Can we "Claim” the Workforce? A Labor-Focused Agenda for Economic Development in the Face of an Uncertain Future

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated three trends that were already transforming economic development theory and practice. A backlash to economic restructuring and inequality, driven by globalization and technology, is now manifesting in reshoring and union movements. The resurgence of small and midsized cities, originally driven by increasing housing costs in coastal cities, has been reinforced by a rise in remote work. The uncertainty of today's complex economy is exacerbating long-term challenges of tracking economic change, making "shoot anything that flies” more important than ever. These trends highlight the need to focus economic development on building and supporting the workforce.

Keep it complex! Prodi's curse and the EU fiscal governance regime complex

The EU fiscal framework has gradually morphed into a regional regime complex through various reforms of the preventive and corrective arms of the Stability and Growth Pact. A regime complex encourages actors to arbitrage between partially overlapping, parallel and nested rules. By drawing on this central insight, this article demonstrates that regime complexity enables member states to respect the letter but not the spirit of the fiscal rules to lower the cost of compliance. It further shows empirically how regime complexity weakens technocratic enforcement capacity when authority is dispersed across multiple levels of governance by focusing on the example of the general escape clauses during the coronavirus pandemic.

Applied Regional Economic Research Can Improve Development Strategies and Drive Better Outcomes

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about an unimagined level of federal investment in regional economic development and much greater political attention to its priorities. Economic development researchers have an opportunity to contribute to an array of federally funded and pandemic-inspired regional experiments, many of which reflect shifting concerns about economic development and what constitutes success. Among these include the importance of addressing historical racial, ethnic, and gender inequalities;the value of research and development as a solution to major human problems;the severity of impending workforce shortages in key sectors;the fragility of many highly efficient global supply chains;and the inadequacy of our underinvested economic data infrastructure to help understand these issues. Researchers have a unique opportunity to examine the regional impacts of national issues by improving public investment logic models, advocating for an improved data infrastructure, and providing evidence to address the long-standing tension between growth and equity as competing economic development priorities.

Worklife Expectancies Two Plus Years after the Start of the Covid-19 Pandemic

This note contains graphs of worklife expectancies by quarters from 2012Q2 through 2022Q2. Graphs show Covid-19 pandemic-related downward movements in worklife expectancies were most prominent from 2020Q2 to 2021Q1. However, worklife expectances returned to their pre-pandemic levels starting in 2021Q2.

What is the Short-Term Impact of Decreasing the Speed Limit for Motor Vehicles on Bicycle Commuting? Evidence from French Cities during Covid-19 Pandemic

This article investigates the effect of a decrease in the speed limit for motor vehicles on bicycle commuting in French cities. I use a difference-in-differences event study design to measure a possible causal effect of motor vehicle speed limits on changes in bicycle traffic. I do not find any effect of the reduction of the speed limit from 50 km/h to 30 km/h on bicycle commuting. This result is important for public policy design, since increasing the number of bicycles is one of the benefits that politicians expect from decreasing the speed limit for motor vehicles.

Do stock market fear and economic policy uncertainty co-move with COVID-19 fear? Evidence from the US and UK

Purpose>The purpose of the paper is to investigate co-movement of major implied volatility indices and economic policy uncertainty (EPU) indices with both the health-based fear index and market-based fear index of COVID-19 for the USA and the UK to help investors and portfolio managers in their informed investment decisions during times of infectious disease spread.Design/methodology/approach>This study uses wavelet coherence approach because it allows to observe lead–lag nonlinear relationship between two time-series variables and captures the heterogeneous perceptions of investors across time and frequency. The daily data used in this study about the USA and the UK covers major implied volatility indices, EPU, health-based fear index and market-based fear index of COVID-19 for both the first and second waves of COVID-19 pandemic over the period from March 3, 2020 to February 12, 2021.Findings>The results document a strong positive co-movement between implied volatility indices and two proxies of the COVID-19 fear. However, in all the cases, the infectious disease equity market volatility index (IDEMVI), the COVID-19 proxy, is more representative of the stock market and exhibits a stronger positive co-movement with volatility indices than the COVID-19 fear index (C19FI). This study also finds that the UK's implied volatility index weakly co-moves with the C19FI compared to the USA. The results show that EPU indices of both the USA and the UK exhibit a weak or no correlation with the C19FI. However, this study finds a significant and positive co-movement of EPU indices with IDEMVI over the short horizon and most of the sampling period with the leading effect of IDEMVI. This study's robustness analysis using partial wavelet coherence provides further strengths to the findings.Research limitations/implications>The investment decisions and risk management of investors and portfolio managers in financial markets are affected by the new information on volatility and EPU. The findings provide insights to equity investors and portfolio managers to improve their risk management practices by incorporating how health-related risks such as COVID-19 pandemic can contribute to the market volatility and economic risks. The results are beneficial for long-term equity investors, as their investments are affected by contributing factors to the volatility in US and UK's stock markets.Originality/value>This study adds following promising values to the existing literature. First, the results complement the existing literature (Rubbaniy et al., 2021c) in documenting that type of COVID-19 proxy matters in explaining the volatility (EPU) relationships in financial markets, where market perceived fear of COVID-19 is appeared to be more pronounced than health-based fear of COVID-19. Second, the use of wavelet coherence approach allows us to observe lead–lag relationship between the selected variables, which captures the heterogeneous perceptions of investors across time and frequency and have important insights for the investors and portfolio managers. Finally, this study uses the improved data of COVID-19, stock market volatility and EPU compared to the existing studies (Sharif et al., 2020), which are too early to capture the effects of exponential spread of COVID-19 in the USA and the UK after March 2020.

A “NOVA ECONOMIA DO PROJETAMENTO” NO COMBATE À COVID-19 E AS CAPACIDADES ESTATAIS CHINESAS COMO FORÇA POLÍTICA ESTRATÉGICA

O presente artigo busca demonstrar dois fenômenos interligados na China. O primeiro deles é o processo histórico que envolveu mudanças institucionais ocorridas ao longo dos últimos 40 anos e saltos qualitativos no seio do setor estatal na economia chinesa. Esses elementos foram fundamentais para o surgimento de novas e superiores formas de planificação econômica, que, por sua vez, fez emergir um estágio superior de desenvolvimento que denominamos de “Nova Economia do Projetamento” - sendo este novo desenvolvimento também síntese de uma série de capacidades estatais construídas ao longo do tempo. O segundo fenômeno tem relação com as citadas capacidades estatais criadas, aqui entendidas como o elo explicativo fundamental no combate ao coronavírus pari passu a uma flexibilidade adaptativa e uma eficiência célere na contenção interna, reforçando o potencial da China e de sua projeção como ator político internacional.Alternate : This article seeks to show two interconnected phenomena in China. The first is a historical process that took place in the past 40 years involving institutional and qualitative changes in the state-controlled portion of the Chinese economy. Such changes have brought about new and superior forms of economic planning, based on which a higher stage of development pattern has emerged. We call this new development pattern "New Projectment Economy" and it synthesizes a series of state capacities built over time. The second phenomenon relates to how the state capacities created in the past decades have allowed the country to show adaptive flexibility and rapid efficiency in the containment of Covid-19 crisis internally and thus explain China's successful response in the fight against the coronavirus. Such phenomena, pari passu, show China's potential and projection as an international political actor.

Pandemics Depress the Economy, Public Health Interventions Do Not: Evidence from the 1918 Flu

We study the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on mortality and economic activity across U.S. cities during the 1918 Flu Pandemic. The combination of fast and stringent NPIs reduced peak mortality by 50 percent and cumulative excess mortality by 24 to 34 percent. However, while the pandemic itself was associated with short-run economic disruptions, we find that these disruptions were similar across cities with strict and lenient NPIs. NPIs also did not worsen medium-run economic outcomes. Our findings indicate that NPIs can reduce disease transmission without further depressing economic activity, a finding also reflected in discussions in contemporary newspapers.

The collateral damages of lockdown policies: A review of the "The Great Covid Panic"

Chaudhuri reviews The Great Covid Panic by Paul Frijters, Gigi Foster, and Michael Baker.

MONETARY POLICY AND INCOME DISTRIBUTION IN THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC CRISIS: A EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVE

This paper focuses on central banks' interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and their impacts on income distribution across Europe, particularly as regards Switzerland and the euro area. The first section offers a survey of the monetary policy tools that have been put into practice to deal with the macroeconomic shock resulting from this pandemic. The second section points out the impact of central banks' interventions on the whole economic system, before elaborating on the distributive effects of them. The third section suggests an alternative monetary policy stance to reduce the latter effects and to enhance sustainable development for the common good.Alternate :El presente artículo analiza las intervenciones de los bancos centrales durante la crisis de la pandemia COVID-19 y sus impactos en la distribución del ingreso en Europa, en particular en lo que concierne a Suiza y el área del euro. Después de la introducción, la segunda parte ofrece una revisión de los instrumentos de política monetaria puestos en práctica para confrontar el choque resultante de esta pandemia. La tercera parte enfatiza el impacto de las intervenciones de los bancos centrales en todo el sistema económico, previo al escrutinio de sus efectos distributivos, y la cuarta sugiere un enfoque alternativo de política monetaria para atenuar estos efectos y para mejorar el desarrollo sustentable de los bienes comunes.

EFECTOS DE LA PANDEMIA COVID-19 EN LA PRODUCCIÓN ESTATAL DE MÉXICO

Este artículo presenta un análisis de la caída de la producción de los estados de México en el segundo trimestre de 2020 como consecuencia de la pandemia de COVID-19. Estimamos modelos econométricos de corte transversal (ante la ausencia de efectos espaciales) y encontramos que las variables asociadas al contexto internacional, como las remesas, el grado de integración internacional y el sector básico, no tienen efectos estadísticamente significativos en la profunda contracción de la producción estatal, en tanto que la producción manufacturera, en particular de la bienes durables, las actividades turísticas y de esparcimiento resultaron significativas en su explicación.Alternate :This paper develops an analysis of the deep production contraction of Mexico's 32 states in the second quarter of 2020 as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Cross-section econometric models are estimated (in the absence of spatial effects);the main results suggest that variables associated to the international context, such as remittances, degree of international integration and basic tradeable goods production do not have statistically significant effects on the drop of production, while manufacturing production, particularly that of durable goods, and touristic and leisure activities are significant in explaining it.

Ping times: relating economic growth to internet connectivity

Since the last decade of the twentieth century, internet access has become a sine qua non for businesses. IT as well as online commerce have been growing fast over the past decades, and many other sectors also depend more and more on internet access;even industrial services such as design and warehousing, to name but two examples, rely on and benefit from cooperation at a distance. The global boost in teleworking and particularly teleconferencing following the Covid-19 pandemic has shown how important reliable connections are. Governments have over the past decade invested in improving their connections to the worldwide internet. Yet it is not clear whether economic clustering in fact is attracted to well-connected locations. We therefore test empirically whether the level of connectedness to the global IT infrastructure has a correlation with subsequent economic growth in sectors that use such infrastructure, or even depend on it. We do this using a panel of US cities, in which we zoom in on a few sectors that can use the infrastructure and compare them against the background of other sectors in the same cities. As a measure for the quality of local connections, we employ a unique method: we use the latency (ping times), a network metric usually spurned in favour of the more common bandwidth.

The territorial and socio-economic characteristics of the digital divide in Canada

The digital divide in Canada has gained significant attention from policymakers and the public in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic enhances the vulnerability of residents in rural and Indigenous communities that lack highspeed Internet access which affects their residents' ability to participate in an online work and learning environment. However, digital inequalities also remain an issue in urban settings despite the physical infrastructure that is usually in place to connect to high-speed Internet. The federal government has launched several funding initiatives at the end of 2020;however, this paper argues that the current federal policy strategy to address the digital divide is insufficient. By drawing on the intersectional character of the digital divide, which is interlinked with other types of socio-economic inequalities, this paper investigates why the federal broadband development approach remains problematic. As the digital divide in Canada persists, this paper explores current federal funding initiatives and their effectiveness in supporting broadband deployment across rural and Indigenous communities. The analysis shows inequalities regarding broadband access and funding distribution in Canada which also stem from a lack of democratic efficacy during federal hearings.

Essential but not empowered: reflections on the working class in Canada under COVID-19

This paper focuses on the political economy of work and labour under COVID-19 in the Canadian context. It reviews the impact of the COVID crisis on employment and workers, highlighting gendered and racialized inequalities in waged and unwaged work, analyzes state responses to the crisis, and explores how organized labour has navigated COVID capitalism. It argues that, while unions have engaged in necessary defensive struggles, the labour movement has not prioritized and won class-wide demands.This paper is part of the SPE Theme on the Political Economy of COVID-19.

Between the Washington, post-Washington, and Wall Street Consensus in the COVID era: the Mexican case

This article discusses the policy choices of Left-Centre president Andres Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO) in Mexico in the context of the neoliberal institutional legacy that his administration inherited. The persistence of neoliberalism under the AMLO government is manifest in the monetary and financial policies pursued—particularly in the context of the pandemic—that merge successive neoliberal approaches with socioeconomic regulation, namely the Washington, the post-Washington, and the Wall Street Consensus.

Devalued labour, COVID-19, and the problem of profitability: crises of seniors care in Shanghai, China and British Columbia, Canada

While differences exist in the organization of seniors care in Shanghai and British Columbia, both systems exhibit the simultaneous devaluation of, and reliance on, feminized labour. In this paper, we argue that COVID-19 highlighted underlying crisis tendencies built into the profit models in both increasingly privatized systems. The crisis of seniors care cannot be addressed without fundamental changes to the way care labour is valued, which in turn requires the true politicization of seniors care. This paper is part of the SPE Theme on the Political Economy of COVID-19.

Career & Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity. By Claudia Goldin,. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp v, 325. $27.95, hardcover

Not only did women enter the workforce in large numbers, they increasingly combined marriage, childbearing, and market work. [...]women increasingly occupied “careers” rather than “jobs,” distinguished by their anticipated time frame and centrality to a person’s identity. Throughout these chapters, Goldin discusses a number of compel-ling explanations for group-to-group transitions, including institutions, social norms, a structural shift away from manufacturing, and medical advances like the birth control pill and assisted reproductive technologies. [...]Career & Family tells a compelling story about the progress of American college-educated women over the course of the twentieth century.

THE LONG RECESSION AND ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

In this article, we argue the rate of profit in combination with the movement of the real net profits determines the phase-change of the economy in its long cyclical pattern. Since WWII, the US and the world economy have experienced two such long cycles. The pandemic COVID-19 has deepened a recession that has been already underway since 2007. The growth rates in the first post-pandemic years are expected to be high;however, soon after, the economies will find themselves back to their old recessionary growth paths. The onset of a new long-cycle requires the restoration of profitability, which can be sustained only through the introduction of 'disruptive' innovations backed by suitable institutional arrangements.Alternate :En este artículo argumentamos que la tasa de ganancia, en combinación con el movimiento de las ganancias reales netas, determina el cambio de fase en el patrón del ciclo largo de la economía. Desde la Segunda Guerra Mundial Estados Unidos y la economía mundial han experimentado dos ciclos largos. La pandemia COVID-19 ha profundizado la recesión que ha estado en curso desde 2007. En los primeros años posteriores a la pandemia se espera que las tasas de crecimiento sean altas;sin embargo, inmediatamente después las economías retornarán a sus anteriores trayectorias de crecimiento recesivas. El inicio de un nuevo ciclo largo requiere de la restauración de la tasa de ganancia, que sólo puede sostenerse a través de la introducción de innovaciones "disruptivas" apoyadas por arreglos institucionales adecuados.

Health governance of COVID-19 in Milan and Toronto: long-term trends and short-term failures

In this paper, we examine a crisis in the governance of health and care that characterized the regions of Milan and Toronto, which the COVID-19 pandemic impacted substantially—both in early 2020 when SARS-CoV-2 first hit and later in the fall and winter when the disease entered its second and third waves. We analyze restructuring in health and care in both regions, and, where necessary, in national contexts. We make the case that restructuring and implementing welfare and health policy, including long-term care, in Toronto and Milan in the context of long-standing tendencies of health governance restructuring that were part of a more general rescaling of the regional welfare state be held responsible for the toll COVID-19 levied. This paper is part of the SPE Theme on the Political Economy of COVID-19.

Alternatives

This paper is part of the SPE Theme on the Political Economy of COVID-19.