The Unassuming Economist

From a VoxEU post by Ralph De Haas, Pablo García Guzmán, Zsóka Kóczán, and Victoria Marino:

“The Life in Transition Survey collects data on household income, employment, education, attitudes, beliefs, and personal experiences across 37 economies in emerging Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and North Africa. This column introduces the 4th wave of the survey, which reveals declining intergenerational mobility in post-socialist economies, growing inequality of opportunity, and trade-offs between wages and job benefits. It also documents substantial wage premiums for digital skills and how concerns about climate change often fail to translate into support for environmental policies. The (publicly available) data can generate valuable insights for policymakers working to promote inclusive growth and social cohesion in emerging economies.”

From the World Economic Forum:

“In the past three years, the World Economic Forum’s Centre for the New Economy and Society has accompanied more than 100 companies in their diversity, equity and inclusion journeys and identified, surfaced and highlighted impactful initiatives globally through its Lighthouse Programme.

The Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Lighthouse Insight Report 2025 features the latest cohort of initiatives selected by an independent expert panel for having achieved significant, scalable, quantifiable and sustained impact for one or multiple underrepresented groups.

The Lighthouse repository, comprising the cohorts from 2023 to 2025, currently includes 23 Lighthouses, as well as 20 cases highlighted for their promising and innovative design features, from across industries and geographies.

The objective of the Lighthouse programme is to surface and scale effective initiatives, equipping leaders with the necessary insights to contribute to faster impact across the global business community and policy-making space, and ultimately shaping more inclusive economies for all.”

Continue reading here.

From a paper by Robert Gmeiner:

“Monetary expansion can lead to inflation. Using economy-wide measures, such as the all item CPI or the GDP deflator, these effects can be quantified, but this leaves open the question of which prices are inflating more, and thus whether monetary expansion is more harmful to the rich or poor, depending on their respective consumption patterns. This paper constructs quarterly consumer price indices specific to each income quintile in the United States from 1990 to 2022. Using transfer function autoregressive moving average models with exogenous regressors (ARMAX), significant inflationary effects of monetary expansion CPIs for the lowest income quintile are observed that are independent of changes in the CPI for higher income quintiles. More generally, households that are likely to spend a higher proportion of income on goods with inelastic demand experience higher inflation rates. These effects, which are robust to specification, are caused by monetary expansion from Federal Reserve purchases of government debt, but not other assets.”

From a paper by Pierre-Richard Agénor:

“This chapter provides an overview of the literature on middle-income traps, and draws policy lessons for African countries that have successfully crossed to middle-income status in recent years. The first part examines the descriptive and statistical evidence on these traps. The second discusses the various arguments that have been put forward to explain their existence and persistence. These arguments include diminishing returns to physical capital, exhaustion of cheap labor and imitation gains, insufficient quality of human capital, inadequate contract enforcement and intellectual property protection, distorted incentives and misallocation of talent, lack of access to advanced infrastructure, and lack of access to finance, especially in the form of venture capital. The third and fourth parts draw together the lessons that can be learnt from countries that have successfully transitioned from middle-to high-income status, and discuss how these lessons can help to prevent today’s middle-income countries in Africa from falling into a trap.”

From a paper by Khoirina Cahyani Rahmawati & Widita Kurniasari:

“This study aims to determine the implementation of Okun’s Law, namely the effect of economic growth on the unemployment rate in 30 countries on the Asian continent in the period 2016-2022. The independent variable in this study is economic growth while the dependent variable is the unemployment rate and in this study has control variables namely foreign direct investment, inflation and trade openness. This research uses secondary data obtained from the World Bank. The analysis method in this study uses the panel data regression analysis method on 30 countries on the Asian continent in 2016-2022 using the Stata application. The best model at this stage of the research is the Random Effect Model (REM). Based on the results of the research conducted, it can be seen that (1) the economic growth variable shows a negative and significant relationship with the unemployment rate, (2) the foreign direct investment variable shows a negative relationship and has no significant effect on the unemployment rate, (3) the inflation variable shows a positive and significant relationship with the unemployment rate, (4) the trade openness variable shows a negative and significant relationship with the unemployment rate.”