There is growing concern that citizens around the world have declining trust in institutions such as public health agencies, private corporations, scientists, or vaccine manufacturers. This column focuses on a family planning campaign in Peru to examine how government actions in the implementation of public programmes can shape trust in institutions and thus affect demand for public services and welfare outcomes.
It seems obvious that lowering the cost of communication among innovators would facilitate scientific and technological progress. Yet, few studies examine this relationship. This column explores the introduction of the first modern postal system in Britain in 1840 and its effect on the number of citations between pairs of scientists and on patenting. The gradient with which citations declined with distance-based postage costs fell and patenting increased in locations that experienced more significant improvements in letter market access due to the reform.
The Covid crisis inspired extraordinary innovation. Carsten Fink and Reinhilde Veugelers are two of the editors of a new ebook from CEPR called Resilience and Ingenuity that examines how countries, organisations and industries were able to innovate. Tim Phillips asks them what worked, what didn’t, and whether we can keep up the pace of new ideas.
The relationship between trade and volatility depends on a complex interaction between sectoral shocks, sectoral specialisation, and geographic diversification. This column uses a multi-country, multi-sector framework to study the main sources of risk for open economies and how trade determines the exposure to those risks through specialisation and diversification of sales. It shows that diversification reduces volatility, particularly in countries with higher output volatility.
The federal government provided $296 billion in disaster relief for catastrophic events in the US between 2001 and 2019. However, excessive bailouts may encourage economic activity to remain in exposed areas. This column shows that increased post-disaster efforts due to political motives result in more people living in hazard-prone coastal regions. A dynamic spatial general equilibrium model predicts that current post-disaster policies improve aggregate welfare at the expense of overall GDP and productivity losses, and encourage sorting into exposed areas.
Evidence suggests that sovereign debt markets are taking climate effects into account in pricing, creating the potential for a climate-debt doom loop. However, climate risks to fiscal stability do not attract the same attention as climate risks to financial stability. This column discusses how integrated assessment models can be linked with stochastic debt sustainability analysis to inform our understanding of climate risks to sovereign debt.
Recorded live at CEPR Paris Symposium 2022: Across Europe and beyond, populist movements have recently flourished. What does history teach us about the economic impact of populism – and is our taste for populists a bug or a feature of democracy? Tim Phillips talks to Moritz Schularick and Massimo Morelli.
The Covid-19 pandemic has profoundly affected the ecosystems that spur innovation and creativity around the world. This CEPR Press eBook untangles how the Covid shock shaped the innovation landscape of the world’s major economies, and how scientists, entrepreneurs and creative professionals responded to the crisis.
How has the global innovation system fared in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis? A new eBook untangles how the COVID-19 shock affected innovation ecosystems in different parts of the world and how scientists, entrepreneurs, and creative professionals responded to the shock. Innovation not only proved crucial in finding solutions to the crisis, overall the innovation system proved more resilient to the pandemic’s fallout compared to previous crises.
Headline inflation has increased markedly across both advanced and emerging market (EM) economies this year ending up much higher than we forecast six months ago. Consumer price inflation is expected to remain elevated until at least the second quarter of 2022 as ongoing supply chain disruptions, higher energy prices, and stronger-than-expected demand in countries such as the US provide additional impetus to already buoyant goods prices. Nowhere is this clearer than in Brazil, where annual inflation rose to 10.67 per cent in October, the highest rate since January 2016.
