The Unassuming Economist

From a paper by Zheng Chris Cao:

“In recent years, international tourism has grappled with various impediments to cross-border activities triggered by geopolitical shifts. This study examines whether globalization is in retreat through the lens of international tourism. We employed spatial autoregressive models, in which several connectivity mechanisms are embedded, to analyze a global dataset of tourist flows. Our findings reveal that spatial dependence in tourism flows significantly weakened during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and became increasingly driven by institutional factors, while the effects of trade links and geographical proximity diminished. This study contributes to the literature on tourism globalization by providing empirical evidence of the megatrends of deglobalization. For tourism firms operating under the assumption of ongoing globalization, these megatrends signal a significant change in the business environment. Firms should be prepared to reorient their market focus and reallocate their resources toward institutionally aligned regions in an evolving global landscape.”

From a paper by Alyshia Gálvez:

“Since Jan. 1, 1994, the economies of the US, Mexico and Canada have been linked in the North American Free Trade Agreement which facilitated the flow of certain kinds of goods and capital across borders and around the continent, while limiting others. Designed as a strategy for ‘mutual prosperity’ (in Bill Clinton’s words at the inaugural ceremony), NAFTA, and its successor, the USMCA, has been a failure. While untangling the entwined economies could be even more destructive than maintaining the deal, what imaginative possibilities have been foreclosed by the current agreement and how could these be opened back up? This article will engage in grounded speculation: what could an alternative or ‘anti-’ Nafta look like? What would it mean to design for mobility, freedom and abundance? How could a reconfigured agreement allow for and facilitate participation in economic, cultural, social and other kinds of exchanges at all scales, not only in ways that facilitate the participation of massive transnational corporations? What could a model for hemispheric food sovereignty designed for health and sustainability look like?”

From a paper by Matthew Busigin:

“This paper presents a novel methodology for enhancing macroeconomic output gap models through systematic residual analysis. Starting with a baseline model incorporating unemployment rate, total capacity utilization, and exchange rate dynamics, we develop a comprehensive framework for identifying and incorporating missing economic variables. Our enhanced model achieves a dramatic improvement in explanatory power, increasing R2 from 86.7% to 95.2% (8.6 percentage point improvement) while reducing root mean square error by 40.2%. The methodology successfully identifies optimal lag structures for monetary policy transmission (6 months), labor market intensive margins (3 months), and fiscal policy effects (3 months). This approach demonstrates that systematic residual analysis, guided by economic theory, can substantially improve macroeconomic model performance and provides a replicable framework for model enhancement across various economic applications.”