The Unassuming Economist

From a paper by BMC Public Health:

“Background: Previous research shows that parental unemployment is associated with low life satisfaction in adolescents. It is unclear whether this translates to an association between national unemployment and adolescent life satisfaction, and whether such a contextual association is entirely explained by parental unemployment, or if it changes as a function thereof. For adults, associations have been shown between unemployment and mental health, including that national unemployment can affect mental health and life satisfaction of both the employed and the unemployed, but to different degrees. The aim of this paper is to analyse how national unemployment levels are related to adolescent life satisfaction, across countries as well as over time within a country, and to what extent and in what ways such an association depends on whether the individual’s own parents are unemployed or not.

Methods: Repeated cross-sectional data on adolescents’ (aged 11, 13 and 15 years, n = 386,402) life satisfaction and parental unemployment were collected in the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) survey, in 27 countries and 74 country-years, across 2001/02, 2005/06 and 2009/10 survey cycles. We linked this data to national harmonised unemployment rates provided by OECD and tested their associations using multilevel linear regression, including interaction terms between national and parental unemployment.

Results: Higher national unemployment rates were related to lower adolescent life satisfaction, cross-sectionally between countries but not over time within countries. The verified association was significant for adolescents with and without unemployed parents, but stronger so in adolescents with unemployed fathers or both parents unemployed. Having an unemployed father, mother och both parents was in itself related to lower life satisfaction.

Conclusion: Living in a country with higher national unemployment seems to be related to lower adolescent life satisfaction, whether parents are unemployed or not, although stronger among adolescents where the father or both parents are unemployed. However, variation in unemployment over the years did not show an association with adolescent life satisfaction.”

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From Pathways for Prosperity Commission:

“Digital technologies are transforming the world, and nowhere are the stakes higher than in developing countries. With new digital technologies come opportunities for low- and middle-income countries to build new industries, deliver better services, improve markets, and, most importantly, enhance peoples’ lives. But the news is not all good. Digital technologies can also entrench exclusion, create new ways for the powerful to abuse the weak, and disrupt – or render obsolete – peoples’ livelihoods and jobs. The Pathways for Prosperity Commission has been on a two-year mission to investigate how countries can best navigate this technological disruption so that everyone benefits.

Developing countries are starting from a challenging position, often grappling with some combination of low human capital, ineffective institutions, and a difficult business environment. Developing countries are also rarely digitally ready: less than a quarter of people in low-income countries have ever used the internet. But this does not mean they should be paralysed by change, or that they must resign themselves to be passive observers of this digital revolution. Quite the opposite. Now is the time for countries to take control of their technological futures – as, indeed, many are already starting to do.

The technological revolution at hand is not simply about technology or ‘digital policy’ in isolation: this transition involves optimising social, political and economic conditions for inclusive growth in the digital age. Technology alone, no matter how innovative, will not guarantee success. Development will come from deploying technologies in a conducive environment, alongside profitable business models, and with the necessary protections in place. Not every country has an existing environment in which firms, individuals and service providers can take full advantage of new digital technologies. Creating this ecosystem is often a case of getting ‘analogue’ matters right in a digital age.

The use of digital technologies will not automatically lead to the inclusion of the poor and marginalised. Throughout our consultations and research, it has been clear that a large proportion of society is being left behind by technological change. Just as trickle-down growth has failed to deliver inclusive development, so too will trickle-down digitalisation. Civil society groups are right to be concerned about the dangers of digitalisation. When policymakers and private sector decision-makers do not consciously design for inclusiveness, they create a digital world that entrenches disadvantage, rendering inclusion an afterthought, and offering opportunities only to the well-of.”

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An interesting paper by Jan Brůha and Jiří Polanský on labor markets and business cycles:

“The goal of this paper is to document and summarize the main cyclical features of labor market macroeconomic data in advanced countries. We report the second moments (correlations, coherences and volatility) of labor market variables for various data transformations (growth rates and cycles). Then we use dynamic factor models to inquire about the number of orthogonal shocks that drives labor market data dynamics. We also investigate the time-varying nature of these features: we ask whether they are stable over time, especially at times of severe crises such as the Great Recession. Finally, we compare these features across countries to see whether there are groups of countries characterized by similar features, such as labor market institutions. We find that certain features are stable over time and across countries (such as Okun’s Law), while others are not. We also confirm that labor market institutions influence selected characteristics, but to a limited degree only. We find that one or at most two orthogonal shocks seem to drive the cyclical dynamics of labor market variables in most countries. The paper concludes with our interpretation of these findings for structural macroeconomic models”

From an ILO paper by Antonia Asenjo and Clemente Pignatti:

“We conduct a comparative analysis of unemployment insurance (UI) schemes in advanced and emerging economies. We find that almost all countries complement UI with severance payments, although emerging (advanced) economies rely relatively more on severance payments (UI). As a result, UI coverage rates are substantially higher in advanced than emerging economies. We also find that most countries finance their UI collectively (i.e. by workers, employers and the government), but contribution rates are higher in advanced than emerging economies. Turning to entitlement conditions, UI schemes are generally accessible only by dependent employees and formal sector workers and the stringency of qualifying conditions is similar in advanced and emerging economies. We also find that unemployment benefit generosity (i.e. in terms of both benefit level and duration) is higher in advanced than emerging economies. Finally, the integration of active measures within UI schemes is observed across most emerging and advanced economies. However, emerging economies present weaker job-search requirements but stronger sanctions for job refusal compared to advanced economies.”

An interesting new blogpost by Andrew Batson on the Nobel Prize in Economics and China:

“The awarding of the Nobel Prize in economics to three academics “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty” has prompted some caustic commentary about how much, or little, global poverty has actually been reduced by the highly targeted, small-scale policy interventions evaluated by such experiments.

It’s well known that most of the reduction in global poverty in recent decades, however it is measured, is accounted for by rapid economic growth in big Asian economies. On the World Bank’s numbers, China alone accounts for about 60% of the decline in the number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide (China’s poor population declined by 742 million people, while the world’s declined by 1.16 billion people).

The contribution of randomized controlled trials to China’s poverty reduction has been, to a first approximation, zero. Yao Yang, the dean of the National School of Development at Peking University, wrote in an English-language op-ed that “Experiments might help policymakers improve existing welfare programs or lay the foundation for new ones, but they cannot tell a poor country how to achieve sustained growth.” In a similar vein, Harvard professor Dani Rodrik tweeted: “Remarkable how little today’s development economics has to say about the most impressive poverty reduction in history ever.”