The Unassuming Economist

From a blog by Duncan Green: “Stefan gave us a tour of the ‘Big Ideals, Big Egos and Big Thinkers in development’. Here they are, points for recognizing them.” Continue reading the wonderful summary here.

The Council on Economic Policies, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization are organizing a workshop on 25-26 April, 2018 in Geneva, Switzerland, on policy relevant aspects of the links between trade in services and inclusive growth. Papers presented in the workshop will be considered for an expedited review process for a Review of International Economics special issue to be published in 2019.

Topics

We particularly encourage the submission of unpublished empirical work that uses new datasets or exploits policy experiments in a novel and informative way. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• What is the effect of services trade on inclusive growth and structural transformation? Is trade in services a promising development strategy for developing economies?
• How does services trade affect employment, income and gender inequality, quality of and access to service delivery, and innovation?
• What are key determinants of and barriers to services trade? To what extent have trade agreements reduced them?
• What policies are needed to increase services trade opportunities for inclusive growth?

Program

The workshop will start with a welcome dinner on April 24. April 25 will be devoted to paper presentations as well as a policy debate with trade negotiators and other practitioners in the evening. Presentations will continue in the morning of April 26, followed by an exploration of new directions for research in the afternoon. The workshop will take place at the WTO Secretariat.

Submissions

Papers should be submitted by February 15, 2018 to trade@cepweb.org. Successful submissions will be notified by beginning of March 2018.

Program Committee

• Peter Egger, ETH Zurich
• Ricardo Hausmann, Harvard University
• Bernard Hoekman, European University Institute
• Bob Koopman, World Trade Organization
• Aaditya Mattoo, World Bank
• Margaret McMillan, Tufts University
• Chris Papageorgiou, International Monetary Fund
• Johannes Schwarzer, Council on Economic Policies

From a new IMF working paper by Jonathan Ostry, Andrew Berg, and Siddharth Kothari:

“Do structural reforms that aim to boost potential output also change the distribution of income? We shed light on this question by looking at the broad patterns in the cross-country data covering advanced, emerging-market, and low-income countries. Our main finding is that there is indeed evidence of a growth-equity tradeoff for some important reforms. Financial and capital account liberalization seem to increase both growth and inequality, as do some measures of liberalization of current account transactions. Reforms aimed at strengthening the impartiality of and adherence to the legal system seem to entail no growth-equity tradeoff—such reforms are good for growth and do not worsen inequality. The results for our index of network reforms as well as our measure of the decentralization of collective labor bargaining are the weakest and least robust, potentially due to data limitations. We also ask: If some structural reforms worsen inequality, to what degree does this offset the growth gains from the reforms themselves? While higher inequality does dampen the growth benefits, the net effect on growth remains positive for most reform indicators.”

A new paper concludes that “Okun’s law is applicable in Russia.” “The economic connection between economic growth rates and changes in unemployment proposed by Okun (1962) over half a century ago remains one of the main tools for analyzing labor markets.”

“Gabrisch and Buscher (2006) proposed that the formation of the labor market mechanism in the formerly planned economies could be considered as completed once Okun’s law became persistently applicable there.”

“The general conclusion is that Okun’s law is applicable in Russia both in the short and long run. A comparison (Akhundova et al., 2005) has shown that transition processes in the Russian labor market were completed during the first half of the 2000s (i.e., the shaping of the labor market mechanisms took slightly more than 10 years).”

The article is available from the Russian Journal of Economics.

From the latest IMF working paper:

“This paper examines the output effects of changes in public expenditure and revenue in sub-Saharan African countries during 1990–2016. Fiscal multipliers in sub-Saharan Africa are somewhat smaller than those in advanced and emerging economies. The effect of changes in fiscal policy on output depends on the composition: cutting public investment has a larger effect on output than cutting public consumption or raising revenue. Episodes of fiscal consolidation have short- and medium-term output effects, but here, too, composition matters: fiscal consolidations based on reducing public investment have the largest effect on output, while fiscal consolidations based on revenue mobilization are less harmful than those based on public investment cuts. These findings suggest that the negative impact on growth can be mitigated through the design of fiscal adjustment and the accompanying policy environment.”