The Unassuming Economist

From a paper by Ge Zhai, Maoxin Zhang, Yihua Hu, Yuwei Chen, Cifang Wu, Youpeng Lu, Tingting He:

“Rapid urbanization in China has driven significant economic growth, but the urban-rural economic disparity (URED) continues to widen. This growing disparity impacts domestic productivity, consumer demand, rural stability, and the achievement of common prosperity. To address this issue and promote sustainable development, understanding the spatiotemporal patterns and drivers of URED is essential. This study employs nighttime lighting (NTL) data to analyse URED changes in 36 Chinese metropolitans at three scales. The study results show that: (1) From 2000 and 2022, both the economic volume and area of the study regions grew more than fivefold, but the economic gap between urban and rural areas significantly widened. (2) Economic growth in Predominantly Urban regions has escaped area constraints, while other regions still rely on spatial expansion. (3) URED has shown a steady increase, with higher values in the southeast and lower values in the northwest. (4) Differences in policy implementation and geographic location strongly influence URED. The study confirms the effectiveness of NTL data in capturing urban-rural economic dynamics and the reliability of spatial entropy in measuring URED. Future research will further explore NTL data patterns and integrate additional urban attributes to provide deeper insights into URED.”

From a paper by Frederic S. Mishkin and Michael Kiley:

“Since the initial launch of inflation targeting in the early 1990s in New Zealand and a few other countries, inflation targeting has become the predominant monetary policy strategy in large advanced and emerging market economies. Inflation targeting has been remarkably successful in anchoring inflation, likely owing to core elements of the framework across central banks. Its reaction process, which adjusts the monetary policy stance to ensure the return of inflation to target, allows it to flexibly incorporate a wide range of factors while limiting the discretionary biases that can contribute to excessive inflation. The emphasis on communications about the inflation outlook promotes transparency and accountability. As a result, inflation targeting central banks have, on balance, managed well the large shocks associated with the Global Financial Crisis and COVID. Even so, there are numerous challenges discussed in this paper that are associated with calibration and communications of forward guidance, quantitative easing/tightening, and financial stability.”

From a paper by Roubyou Said and Ouakil Hicham:

“In this study, we aimed to assess the effectiveness of monetary policy in influencing housing prices in Morocco. Bayesian estimation over the period 2007Q2–2017Q2 of a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model allowed us to reveal a significant impact of the increase in policy interest rates on the prices of residential goods. Indeed, the implementation of a restrictive monetary policy in Morocco will drive the prices of this type of asset downward. Despite this empirical finding, the historical decomposition of shocks impacting the inflation of residential property prices shows that interest rates explain only a small portion of the variations in housing prices in this country. Our results also indicate that an increase in the share of borrowers extends the time required for economic and financial variables to return to their equilibrium state. This is a sign of the potential dangers of fueling housing bubbles through credit booms.”

From a paper by Roshnay R. Britz, Adefemi A. Obalade, and Anthanasius F. Tita:

“The Russia-Ukraine invasion presents one of the most trending news in 2022. Economies having solid ties with Russia are exposed to the contagion effects of the crisis. The South African economy is strongly linked to Russia via international trade and the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) alliance. This study investigates the impact of the Russia-Ukraine invasion on daily and monthly commodity prices in South Africa for the 2015-2023 period. The study applies descriptive statistics, dummy regression model and sub-period analysis to evaluate wheat prices, oil prices and inflation rate before and during the Russia-Ukraine invasion. The descriptive analysis and regression results indicate an increase in wheat prices, oil prices and inflation rates during the post-invasion period compared to the pre-invasion period. This implies a significant impact of the Russia-Ukraine invasion on these economic indicators in South Africa. Policy implications of the findings are highlighted in the concluding section.”

From a paper by Joan Crespo & Jesús Peiró-Palomino:

“This article studies the dynamics of innovation in the US Core-Based Statistical Areas over a long period (1860–2019), with the production of patents used as a proxy for innovation. The results show that innovation has always been highly concentrated, albeit with alternating periods of greater and lesser concentration. Despite the relative stability of the distribution of innovation, cities have experienced notable movements inside the distribution, which are the result of progressive long-run tendencies. Moreover, a remarkable change in the innovation landscape is found due to cities in the Northwest and Midwest gradually losing ground to cities in the South and the West. Finally, the technological specialization of cities changes rapidly, and the technological life cycle phase conditions cities’ mobility within the innovation distribution. Specialization in growing technologies helps cities to improve their relative position in the distribution, while the opposite is the case for cities that specialize in mature technologies.”