The Unassuming Economist

From the Global Labor Market Conference:

“The Global Labor Charter outlines a vision to enhance labor market flexibility, tackle youth unemployment, and ensure sustainable, inclusive growth.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, Jan. 29, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — The second edition of the Global Labor Market Conference kicked off with the highly anticipated ministerial roundtable, chaired by His Excellency the Minister of Human Resources and Social Development, Eng. Ahmed bin Sulaiman Al Rajhi. Bringing together over 40 labor ministers from G20 Countries, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas, along with the Director General of the ILO Gilbert Houngbo. the high-level meeting hosted an impactful dialogue on pressing labor market challenges and opportunities.

In his opening speech, the Minister warmly welcomed the international labor ministers to Riyadh, highlighting the Kingdom’s commitment to leading the global dialogue on the future of labor markets through this conference. He emphasized that the event serves as a strategic platform to foster international collaboration and develop innovative solutions to address labor market challenges while ensuring their sustainability amidst rapid technological advancements.

His Excellency concluded by urging Ministers from around the world to leverage the roundtable as a dynamic platform for exchanging insights and experiences, addressing the challenges facing labor markets, and showcasing notable achievements. He stressed that joint action and the exchange of ideas among nations have the potential to drive significant transformation, empowering and supporting young people while building a more inclusive and sustainable future for all.

The meeting fostered an exchange of ideas and experiences, with the ministers reviewing key trends and pressing challenges in the labor market. These discussions laid a solid groundwork for crafting practical strategies to support future transformations and strengthen the sustainability of labor markets.”

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From IISD:

“The recent UN Summit of the Future (SoF) stressed the need to address well-known shortcomings of gross domestic product (GDP) as an indicator of wealth by developing a framework for measuring sustainable development progress that can complement and go beyond GDP. The need for such measures is widely recognized. The UN Secretary-General has described overreliance on GDP as a “glaring blind spot in how we measure economic prosperity and progress.”  The Pact for the Future – the Summit’s outcome document – specifically identifies the need “to develop recommendations for a limited number of country-owned and universally applicable indicators of sustainable development that complement and go beyond GDP,” taking into account the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

In anticipation of growing global efforts to select indicators that move beyond GDP, the SDG Knowledge Hub is providing regular updates on publications on this topic. The authors use databases of agencies and peer-reviewed literature to collect such information.

The first issue of the ‘Beyond GDP’ update series comes in the aftermath of the September 2024 Summit of the Future and covers the period from October through December 2024.

Recommendations for specific indicators and indices to complement GDP performance

The fifth edition of the World Bank’s report on the Changing Wealth of Nations (CWON) themed,  ‘Revisiting the Measurement of Comprehensive Wealth,’ presents a methodology, global CWON estimates, and trends of the assets of the wealth portfolio, including trends on non-renewable natural capital, hydropower, forests and agricultural land, blue natural capital, and human capital. As the report’s authors suggest, the publication is intended for a technical audience, including policy advisors, statisticians, and researchers.”

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From C40 Cities:

“New research from C40 Cities today reveals that making the construction sector more sustainable in cities will generate multiple socio-economic benefits, including the creation of millions of green jobs.

Building greener cities: green job opportunities in clean construction, is the first major piece of work to identify the potential for cities’ workforces of adopting clean construction, presenting a compelling economic case for shifting to clean construction practices. The research, supported by Laudes Foundation and the City of Oslo, and with insights from Building and Woodworkers International, spans seven major cities: Bogotá, London, Madrid, Mexico City, Nairobi, Oslo and Seattle, to give a global perspective on how decarbonising the built environment, responsible currently for close to 40% of global CO2 emissions, can support a stable and healthy workforce and provide opportunities for greater social equity.

Researchers modelled the impact of two scenarios from 2023-2050: first, a city’s continuation of current carbon-intensive construction scenario, and second, a shift towards clean construction (defined as decarbonised, resource-efficient, resilient and socially just built environment and construction systems). The research projects the changes in job numbers and job roles, maps workforce diversity and quality of work, and calculates the investment needed for each.”

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From a paper by Tobias Herbst, Moritz Kuhn, and Farzad Saidi:

“Houses are the most important asset on American households’ balance sheets, rendering the U.S. economy sensitive to house prices. There is a consensus that credit conditions affect house prices, but to what extent remains controversial, as an expansion in credit supply often coincides with changes in house price expectations. To address this longstanding question, we rely on novel microdata on the universe of mortgages guaranteed under the Veterans Administration (VA) loan program. We use the expansion of eligibility of veterans for the VA loan program following the Gulf War to estimate a long-lived effect of credit supply on house prices. We then exploit the segmentation of the conventional mortgage market from program eligibility to link this sustained house price growth to developments in the initially unaffected segment of the credit market. We uncover a net increase in credit for all other residential mortgage applicants that aligns closely with the evolution of house price growth, which supports the view that credit-induced house price shocks are amplified by beliefs.”

From Minneapolis Fed:

“In 2024, 24 papers were added to the Institute Working Papers series, bringing the total in the series to 108. These papers make use of frontier methods to conduct empirical analysis and build models of economic processes. Institute economists were authors on eight of the new papers in 2024. Two of these papers analyze novel datasets that the authors created and made public. Two others look at the early impact of new labor policies: a guaranteed basic income program and a prohibition on domestic outsourcing.

This summary article provides a brief overview of the main findings of all 24 new additions from 2024.

Labor markets

Artificial intelligence dominated headlines in 2024, offering opportunities and provoking concerns. For workers, one concern is how wages and employment will respond to the current wave of technological innovation. In “New Technologies and Jobs in Europe,” Stefania Albanesi, António Dias da Silva, Juan F. Jimeno, Ana Lamo, and Alena Wabitsch investigate the impact of AI on relative employment and wages by occupation in 16 European countries over the period 2011 to 2019. Their results suggest that the adoption of AI has not been associated with lower aggregate employment in Europe.”

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