Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

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Today is January 18th, 2010, and my guest is Michael Spence, a senior fellow at Stanford

University's Hoover Institution, the chair of the Commission on Growth and Development,

and the 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Mike, welcome to Econ Talk.

I'm delighted to be with you, Russ.

I want to start with your work on the Commission of Growth and Development. It started in 2006. Give us a

little background to start with on what its mission was and how it's unfolded.

Well, I think the mission had really two parts. One was the feeling on the part of the people

who eventually became part of the Commission that the importance of growth has been

an enabler of the achievement of a number of objectives, poverty reduction, and a lot of the

NBG's had been sort of law. People were focusing on trying to solve important problems that people

care about in the developing world, but many of them are pretty difficult to deal with without the

tailwind of growth behind you. So that was one of the, it was never meant to be negative with

respect who had been very important achievements that had been made in the areas of education,

health, and other things. So I think of it as complementary to that. The other thing is that,

you know, since the Washington consensus which came together in the around 1990s, maybe 1990s,

there's been a lot of experience accumulated in the developing world. NBG had accelerated,

China had been accelerated earlier and been going very rapidly, and growth had turned up in a

...