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Electoral rules determine how voters' preferences are aggregated and translated into political representation, and their design can lead to the election of representatives who represent broader or narrower constituencies. Relying on a regression discontinuity design, I contrast single- and two-round elections in Brazilian municipal races. Two-round elections use two rounds of voting to elect a winner, ensuring that the eventual winner obtains at least 50% of the vote. Theoretically, this can provide incentives for candidates to secure a broader base of support. Consistent with this, I show that in two-round elections, candidates represent a more geographically diverse group of voters, public schools have more resources, and there is less variation in resources across public schools. Effects appear to be driven by strategic responses of candidates, rather than differential entry into races. These results suggest that two-round elections can lead candidates to secure broader bases of support and to distribute public goods more broadly.
We study the pass-through of labor costs to prices using a novel data-set that links industry-level wages to sectoral consumer prices through input-output tables. Pass-through increased during the COVID-19 pandemic recovery, temporarily in goods and persistently in services. Our analysis suggests that the elevated pass-through contributed at least 0.8 percentage points to goods inflation in 2021 and 0.7 percentage points and 0.5 percentage points to services inflation in 2021 and 2022, respectively. We find that the increase in pass-through reflects elevated demand in goods sectors and firms' difficulty in absorbing high wage growth in services sectors. The analysis suggests it will take a reduction in wage growth to bring PCE inflation back to target. Fiscal and monetary policies that help to re-balance the labor markets can facilitate this process.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Rising inequality and widespread poverty, social unrest and polarization, gender and ethnic disparities, declining social mobility, economic fragility, unbalanced growth due to technology and globalization, and existential danger from climate change are urgent global concerns of our day. These issues are intertwined. They therefore require a holistic framework to examine their interplay and bring the various strands together. Leading academic economists have partnered ...
Global economic activity is experiencing a broad-based and sharper-than-expected slowdown, with inflation higher than seen in several decades. The cost-of-living crisis, tightening financial conditions in most regions, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the lingering COVID-19 pandemic all weigh heavily on the outlook. Global growth is forecast to slow from 6.0 percent in 2021 to 3.2 percent in 2022 and 2.7 percent in 2023. This is the weakest growth profile since 2001 except for the global financial crisis and the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Global inflation is forecast to rise from 4.7 percent in 2021 to 8.8 percent in 2022 but to decline to 6.5 percent in 2023 and to 4.1 percent by 2024. Monetary policy should stay the course to restore price stability, and fiscal policy should aim to alleviate the cost-of-living pressures while maintaining a sufficiently tight stance aligned with monetary policy. Structural reforms can further support the fight against inflation by improving productivity and easing supply constraints, while multilateral cooperation is necessary for fast-tracking the green energy transition and preventing fragmentation.
Since 1980, income levels in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have shown no convergence with those in the US, in stark contrast to emerging Asia and emerging Europe, which have seen rapid convergence. A key factor contributing to this divergence has been sluggish productivity growth in LAC. Low productivity growth has been broad-based across industries and firms in the formal sector, with limited diffusion of technology being an important contributing factor. Digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) hold significant potential to enhance productivity in the formal sector, foster its expansion, reduce informality, and facilitate LAC’s convergence with advanced economies. However, there is a risk that the region will fall behind advanced countries and frontier emerging markets in AI adoption. To capitalize on the benefits of AI, policies should aim to facilitate technological diffusion and job transition.
The Guyanese economy has tripled in size since the start of oil extraction (end- 2019), from one of the lowest GDP per capita in Latin America and the Caribbean in the early nineties. Oil production is ramping up rapidly, supporting the highest real GDP growth in the world in 2022 (62.3 percent). With the help of oil revenues, first transferred to the budget in 2022, the government has started investing heavily to address large development needs. Fundamentals remain strong and there are no signs of inflationary pressures or overheating as of yet—annual CPI inflation rate was 1.2 percent in July 2023— since there remains slack in the economy.
The U.S. economy has proven resilient in the face of the significant tightening of both fiscal and monetary policy in 2022. Consumer demand has held up particularly well, boosted initially by a drawdown of pent-up savings and, more recently, by solid growth in real disposable incomes. Policy restraint is expected to continue to slow the economy in 2023 with a modest pick-up in momentum later in 2024. Unemployment is expected to rise slowly to close to 41⁄2 percent by end-2024.
The economy is recovering after consecutive climate-related shocks as well as social turmoil at the beginning of 2023. Inflation has receded due to the central bank’s decisive monetary policy tightening, while the fiscal position and financial system remain strong. The country is in a period of relative political stability, but lingering political uncertainty is denting the appetite for the reforms needed to boost potential growth.
Finance and Development, December 2021
Since 1995 there has been intense debate about whether the WTO Agreement is just. Many observers point to the association of the treaty with intensive interdependence and the disruptive effects of globalization to assert that it is unjust. Nevertheless, justice in sovereign terms is different from justice in human terms. This book puts forward a theory of WTO law to explain the difference and its implications for the international trading system. It details how economic interdependence gives rise to an interdependent view of the relationship between different forms of justice and to interdependent obligations in WTO law. It also suggests how the WTO dispute settlement system might have a residual value as a locus for transformative outcomes despite contemporary concerns about the system's political acceptability. Taken together, such insights may assist in identifying elements of a general theory of law.