In the late 2000s, the fatal-accident rates of Chinese airlines were lower than those of airlines in Europe and the United States, even as Chinese carriers spent more and more hours in the sky. The culture of safety in China’s skies did not come from centuries of Confucian culture and respect for authority. It came from a decisive intervention that overhauled China’s aviation sector inside of a decade.

During the 1990s, China’s aviation rules failed to keep pace with the rapid growth and technical change in its airline industry. Travel within and abroad became more accessible but a lack of effective rules led to a series of fatal crashes between 1990 and 2002, leaving Chinese airlines with a reputation as some of the most dangerous in the world. China’s air-safety turnaround after 2002 illustrates the power of copying and implementing good rules.

Managers consider a fishery collapsed in a given year if the harvest from that year is less than 10 percent of the maximum recorded harvest. In 2003, roughly 27% of the world’s fisheries were collapsed. Should fisheries mismanagement continue apace, the collapsed share of world fisheries will grow even larger. One estimate from the journal Science suggests universal collapse as early as 2048.

A combination of improvements in fishing technology and unchecked access to fisheries led to this unfortunate outcome. Collapsed fisheries highlight the fact that sustainable growth and development rely on something more than just the power of technology. The ideas behind fishing nets and trawlers fit nicely into the category of technology, but there’s another category of ideas needed to ensure a sustainable catch: rules.

Because the conventional economic analysis of crime treats norms as exogenous, it may be missing much of the action on the front lines. Creative enforcement strategies — like those employed in Bogotá, New Dehli, and New York — don’t just change behavior. They change norms.

At the cinema – called Hemak Cheat – rows of shacks line the floor and stage of a former single-screen auditorium. One of its high walls is dramatically corroding from the steady flow of tik s’oeuy – literally, “dirty water”, or raw sewage – cascading down from another settlement on the roof. Hundreds of bats squeal constantly overhead, and the residents share the space with a large pile of their own garbage.

Jamaica could let its diaspora vote in its next election. Doing so may be its best hope for a healthier form of political competition then, and therefore for better policy now. It may be its only hope for moving away from the unstable trajectory created by bad policy and out-migration of its well educated citizens.

A working economy requires good formal and informal rules as well as an effective system of enforcement. The effective enforcement of laws and regulations feeds off of good informal rules, particularly the norm of lawful compliance even when the threat of punishment is not imminent. The absence of effective enforcement can erode this norm of compliance, leading to lawlessness. In this situation, the leaders of the lawless nation may be able to quickly turn things around if they are willing to partner with other governments.

In a recent working paper for the Center for Global Development, Stanford PhD candidate Aila Matanock analyzes several cases of shared governance in Melanesia. In particular, her analysis of the Solomon Islands illustrates the challenges and opportunities for shared governance.

Bjorn Harsman and John Quigley describe the success of Stockholm’s congestion pricing referendum in a recent paper. The adoption of congestion pricing there offers an interesting example of a meta-rule: a mechanism for innovation in the space of rules. To change traffic rules there, city officials employed a meta-rule based on the “try before you buy” strategy that firms use to enhance the credibility of their product claims. Instead of committing everyone to a big and permanent change, the officials let residents sample the new traffic rules for themselves during a finite trial period. By giving people a chance to try the new rules the officials won majority support for a previously unpopular idea.