Ineffective governments with weak leadership are at the root of the problem. In democracies, repeated elections lead to short term policy choices.

Ineffective governments with weak leadership are at the root of the problem.

In contrast to Japan, however, Sweden simultaneously restructured the entire banking sector by closing down inefficient banks.

Some people ascribe the global collapse of reform efforts to a peculiarly ineffective collection of leaders.

Similarly, green initiatives will open new markets only if other nations subsidize inefficient technologies bought abroad. Thus, the real game becomes which nations get to suck up other nations tax financed subsidies.

It is not just that global supplies of resources are increasingly scarce, but also that supplies are increasingly falling into inefficient hands.

Similarly, green initiatives will open new markets only if other nations subsidize inefficient technologies bought abroad.

Those are very dirty fuels, made worse by inefficient traditional stoves designed to burn only wood and animal dung.

Moreover, a great deal of this aid is delivered in kind and for strategic reasons, often supporting ineffective and kleptocratic governments.

Generating sufficient political support to enact reforms that can survive the opposition of vested interests requires attempting to deregulate the entire economy simultaneously, not select industries, one by one. The key to eliminating inefficient, unproductive subsidies to minorities is to implement tax reductions for all.

Similarly, inefficient state banks far inferior to private banks even in Kazakhstan or Ukraine dominate the banking system.

They were extremely inefficient by modern standards, but when located where coal was cheap at pit heads, opened up a great expansion in coal mining by allowing mines to go deeper.

Most importantly, they inherited from the Soviet era bloated and inefficient public sectors, which they are finding hard to downsize and professionalize.

He dismantled decades of inefficient and ineffective government restraints on trade, investment, and entrepreneurship, unleashing more than a decade of the fastest economic growth in India's history.

The succession of financial crises that stained the 1990s had many and varied causes, but dysfunctional regulatory arrangements usually aggravated the effects. Each crisis exposed weak and ineffective legal frameworks (often deliberately maintained by politicians), inadequate and dispersed supervision, and forbearance policies that only an industry lobbyist could love.

But in many other situations, we would miss major sources of motivation and thus would adopt useless, if not counter productive, measures aimed at producing the outcomes we seek.

Apart from the resulting global inefficiency, this also creates a whole new raft of industry players that will keep pushing inefficient legislation, simply because it fills their coffers.

But a recent study commissioned by The Economistfound that a carbon tax would increase both government revenue and economic output primarily by replacing existing, inefficient energy subsidies.

And at the same time to scrap inefficient old planes, so that if they were otherwise to come back in the air, they would waste more oil, and block the uptake of efficient, new planes.

At the same time, smallholder farmers need easier access to markets to sell their crops for a fair price, rather than relying on expensive middlemen or inefficient government bodies.

Wherever demographic growth outstrips economic growth, the fault lies primarily with corrupt and inefficient regimes and the obstacles they put in the way of entrepreneurship and wealth creation.

But few people whether ordinary citizens or internationally oriented economists recognize that our seemingly weak and ineffectual multilateral institutions are the world s best hope for managing and democratizing the global market.

Obama should seize the initiative and make the meeting in Copenhagen next year not about bloated subsidies for inefficient technologies, but about lean investments in future breakthroughs.

In a fiscal crunch, the first spending cuts hit productive public investments, because governments prefer to protect current and often inefficient spending on public sector jobs and transfer payments to the private sector.

Rather than investing hundreds of billions of dollars in short term, ineffective cuts in CO2 emissions, we should be investing tens of billions in research, leaving our children and grandchildren with cheaper and cleaner energy.