If you like Charter Schools, you're gonna love Charter Cities.

[Octafish]

9. Hong Kong in Honduras

Is how The Economist put it:

Hong Kong in Honduras

An ambitious development project aims to pull a Central American country out of its economic misery. Can it work?

Dec 10th 2011

EXCERPT...

The Honduran regions are modelled on a concept called “charter cities” developed by Paul Romer, an economics professor at New York University. The principle is simple: take a piece of uninhabited land big enough for a city of several million, govern it by well-tried rules and let those who like the idea move there. The aim is to replicate the success of such places as Hong Kong, not as colonial outposts but as models of development.

Mr Romer is best known for his insights about technology, not as a constitutional theorist. But the project stems naturally from his research, chiefly the “new growth theory” that he helped develop in the 1990s. This adds ideas—particularly technological know-how—to the inputs of land, labour and capital that in traditional economic theory are needed for growth. More recently he has focused on the rules of open science and governance systems, which help people to deal with each other and think up ideas.

Today his main interest is “meta-rules”: how to move from bad rules, which keep people in poverty, to the sort that lets them thrive. These, he reckons, matter just as much as the better-studied questions around technological change. “What types of mechanisms will allow developing countries to copy the rules that work well in the rest of the world?” he asks.

SNIP...

A clean slate allows government authorities to experiment with laws and governance or copy those that have worked elsewhere, says Mr Romer. A further spin-off, potentially of great interest to rich countries such as America struggling with illegal migration, is that the new entity's open door gives the huddled masses an alternative: instead of risking their lives on perilous journeys to cross borders illegally, they can move legally to a charter city.

CONTINUED...

http://www.economist.com/node/21541392

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