The Unassuming Economist

From a paper by Luca Bettarelli, Davide Furceri, Loredana Pisano, Pietro Pizzuto:

“This paper investigates the impact of climate change policies on inflation, for a large sample of 177 developed and developing economies, 78 subnational territorial areas and 17 sectors, over the period 1989-2022. We show that carbon taxes lead to inflationary pressures. The effect is not negligible: a one standard deviation carbon tax shock—corresponding to a 5$/tCO2 increase in emissions-weighted carbon taxes—leads to an increase of the price level of about 0.7 percent one year after the implementation of the policy, and between 1.6 and 4 percent in the medium term. These results hold at the national, sub-national and sectoral level. The effect is larger when inflation is initially high, and in regions (sectors) characterized by high emissions and low innovation capacity. In contrast, we find that emissions trading systems as well as non-market-based climate change policies (such as R&D subsidies) do not have statistically significant effects on prices.”

From a paper by Xiaoshan Hu, Guanghua Wan, and Congmin Zuo:

“Education has long been perceived as a “great equalizer”, but even with universal rises in schooling years, income distribution worsened world-wide. We propose a method for decomposing the contribution of a variable to the change in inequality into three components: the mean, the dispersion, and the price components. The proposed method is then used to investigate the roles of the education variable in driving down China’s wage inequality between 2010 and 2018. We find that (1) education accounted for over 30% of total wage inequality in 2010 and 2018; (2) 70% of the overall decline in wage inequality from 2010 to 2018 can be attributed to education development, and (3) the 70% inequality-reducing effect was made up of 95% benign dispersion and price components and 25% malign mean component. The benign components are attributable to an improvement in educational equity and a decrease in the college premium.”

From a paper by Amaama Abdul Malik and Asad Ul Islam Khan:

“The Covid 19 pandemic was a strong shock that plummeted into the entire interconnected economic activities of the world. As a result of the lockdown associated with the pandemic, the economies of the world were affected through restrictions like lockdown leading to the reduction of economic indicators like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and increase in Unemployment. This paper set out to look at the relationship between the GDP and unemployment in Ghana in the periods prior and during the covid pandemic. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model was used on data from 1991 to 2021. The result shows the nonexistence of the Okun’s law in Ghana in each of these periods. We conclude by advising policy makers to implement policies that directly generate more jobs like improvement in the agriculture sector through training and financial support to enable increased employment to match the increase in economic growth.”

From a paper by Antoine Gaudin, Brendan Harnoys Vannier, and Martin Kessler:

“In this article, we construct a new database on 606 Debt Sustainability Assessments (DSAs) published for 68 Low Income Countries over 2013–2023, a period covering the last two methodology updates. We study associated forecast errors to account for IMF and WB biases given their central role in the perception of countries‘ performances. The recent methodological change does not display improvement in projection accuracy. DSAs display a tendency for optimism when projecting public and publicly guaranteed debt ratios (realized ratios are higher than projected). DSAs perform relatively better for Small Islands Developing States. Circumstantial determinants (IMF programmes or recession) deepen optimism biases.”

From a paper by Yoosoon Chang, Soyoung Kim, Joon Y. Park:

“This paper investigates the interactions between macroeconomic aggregates and income distribution by developing a structural VAR model with functional variables. With this novel empirical approach, we are able to identify and analyze the effects of various shocks to the income distribution on macro aggregates, as well as the effects of macroeconomic shocks on the income distribution. Our main findings are as follows: First, contractionary monetary policy shocks reduce income inequality when focusing solely on the redistributive effects, without considering the negative impact on aggregate income levels. This improvement is achieved by reducing the number of low and high-income families while increasing the proportion of middle-income families. However, when the aggregate income shift is also taken into account, contractionary monetary policy shocks worsen income inequality. Second, shocks to the income distribution have a substantial effect on output fluctuations. For example, income distribution shocks identified to maximize future output levels have a significant and persistent positive effect on output, contributing up to 30% at long horizons and over 50% for the lowest income percentiles. However, alternative income distribution shocks identified to minimize the future Gini index do not have any significant negative effects on output. This finding, combined with the positive effect of output-maximizing income distribution shocks on equality, suggests that properly designed redistributive policies are not subject to the often-claimed trade-off between growth and equality. Moreover, variations in income distribution are primarily explained by shocks to the income distribution itself, rather than by aggregate shocks, including monetary shocks. This highlights the need for redistributive policies to substantially alter the income distribution and reduce inequality.”