The Unassuming Economist

A new IMF working paper finds “striking differences in the evolution of labor force participation across countries, and even more across groups of workers. While the heterogeneous timing and pace of the demographic transition can explain part of the divergent trends, other factors, including policies and differential exposure to the global forces of technological progress, are also at play.”

“The findings of this paper suggest that many countries so far successfully counteracted the negative forces of aging on aggregate labor force participation by strengthening the attachment of specific groups of workers to the labor force. Changes in labor market policies and institutions, together with structural changes and gains in educational attainment, account for the bulk of the increase in the labor force attachment of prime-age women and older workers in the past three decades. Conversely, technological advances, namely automation, while beneficial for the economy as a whole, weighed on labor supply of most groups of workers, and can partially explain declining prime-age male participation. Individual-level evidence confirm the significant impact of vulnerability to routinization, and that detachment from the labor force is significantly more likely among individuals whose current or past occupations are more vulnerable to automation. But encouragingly, higher spending on education and active labor market programs, and access to more diverse labor markets, tend to attenuate this negative effect, at least for prime-age workers.”

From a new IMF working paper:

“In this paper, we quantitatively investigate the macroeconomic and distributional impacts of fiscal consolidations in low-income countries through VAT, PIT, and CIT. We find that VAT has the least efficiency costs but is highly regressive, while PIT and CIT lead to higher output and consumption drop, but have better distributional implications. Further, we find that cash transfers targeting rural households are able to mitigate the negative distributional impacts of VAT, while public investment shows almost no distributional impacts.”

“Our results suggest that low-income countries indeed face very different equity-efficiency tradeoffs comparing to advanced economies due to their unique economic structure. It therefore is important to investigate quantitatively the impacts of other tax instruments that have been extensively studied under the environment of advanced economies. For instance, we believe that the optimal progressivity of income tax is also a critically important feature in low-income countries. It is also interesting to study whether and how will classical optimal taxation results under complete markets change when migrated to an economy resembling low-income countries. Another limitation of our study is the omission of transitional dynamics in our model, which is important to the evaluation of short-run welfare effects. We leave these extensions to future work.”

From a new VOX post:

“Monetary policy shocks can affect different types of agents differently. These distributional effects can have important consequences for policy effectiveness. Using US data, this column explores how shocks differentially affect the prices faced by households with different incomes. The results suggest that middle-income households’ consumption baskets have more volatile prices than those of high-income households, and they are therefore more exposed to monetary policy shocks.”

“[…] Figure 3 plots the impulse responses for selected income percentile-specific CPIs. The monetary policy shock is a 25 basis-point increase in the Federal Funds rate on impact, thus a contraction. The consumption price indices of the high-income households react substantially less to monetary policy shocks than those for the middle of the income distribution. The difference is economically meaningful. After 12 months, the top 1% households’ CPI responds by 34% less, and the 96-99th percentile households by 22% less, than the CPI of the households in the middle of the income distribution (40th-60th percentiles). After 24 months, the differences are still 12% and 6%, respectively.”

From a new VOX posts:

“When the poorest gain, the lower bound, or ‘floor’, of the distribution of living standards rises. Using microdata spanning the last 30 years, this column argues that the floor in the US has been sinking, alongside rising top incomes. The floor would have fallen further without public spending on food stamps, which helped protect the poorest in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.”

“Figure 1 gives our estimates of the floor before and after SNAP. Since the official poverty thresholds vary by family size and composition, it is simpler to express the floor as a proportion of the threshold. The mean post-SNAP floor is about 36% of the official threshold. For a family of four, with two adults and two children, the threshold was about $16.50 per person per day in 2015. The floor in that year’s prices is $5.89 a day post-SNAP, while the pre-SNAP value is $5.40. ”

From the IMF’s latest report on Sri Lanka:

“Sri Lanka has been a trendsetter in the region in advancing gender parity in education and health. Yet, this has not been reflected in more active female labor force participation (FLFP), which is low compared to its emerging market peers and even some low-income developing countries in the region. Closing this gap is especially important as Sri Lanka faces an aging population with a labor force that could start shrinking as early as 2026. Given the potential for significant economic gains from integrating the female labor force into the labor market, the authorities’ Vision 2025 identifies policies to bridge this gap. Specifically, the Sri Lankan authorities aim to provide child care facilities, improve access to transportation, facilitate part-time and flexible work arrangements, improve maternity benefits for private sector employees, and increase access to tertiary education and vocational training. While these measures are steps in the right direction, Sri Lanka may also benefit from a more systematic approach through implementing gender responsive budgeting.”