The Unassuming Economist

From a paper by Ernest Alang Wung, Joslanie Douanla Tameko, and Muhamadu Awal Kindzeka Wirajing:

“This study investigates the effect of external dependency on structural change in 54 African countries between 1990 and 2021. The Two-Step System Generalized Method of Moments strategy is adopted to control for potential endogeneity problems. Findings reveal that structural change in Africa is strongly impaired by the level of external dependency. This is since all proxies of external dependency are negatively and statistically significant with all structural change proxies. For instance, under agricultural productivity, external debts stocks (EDS) give an eigen value (β) of 0.879, standard coefficient (SC) = 0.162, and p = 0.000; for external debt services (DSED), β = 0.240, SC = −0.040, and p = 0.972; and for personal remittances received (PRR), we have β = 0.764, SC = −0.133, and p = 0.031. Depicting that, the more African countries rely on the external world for change, the less they realize this change. The results remain consistent after accounting for income differences by segmenting African countries into low- and middle-income groups. As suggestions to policymakers, for structural change to concretely take place in Africa, the rate of external dependence should be limited, and resources in Africa and local methods of growth should be used rather than copying from the Western world. Though the results are valid across income groups and Africa, the case of countries could be more significant.”

From a paper by Emiliano Brancaccio, Fabiana De Cristofaro, and Raffaele Giammetti:

“The so-called ‘IMF-OECD consensus’ suggests that labour market deregulations increase employment and reduce unemployment. This paper presents a meta-analysis of research on this topic based on MAER-NET guidelines. We examine the relation between Employment Protection Legislation indexes on one hand, and employment and unemployment on the other. Among 53 academic papers published between 1990 and 2019, only 28 per cent support the consensus view, while the remaining 72 per cent report results that are ambiguous (21 per cent) or contrary to the consensus (51 per cent). The decline in support for the consensus view is particularly evident in the last decade. Our results are independent of the citations of papers examined, the impact factor of journals and the techniques used. A FAT-PET meta-regression model confirms these outcomes.”

From a paper by Nora Lustig and Andrea Vigorito:

“Inequality measures based on household surveys may be biased because they typically fail to capture incomes of the wealthy properly. The “missing rich” problem stems from several factors, including sampling errors, item and unit nonresponse, underreporting of income, and data preprocessing techniques like top coding. This paper presents and compares prominent correction approaches to address issues concerning the upper tail of the income distribution in household surveys. Correction approaches are classified based on the data source, distinguishing between those that rely solely on within-survey information and those that combine household survey data with external sources. We categorize the correction methods into three types: replacing, reweighting, and combining reweighting and replacing. We identify twenty-two different approaches that have been applied in practice. We show that both levels and trends can be quite sensitive to the approach and provide broad guidelines on choosing a suitable correction approach.”

From a paper by Xiaoshan Hu, Guanghua Wan, and Congmin Zuo:

“Education has long been perceived as a “great equalizer”, but even with universal rises in schooling years, income distribution worsened world-wide. We propose a method for decomposing the contribution of a variable to the change in inequality into three components: the mean, the dispersion, and the price components. The proposed method is then used to investigate the roles of the education variable in driving down China’s wage inequality between 2010 and 2018. We find that (1) education accounted for over 30% of total wage inequality in 2010 and 2018; (2) 70% of the overall decline in wage inequality from 2010 to 2018 can be attributed to education development, and (3) the 70% inequality-reducing effect was made up of 95% benign dispersion and price components and 25% malign mean component. The benign components are attributable to an improvement in educational equity and a decrease in the college premium.”

From a paper by Amaama Abdul Malik and Asad Ul Islam Khan:

“The Covid 19 pandemic was a strong shock that plummeted into the entire interconnected economic activities of the world. As a result of the lockdown associated with the pandemic, the economies of the world were affected through restrictions like lockdown leading to the reduction of economic indicators like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and increase in Unemployment. This paper set out to look at the relationship between the GDP and unemployment in Ghana in the periods prior and during the covid pandemic. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model was used on data from 1991 to 2021. The result shows the nonexistence of the Okun’s law in Ghana in each of these periods. We conclude by advising policy makers to implement policies that directly generate more jobs like improvement in the agriculture sector through training and financial support to enable increased employment to match the increase in economic growth.”