The Unassuming Economist

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.

The National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) recently hosted Dr. Gita Gopinath, currently serving as the Chief Economist at the IMF for a discussion on the outlook for global growth in 2022. Among other things, the discussion touched upon topics like vaccination for protection against Covid-19, inflationary pressures in several countries, and the unique set of challenges before policymakers.

Watch the full video here.

David Malpass, President of the World Bank Group, and Henrietta H Fore, Executive Director of UNICEF write about mitigating educational challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic in a recent opinion piece (December 2021) for Project Syndicate. Excerpts from the article:

“According to World Bank estimates, pandemic-related school closures could drive up “learning poverty” – the share of 10-year-olds who cannot read a basic text – to around 70% in low- and middle-income countries. This learning loss could cost an entire generation of schoolchildren $17 trillion in lifetime earnings. Throughout the pandemic, marginalized children have struggled the most. When classrooms around the world reopened this fall, it became clear that these children had fallen even further behind their peers. Before the pandemic, gender parity in education was improving. But school closures placed an estimated ten million more girls at risk of early marriage, which practically guarantees the end of their schooling.”

Further, they discuss prospects for higher investment in education, some best practices, and access to digital learning as a “great equalizer”.

Click here to read the full article.