The Unassuming Economist

My talk to the Parliamentary Network on the World Bank and IMF: still trying to make the case to parliamentarians that unemployment and job creation often have as much to do with central banks and finance ministries as with labor and education ministries.

An IMF report says “The level of corruption in Ukraine is exceptionally high. This can severely undermine economic growth prospects, in particular by hindering private investment. Reducing corruption is therefore essential to speed up the process of economic convergence to the rest of Europe. Regional comparisons help identifying best practices in reducing corruption. The Ukrainian authorities have recently adopted important measures that follow some of these best practices. They are, however, facing a number of specific challenges, including the concentration of political and economic powers in a small group of people which may hamper effective anti-corruption efforts.”

Continue reading here.

A partial summary of the IMF’s work on inclusive growth (partial to my work).

Build a new data set and the users will come. At least that’s what my co-authors and I hope will be the case with this new data set on services exports that we released yesterday. More to come on this topic in coming days.

According to a new report by Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and George Ward: “The overwhelming importance of having a job for happiness is evident throughout the analysis, and holds across all of the world’s regions. When considering the world’s population as a whole, people with a job evaluate the quality of their lives much more favorably than those who are unemployed. The importance of having a job extends far beyond the salary attached to it, with non-pecuniary aspects of employment such as social status, social relations, daily structure, and goals all exerting a strong influence on people’s happiness.” Continue reading here.