The Unassuming Economist

From a paper by Anja Janischewski, Katharina Bohnenberger, Matthias Kranke, Tobias Vogel, Riwan Driouich, Tobias Froese, Stefanie Gerold, Raphael Kaufmann, Lorenz Keyßer, Jannis Niethammer, and Christopher Olk, Matthias Schmelzer, Aslı Yürük, and Steffen Lange:

“Many socio-economic systems require positive economic growth rates to function properly. These growth dependencies pose serious challenges given uncertainty about future growth rates and the role of economic growth as a driver of environmental crises. Thus, identifying and transforming socio-economic systems that currently rely on growth for their adequate functioning is a crucial step towards effective sustainability transformations. To facilitate conceptual clarity, we propose a general definition and framework for operationalizing the concept of “growth dependence” through four elements: (1) the system under investigation, (2) the unit of growth measurement, (3) the meaning of “growth”, and (4) the functions or properties of the system relevant for human well-being. We illustrate the impact of varieties in definitions on assessment outcomes by applying the framework to areas widely seen as growth-dependent: labor markets, social insurance and public finance. Our framework helps researchers to develop a more coherent understanding of growth dependence, a prerequisite for assessing policy options towards growth independence.”

From a paper by Md Qamruzzaman, Md. Adnan Hoque, and Md. Ratib Khan:

“This study examines the impact of renewable energy consumption, financial globalisation, digitisation, trade freedom, and financial development on income inequality across the G7, E7, and N11 economies from 1990 to 2022. Using CS-ARDL as the baseline estimator to account for cross-sectional dependence and long-run dynamics, the analysis is reinforced with the AMG, CCEMG, and Driscoll–Kraay estimators for robustness, while the dynamic panel GMM addresses potential endogeneity. Nonlinear and distributional heterogeneity were explored using Panel Threshold Regression, Quantile Regression (QR-MM), and Markov Switching models. The results consistently indicate that renewable energy, digitisation, financial globalisation, and trade freedom contribute to reducing income inequality, whereas financial development exacerbates disparities, with the effects being more pronounced in emerging economies (E7 and N11) than in advanced economies (G7). Threshold and quantile analyses reveal that renewable energy and digitisation exert more substantial equalising effects once institutional quality and digital penetration surpass critical levels under conditions of higher inequality. Regime-switching estimations showed a stabilising role during economic stress. These findings suggest that expanding renewable energy and digital infrastructure, and maintaining open trade policies, can help mitigate inequality, particularly in emerging economies, though the benefits of financial development require inclusive frameworks and regulatory safeguards. By integrating multiple advanced econometric techniques, this study provides new evidence on the interconnected roles of globalisation, the energy transition, and digital transformation in shaping income distribution across different economic contexts.”

From a paper by Lisa Capretti, and Lorenzo Tonni:

“The empirical literature on the relationship between income inequality and economic growth has
produced highly heterogeneous and often conflicting results. This paper investigates the sources of this heterogeneity using a meta-analytic approach that systematically combines and analyzes evidence from relevant studies published between 1994 and 2025. We find an economically small but statistically significant negative average effect of income inequality on subsequent economic growth, together with strong evidence of substantial heterogeneity and selective publication based on statistical significance, but no evidence of systematic directional bias. To explain the observed heterogeneity, we estimate a meta-regression. The results indicate that both real-world characteristics and research design choices shape reported effect sizes. In particular, inequality measured net of taxes and transfers is associated with more negative growth effects, and the adverse impact of inequality is weaker – or even reversed – in high-income economies relative to developing countries. Methodological choices also matter: cross-sectional studies tend to report more negative estimates, while fixed-effects, instrumental-variable, and GMM estimators are associated with more positive estimates in panel settings.”

From a VoxEU post by Beatrice Weder di Mauro:

“VoxEU launched in June 2007 with a simple but ambitious idea: that rigorous economics could speak clearly, quickly, and accessibly to the world’s most urgent policy debates. As its founding Editor-in-Chief Richard Baldwin steps down, this column marks this moment with thanks for his vision, his energy, and his service to the economics profession and to the public.

President Centre for Economic Policy Research; President Professor of Global Economics, Climate and Nature Finance Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID); Visiting Professor Hoffmann Global Institute for Business and Society INSEAD

When VoxEU launched in June 2007, it was an experiment with a simple but ambitious idea: that rigorous economics could speak clearly, quickly, and accessibly to the world’s most urgent policy debates. It was Richard Baldwin’s idea, and it has become one of the most influential innovations in the global economics community. As Richard steps down as Editor-in-Chief at the end of this year, we want to mark this moment with deep thanks for his vision, his energy, and his extraordinary service to the profession and to the public. 

VoxEU did not appear by accident. It was born from Richard’s conviction that economics needed a better bridge between frontier research and real-time events. Academic publication is necessarily careful and slow. Policy, by contrast, is fast, noisy, and often hungry for evidence. Richard saw that this gap was not a small inconvenience but a structural weakness in how societies use knowledge. VoxEU was his answer: a place where economists could contribute analysis at the speed of the news cycle, without sacrificing the discipline and integrity of scholarly standards.

From the outset, Richard insisted on two things that became VoxEU’s hallmark. First, intellectual seriousness: VoxEU would be a platform for evidence, not opinion for its own sake. Second, lucid communication: authors would be encouraged to write for a broad, global readership encompassing policymakers, journalists, practitioners, and fellow scholars. These principles may sound straightforward, but anyone who has tried to follow them at scale knows how rare that combination is. Maintaining them for eighteen years has required editorial judgement, perseverance, and a founder’s willingness to do the unglamorous work, day after day.

Over time, VoxEU has grown into a remarkable global public good. Thousands of columns have presented new research, debated policy trade-offs, and translated complex ideas into usable insight. Its reach is international and genuinely pluralistic, spanning every continent and most subfields of economics. It has become a first stop for people trying to understand what economists know (and what they disagree about) in the face of fast-moving events.”

Continue reading here.

From a paper by Shih-Yen Pan , Lawrence P. King & Elias Nosrati:

“The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been one of the world’s most powerful international
organisations in setting the parameters for economic reforms in the developing world. In this study,
using annual cross-national data from 1980–2019, we investigate the impact of the IMF’s lending programmes on poverty incidence in participant countries. Departing from the prevailing practice of relying on instrumental variables, we employ a novel difference-in-differences approach that ensures clean comparisons between ‘treatment’ and ‘control’ units based on their programme participation histories. Besides providing a quantitative estimate of the average programme effect, we evaluate whether the IMF’s alleged anti-poverty focus in recent decades has made any difference. We find that IMF programme participation leads to large increases (4.2-5 percent of the total population) in the proportion of a country’s population living under the $6.85=day international poverty line (2017 PPP) and the country-specific Societal Poverty Line. We also find that the poverty reduction measures incorporated by the IMF into its programmes have not been effective in mitigating the poverty-increasing programme effects. Overall, our findings suggest that IMF programmes have been detrimental to the welfare of vulnerable populations in participant countries.”