THE scandal over Saif al-Islam Qaddafi's PhD thesis, from the London School of Economics, grows. Why was he allowed to commission research from Monitor, a consultancy, to pad out the thesis? I had always thought that PhDs were supposed to embody your own original research. Did he write the thesis himself or employ a ghost writer? And did whoever wrote the thesis crib large chunks of it? I think the LSE has an obligation to come clean.

Some industrious bloggers have been fisking the thesis for examples of plagiarism. I note that example number three comes from The Economist's very own Matthew Bishop:

3. Thesis Page 44, Line 16 in 1971–73, the IMF became more involved with its member countries' economic policies, advising on fiscal policy and monetary policy as well as microeconomic changes such as privatisation, of which it became a forceful advocate. In the 1980s it played a leading part in addressing the problems of developing countries' mounting debt. More recently it has several times coordinated and helped to finance assistance to countries with a currency crisis. Source: Essential economics: an A-Z guide By Matthew Bishop (link to start of plagiarised passage, end of passage)

Other examples of possible plagiarism can be found here.