A glimpse of the future: charter cities

I’m intrigued by Paul Romer’s plan to create charter cities in developing world areas to try and jumpstart areas.

Weak institutions and bad rules are some of the most significant obstacles to economic growth in developing countries. Paul Romer, an economist known for his work on economic growth, has a plan to change that and recently resigned his tenured teaching position at Stanford to devote his full energies to the challenge.

“Moving from bad rules to better ones may be much harder than most economists have allowed.” Romer’s plan calls for the establishment of Hong Kong-like “charter cities,” special zones within developing countries with better rules and institutions.

Mainly it intrigues me because so many unintended consequences can be easily gameplayed out of this. I’m particularly intrigued and may fold some of his rhetoric into characters in Arctic Rising, who’re busy creating similar economic zones with seasteading…

Filed under the topic Tech on October 5th 2009 at 10:29 am. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.