Carlos Oya

SOAS academic, Professor of Political Economy of Development and HoD, Development Studies @soasdevelopment, Atletico Madrid fan @Atleti. RTs not endorsements

[Carlos Oya @estariade]

We are delighted to share our new article on wage comparisons between Chinese and other firms in Angola and Ethiopia, with a focus on manufacturing and infrastructure construction, product of years of field research and surveys. @FTSchaefer @WeiweiChen16 https://t.co/LrBhAetoGv

[Kyle Chan @kyleichan]

China is making a big push for outbound investment.

China is also building tools to hit back at countries it feels “have taken discriminatory actions against Chinese foreign investment”:

“First, in response to investment barriers related to trade or other obstacles to investment and business operations imposed by foreign countries or regions, the State Council’s commerce department may conduct investigations on its own or jointly with other relevant departments. Based on the investigation results, relevant State Council departments may take measures such as adjusting country-specific investment policies and prohibiting or restricting the import and export of relevant goods and technologies.

Second, in response to discriminatory prohibitions, restrictions, or other similar measures adopted by foreign countries or regions, or international organizations, in areas such as investment and business operations, the Chinese government has the right to take corresponding measures based on actual circumstances. It may also, in accordance with the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law of the People’s Republic of China and its supporting regulations, impose countermeasures on organizations and individuals that directly or indirectly participate in formulating, deciding, or implementing such measures.

Third, in response to foreign organizations or individuals that harm China’s national sovereignty, security, or development interests; interrupt transactions in violation of normal market transaction principles; or adopt discriminatory measures that unreasonably deprive or restrict investors and their legitimate rights and interests in outbound investment, relevant State Council departments may take measures against them, including prohibiting or restricting their investment in China, entry into China, and relevant transactions or cooperation.”

[Mushtaq Bilal, PhD @MushtaqBilalPhD]

Claude Code can automate screening titles/abstracts for your systematic literature review with just two prompts.

Here's a step-by-step tutorial on how to do it:

1. Start by creating a folder on your computer, "systematic review"

[Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan]

There are two solutions:
hand-written exams with only paper and pen available (I have been using this for 4 years & nobody complained & the exams were good & people do have reasonable handwriting, still)
and
refereeing of submitted written articles through oral examination via video platform. No double-blind, but no plagiarism either.

[SOAS Development Leadership Dialogue @SOAS_DLD]

🚀 Join us at @SOAS #DLD next Thursday June 11 for our latest Conversation event, this time on the global health funding crisis.

💡Our speakers - Professor Toby Green, Professor Kara Hanson, and Tess Hewitt

➡️ info and registration🔗
https://t.co/bT0DMBaFIy

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

We wrote about this here, for a fuller picture. https://t.co/Ijq7gbuS7J

[Kyle Chan @kyleichan]

Epic amounts of Chinese investment in Morocco, particularly in EV and battery supply chains.

I know this article was framed around Europe’s fears. But for many developing countries, this is exactly what they’re hoping for.

FT: https://t.co/dgHDhaAVWF

[Carlos Oya @estariade]

@GoodwinMJ That was a long tweet. Are you still cross at your loss? #matbadloss

[The China-Global South Project @ChinaGSProject]

US pressure. Chinese retaliation. Infrastructure politics.

What happens when Latin America becomes the frontline of US-China competition?

Watch - https://t.co/Z7HL90dDp7

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Absolutely hilarious for the FT to argue the West is losing to China because "liberal market democracies operate with greater accountability to voters."

Hilarious and, of course, absurdly wrong. China is winning precisely because it's obsessively focused on delivering for its people: infrastructure, improving living standards, reducing poverty, etc.

"Liberal market democracies" are losing precisely because they forgot who democracies are supposed to be accountable to.

Src: https://t.co/tQjkt6OSg4

[Isabella M Weber @IsabellaMWeber]

I’d say China’s comparative advantage is economic system reform planned & pursued over decades, always adapting to new challenges & opportunities. The CCP is oriented towards stages of historical development. Industrial policy is just one instrument in this much larger project.

[Andrew M. Fischer @AndrewM_Fischer]

@joefrancis505 That’s the standard argument, no? The Dutch disease really should have been called the Spanish disease…

[Jason Smith - 上官杰文 @ShangguanJiewen]

Cannot recommend this book enough.

If you are in China, and want to learn more about China's poverty alleviation campaign, go online and order a copy now.

Very analytic. None of the personal story stuff in other books. Just the methodology and approach.

[Jostein Hauge @haugejostein]

Here's an incredibly important segment from one of Mushtaq Khan's papers explicitly critiquing AJR.

This is pretty dark reading, covering not only methodological flaws but also racism and the violent process of settler colonialism.

Link: https://t.co/sqQKcuin90

[Mushtaq Bilal, PhD @MushtaqBilalPhD]

Most academic researchers are still living in 2023.

They use AI in their web browsers through a chat window. They open a browser tab, ask a question, and the AI gives them an answer to their question.

If they are smart, they use AI to brainstorm ideas or elicit critique on their work. If they are not smart, they copy the text AI gives them and paste it in their manuscripts.

Either way, this is NOT a smart use of AI for research purposes. Here’s why: our research processes are complex and involve various kinds of documents.

We have our primary and secondary sources in a folder on our computer. Then we have another folder for our drafts, which are mostly in MS Word. Datasets are in yet another format.

When we use AI in a web browser, it can only see one isolated part of our project at a time. For example, it can only look at your draft to give critical feedback, or it can only look at a given paper to summarize it for you.

Another problem with this kind of workflow is that every time you have to repeat your instructions and give the AI context about your project. If you use AI frequently, you will write a set of instructions and copy-paste them often.

The browser-based chat window has a huge limitation when it comes to serious academic research. If you add an article to chat to ask question, it can’t see any other related articles or your notes to give you a well-informed answer. In other words, the browser-based AI is blind to your project as a whole. It can only process an isolated part of your project at any given time.

Claude Code has completely changed the way we do academic research.

Instead of you bringing isolated pieces of your project to the AI, Claude Code puts the AI inside your project folder. You can ask Claude Code to read every single document, Excel sheet, interview transcripts, and dataset inside your project folder before it answers your questions.

Claude Code can also create new files in your folder and edit the existing ones. Furthermore, if you pause a conversation, it remembers the whole context, and you can pick up it later.

Let’s say, you have forty articles on a given topic (e.g. impact of social media on mental health) sitting in folder on your computer, and you want to find out which articles present evidence contrasting to a claim that posting actively on social media leads to a sense of better wellbeing.

You can, of course, do it manually. You read every single article and extract the relevant information and put in an Excel sheet or a Word file.

Or you can run all forty articles one-by-one in an app like ChatGPT and ask it to extract relevant information for you. Using ChatGPT is efficient than extracting information manually, but it’s still cumbersome.

Instead of ChatGPT, open the folder containing all your papers in Claude Code and ask it to extract relevant information. Claude Code will access all the papers in the folder.

It will then read the papers and extract required information and put it in a neatly organized table. You don’t need to run papers one by one in Claude Code. And if you need it to revise the table in any way, you can simply ask it to do so. Browser-based apps like ChatGPT were not built to do so.

The tricky part here is that you can’t really appreciate the kind of value Claude Code brings to your work unless you have tried it yourself.

But once you set it up with respect to your own research and the kind of standards you want it to meet, Claude Code become an incredibly powerful research assistant for you.

You must keep in mind that while Claude Code is an incredibly powerful tool, it can’t replace your expert judgement. It may overdo some aspects of a task while underperform on certain others.

You can delegate certain tasks to Claude Code, but you must keep in mind that it is your research assistant, and you must check its output just like you would check your human research assistant’s work.

You can outsource enormous amounts of academic labor to Claude Code while keeping the thinking process to yourself.

And now that you don’t have to spend your time and energies on laborious and cumbersome aspects of research, you will have much more time to do the actual thinking.

AI agents like Claude Code are on the verge of revolutionizing almost all aspects of knowledge work.

But many academics still feel intimidated to get started on a tool like Claude Code. They assume that they need advanced coding skill or computer programming knowledge to use Claude Code. That is simply not true.

You don’t any coding skills of programming knowledge to get started on Claude Code. If you can write sentences in English, you can use Claude Code.

That’s why I am running a webinar on 6 June to help academic colleagues get started on Claude Code.

I have designed it specifically for non-technical colleagues. You can find the registration details in the post below:

[د. عبدالرحمن ذياب @dr2alshehri]

لا يزال كثير من الباحثين الأكاديميين يستخدمون الذكاء الاصطناعي بالطريقة التقليدية عبر نافذة دردشة في المتصفح، حيث يتعامل مع ملف أو سؤال واحد في كل مرة. هذه الطريقة مفيدة، لكنها محدودة لأنها لا تمنح الذكاء الاصطناعي رؤية شاملة للمشروع البحثي بكل ملفاته ومراجعه وبياناته.

أدوات الوكلاء الذكية مثل Claude Code تقدم نموذجاً مختلفاً؛ إذ تعمل داخل مجلد المشروع نفسه، فتستطيع قراءة الأوراق العلمية، والملاحظات، والجداول، وقواعد البيانات معاً، ثم استخراج المعلومات وتنظيمها تلقائياً في جداول أو ملفات قابلة للتعديل. كما تحتفظ بسياق العمل وتتابع من حيث توقفت دون الحاجة لإعادة شرح المشروع في كل مرة.

ورغم قوة هذه الأدوات، فإنها لا تُغني عن خبرة الباحث وحكمه العلمي. دورها الحقيقي هو أتمتة الأعمال البحثية المرهقة وتوفير الوقت، بينما يبقى التفكير النقدي والتحليل العلمي مسؤولية الباحث. ومع تطور وكلاء الذكاء الاصطناعي، يتوقع أن تُحدث تحولاً جذرياً في العمل المعرفي والبحث الأكاديمي، دون الحاجة إلى مهارات برمجية متقدمة لاستخدامها 👇🏼

[The China-Global South Project @ChinaGSProject]

The war with Iran is disrupting global energy markets and accelerating demand for China’s clean energy technologies across the Global South.

@LiShuo_GP joins Eric & Cobus to explain why China may be one of the biggest beneficiaries.

[Zainab Usman @MssZeeUsman]

Check out this latest podcast episode in which I join Eric and Geraud at @ChinaGSProject to discuss the international/trade dimensions of U.S. industrial policies to secure critical minerals supply chains 👇🏾

[Adam Habib @AdHabb]

1. UK universities cut jobs, research and teaching amid squeeze in overseas students https://t.co/2CaKnFve8T via @ft

[Haggis_UK 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 @Haggis_UK]

Mick Lynch on Nigel Farage:

"He's going to unleash a torrent of racism & division.. putting us into the dark ages"

ML calls out the Telegraph:

"The Telegraph seems to be preparing itself to become a fully signed up affiliate of Reform & all the racism & disunity it will cause"

[Ken Opalo @kopalo]

You can’t projectize industrial policy: https://t.co/HIluf72jpv