The Unassuming Economist

From The Tribune:

“New Delhi [India], January 19 (ANI): Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Sunday shared insights on his participation at World Economic Forum (WEF) 2025.

The Union Minister highlighted that there will be a detailed discussion on issues ranging from inclusive growth, invetments in social phisical and digital infrastructure to democratising technology.

He pointed out the global interest in India’s approach to economic policy, digital transformation, and the Digital India programme.

He stated, “The Prime Minister Narendra Modi ji has put huge focus on inclusive development, and a growth which brings a big transformative change in the lives of the people at the bottom of the pyramid. People who have been left out of development over many decades in the past, whether it is bank accounts, whether it is providing toilets, gas connections, whether it is having tap water connections, getting the basic infrastructure in the or villages done. Infrastructure in the urban areas done. This is something which the world wants to understand.”

“In the World Economic Forum at Davos, there is a lot of interest in understanding our thought process, PM’s economic policy about digital transformation and also the way technology has been democratised by our PM’s Digital India program… There will be detailed discussion in the World Economic Forum about inclusive growth, investment in social, physical and digital infrastructure and democratizing technology,” he added.”

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From a paper by Florin Cornel Dumiter, Ștefania Amalia Nicoară, Samuel Nicoară, Cristian Bențe and Luminița Păiușan:

“The oil price influences and tendencies have gained, lately major developments both at the European level and on the international level. Moreover, several interconnections between the energy sector and oil price influences have become the panacea of several important research and studies. In this article, we provide a qualitative and quantitative approach to the interconnections manifested between oil price movements and the developments of the energy sector. The study is focused on Central and Eastern European Countries which have similarities and differences both at the energy sector level and economy level. The econometric techniques used in this study reveal the importance of the causality relationship between oil price movements and the energy sector taking into account the macroeconomic context. The conclusions of this study highlight some important fine-tuning aspects that must be recalibrated in Central and Eastern European Countries to increase the economic outcomes, strengthen the energy sector, and respond properly to the oil price movement trends.”

From a paper by David Amaglobeli, Joaquim Guilhoto, Samir Jahan, Salma Khalid, Raphael Lam, Gregory Legoff, Brent Meyer, Xuguang Simon Sheng, Pawel Smietanka, Sonya Waddell, and Daniel Weitz:

“The energy price shock in 2022 led to government support for firms in some countries, sparking debate about the rationale and the nature of such support. The results from nationally representative firm surveys in the United States and Germany indicate that firms in these countries were generally resilient. Coping strategies adopted by firms included the pass-through of higher costs to consumers, adjustment of profit margins (United States) and investments in energy saving and efficiency (Germany). Firms in energy-intensive industries would have been significantly more affected if international energy prices were fully passed through to domestic prices in Europe. Survey responses further reveal that most firms are uncertain about the impact of recent policy announcements on green subsidies. Firms take advantage of fiscal incentives to accelerate their climate-related investment plans are often those that have previous plans to do so. These findings suggest better targeting and enhancing policy certainty will be important when facilitate the green transition among firms.”

From a paper by Fernando Avalos, Ryan Niladri Banerje, Matthias Burgert, Boris Hofmann, Cristina Manea, and Matthias Rottner:

“Major price increases in energy and food were key drivers of the 2021–22 inflation surge. These large supply-driven commodity price increases, occurring when inflation was already elevated in many countries, increased the risk of moving to a high-inflation regime. Central banks have tended to look through commodity price fluctuations due to their often transitory nature and the implied trade-off between inflation and output stabilisation in the case of supply-driven price shocks. Growing geopolitical disruptions, climate change and a bumpy transition to green energy threaten to make commodity price shifts larger and more frequent going forward. This potentially raises greater risks for price stability, thereby limiting the scope for monetary policy to look through them.”

From a paper by Elena Bárcena-Martín, Natalia Martín-Fuentes, and Salvador Pérez-Moreno:

“This work provides evidence of the heterogeneous effects of the ECB’s monetary policy across income classes. In particular, this investigation focuses on the labor market channel. Based on EU-SILC data, we estimate country-specific structural vector autoregressions (SVAR) models to analyze the impact of the expansionary monetary policy shocks over the 2006–2019 period. The results suggest that monetary easing helped decrease unemployment rates for lower- and middle-income classes, to a larger extent for the former. This differential impact is accounted for a stronger improvement in job finding rates for classes located at the bottom of the income distribution. Conversely, the employment status of the upper class remained largely unaffected. The analysis identifies a positive impact of expansionary monetary policy on real labor income, which seems to have mostly benefitted the upper class. Overall, our results suggest that expansionary monetary policy helped decrease labor income inequality by exerting a stronger positive impact on lower-income households.”