. We also discuss the continuing work scholars are doing in this research area, including Vlad’s new book Public Governance and the Classical-Liberal Perspective: Political Economy Foundations co-authored with Paul Dragos Aligica and Pete Boettke.

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