Following our usual tradition, VoxEU.org takes a break between Christmas and the New Year – our final column of 2020 will be on Thursday 24 December and our first column of 2021 will appear on Saturday 2 January.
From early March, it became clear that economists around the world, like everyone else, were mesmerised by the Covid-19 pandemic and trying to make sense of the unfolding events. This column describes how the tradition of pre-prints in physics and the medical sciences inspired the creation of CEPR's “Covid Economics: Vetted and Real-Time Papers”. Beyond its contribution to a faster understanding of the pandemic, the Covid Economics experiment may help the economics profession think about how research is published.
By 2025 the UN aims to have eliminated child labour, a practice that affects roughly 10% of the world’s children and severely impedes sustainable development. But reaching that target will require a clear understanding of how global value chains interact with child labour. This column analyses 26 developing countries from 2007–2015 and concludes that countries participating in global value chains experienced reductions in child labour except in cases when an increase in exports was accompanied by additional imported content from third countries.
The use of a language in written and formal contexts that is distinct from the languages used in everyday communication – such as Latin in early modern Europe and Standard Arabic in the Arabic-speaking world, both past and present – comes with benefits, but also with costs. Drawing on publishing data from early modern Europe, this column shows that the Protestant Reformation led to a sudden and sharp rise in vernacular printing, such that by the end of the 16th century, the majority of works were printed in spoken tongues rather than in Latin. This transformation allowed broader segments of society to access knowledge. It also diversified the composition of authors and book content and had long-term consequences for economic development.
The US continues to struggle with insufficient COVID-19 testing capacity. At the same time, US laboratories use ultrasensitive diagnostic criteria in their tests, leading to a large proportion of positive diagnoses associated with negligible viral loads. This column seeks to construct a theory that explains both undertesting and overdiagnosis. The theory predicts both phenomena may arise in the absence of mandatory viral load reporting. Despite the obvious clinical advantages of viral load reporting, mandating such reporting may not be optimal when considering laboratories’ capacity building decisions and potential benefits of widespread quarantining.
Other Recent Columns:
- Political polarisation impedes the public policy response to COVID-19
- Closing the gap between vocational and general education
- Valuing gene therapies for orphan pediatric disease
- The long shadow of monetary policy
- Polarised elections raise economic uncertainty
- Workers’ bargaining power, business cycle fluctuations, and the Phillips curve
- Thriving in a post-pandemic economy
- Avoiding zombification after the COVID-19 consumption game-changer
- Gender wage growth gaps across fields of study in Europe
- Where globalisation was hiding, and how far it might go
- A review of economic studies on the opioid crisis
- Tracking GDP using Google Trends and machine learning
- Adjusting population density to account for land quality
- Economic incentives and regulation to increase COVID-19 app effectiveness
- Local inequalities of the COVID-19 crisis
- Promoting parental involvement in schools
- Taking stock of the financial sector policy response to COVID-19 around the world
- Two proposals to resurrect the Banking Union: The Safe Portfolio Approach and SRB+
- Profit-splitting rules and the taxation of multinational digital platforms
- Competition among high-frequency traders and market liquidity






