Rigorous research in humanitarian emergencies is not only feasible but also necessary to determine what constitutes effective assistance in these settings. This column introduces a Special Issue of the Journal of Development Studies which demonstrates that research establishing causal effects is vital for the design of efficient and effective social protection in settings of fragility and displacement.
Support for Eurosceptic parties and the rise of populism threaten not only European integration, but peace and prosperity on the continent more broadly. Rather than attributing their rise to the individual characteristics of voters – such as age or income – this column takes a different approach. Using results from recent legislative elections to map the geography of EU discontent, it finds that purely geographical factors – chiefly, long-term economic and industrial decline – are the fundamental drivers of anti-European voting.
Due to their lower standards of living, Eastern and Central Eastern Europe are losing their young, well-educated and energetic population to the West. The scarcity of data that reach far enough back in time makes it challenging to explain the longstanding East–West differences. This column explores the relationship of economic development with human capital – specifically, elite numeracy – and violence. It concludes that the absence of violence played a significant role in economic development through elite numeracy formation.
For the past two years, global growth outcomes and prospects have steadily deteriorated, while investment growth has collapsed. This is particularly the case in Europe. This column argues that reducing policy uncertainty, rethinking fiscal policy, and acting vigorously to address the challenges raised by digitalisation, climate change, and persistent inequalities all have the potential to reverse the current slippery trend and lift investment and living standards.
Research shows that individual spending behaviour is heterogeneous across households and that it depends on characteristics such as income and wealth. Using Italian data, this column shows that household heterogeneity plays a crucial role in the propagation of fiscal expenditure shocks. Household inequality gives rise to a rich set of new channels that propagate government expenditures shocks through consumer spending, which are related to households’ balance sheets and monetary-fiscal interactions. The values of the fiscal multiplier diverge from those predicted by the standard macroeconomic framework and the difference is particularly large at the zero lower bound.
Other Recent Columns:
- Post-disaster subsidies for small and medium firms
- Sluggish updating of information and consumer spending
- The circular relationship between productivity growth and real interest rates
- The role of standards in the diffusion of new technologies
- Public debt and private investment
- Macroprudential liquidity requirements
- Price trends over the product lifecycle and monetary policy
- Bridging the growing divides: DG ECFIN’s Annual Research Conference 2019
- Stabilising stablecoins: A pragmatic regulatory approach
- Fiscal policy cannot save the ECB
- The aggregate and distributional effects of financial globalisation
- Systemic consequences of outsourcing to the cloud
- The China Shock and employment in Portuguese firms
- Chile’s insurgency and the end of neoliberalism
- Demographics and technology explain secular stagnation and more
- Optimal policy responses to the growing polarisation of occupations in space
- A unified theory of public basic research
- Electoral sentencing cycles
- Business dynamism in Turkey
- Dynamic social interactions and health risk behaviour
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