The Unassuming Economist

In a column for the public policy think tank, American Enterprise Institute, the top ten inbound and top ten outbound US states for the year 2021 have been compared using new data on net domestic migration data from the US Census Bureau.

Click here to read the full report.

In a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, authors Arpit Gupta of NYU Stern School of Business, and Anup Malani and Bartosz Woda of the University of Chicago Law School write about inequality in India during the COVID-19 pandemic. The abstract of the paper is as follows:

“We use a large, representative panel data set from India with monthly data on household finances to examine the incidence of economic harms during the COVID pandemic. We observe a sharp spike in poverty, peaking during India’s sharp but short lockdown. However, there was a striking decrease in income inequality outside the lockdown. There was a smaller decrease in consumption inequality, likely due to consumption smoothing. Evidence supports two mechanisms for the decline in income inequality: the capital income of top-quartile earners covaries more with aggregate income, and demand for labor fell more for higher quartiles.”

Click here to read the full paper.

In a column for VoxEU CEPR, Majed Dodin and Sebastian Findeisen of the University of Manheim, Lukas Henkel of the European Central Bank, Dominik Sachs of the University of St. Gallen, and Paul Schüle of the University of Munich write about social mobility in Germany.

“According to the OECD, social mobility in Germany is lower than in most other developed economies, reigniting a debate on equality of opportunity and shortcomings of the education system. This column discusses how census data can be used to obtain high-quality mobility statistics for Germany. Using the Abitur educational qualification as a measure of opportunity, it suggests that relative mobility has remained constant for recent birth cohorts but points to substantial geographic variation in mobility measures across regions in the country.”

Click here to read the full blog.

The IMF’s major book on policies to achieve inclusive growth was just published. The book is available here. 

This and the book, Confronting Inequality: How Societies Can Choose Inclusive Growth (Ostry, Loungani, Berg; 2019) together make a compelling case for why inequality matters for efficiency and what policies can foster inclusive growth. 

While the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world very hard, it is particularly well known that developing economies took the largest hit. In that, Latin America’s “long-standing fiscal and social deficits” have compounded the problem for policymakers, as discussed in a recent blog for VoxEU CEPR by Ilan Goldfajn (Chairman of the Board, Credit Suisse) and Eduardo Levy Yeyati (Dean, School of Government, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella).

“The pandemic also flagged two long-standing but often overlooked regional deficits: poor state capacity, and labour exclusion and informality. This explains the region’s worse performance during the pandemic: larger welfare costs and meager relative recovery. Not surprisingly, societies face growing indifference with political regimes (Latinobarómetro 2021), and social outbursts in several countries, such as Chile or Colombia, reveal dissatisfaction which will likely limit economic policy looking forward. On the one hand, many countries came from a period of increased civil unrest that reduced the government’s ability to restrict mobility. On the other hand, lack of political cohesion made it more difficult to implement restrictions, which inevitably led to lockdown fatigue and declining compliance. On top of that, a background of discontent and/or ongoing recessions clouded any perception of effective pandemic response.”

The article then moves on to discuss some areas that may possibly restrain constructive policy solutions, such as the limited size of the public sector given the already mounting primary deficit, populist policy temptations clashing with economically robust policies, etc.

Read the full blog here.