The World Bank’s societal poverty estimates can now be readily accessed from the Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP). Societal poverty, first introduced as one of the World Bank’s measures of poverty in 2018, provides information that complements the absolute measures of poverty reported by the World Bank, namely poverty at the international poverty line (currently set at $2.15 […]
Earnings inequality has risen since the 1980s in most developed countries, yet the complexities of this rise spark ongoing debates. A crucial question is whether inequality grows between firms within the same industry or across different industries. This column analyses Italy’s private-sector employment over 30 years and reveals a distinctive pattern. Most of the increase […]
Many commentators argue that quantitative easing played a significant role in the post-pandemic rise in inflation across advanced economies. Would the inflation consequences have been different if central banks had used conventional monetary policy instead? This column uses eight measures of quantitative easing to examine its inflation effects relative to those of conventional monetary for […]
The long era of the Great Divergence has come to an end with the rapid economic ascendance of Eastern Asia, and China in particular. But economic historians have yet to define an agenda to analyse the causes and consequences of the rapid, and more recent, economic divergence across the Global South. This column argues that […]
When the Saudi government offered soccer superstar Lionel Messi a contract said to be worth more than $500 million for two years, the amount seemed staggering though it should not have been surprising. That strategy—paying an exorbitant price to gain influence by hiring the world’s best talent—is one Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states have consistently applied […]
The chief of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency MI5 warns of danger on the horizon. Deepfakes, Ken McCallum said at a conference in California, are “a threat to democracy” with the potential to “cause all kinds of confusion and dissension and chaos in our societies.” It’s a warning often repeated—yet one that always seems just around […]
Globally, health economists and practitioners have been increasingly focusing on bottlenecks in public financial management (PFM) to improve the delivery of health services to citizens. The World Bank’s FinHealth: PFM in Health Tool offers a holistic analysis of health sector service delivery from a Governance and a PFM perspective and helps develop a sequenced and detailed action […]
The US has seen an alarming rise in the frequency and severity of mass shootings, with a potential indirect impact on pregnant individuals and their infants. This column examines newborn health following the 2002 ‘Beltway sniper’ attacks, which were prolonged and seemingly random attacks that caused intense psychological distress in the area. Exposure to the […]
European public opinion broadly favours ambitious measures to tackle global warming. This has been shown by observational data (European Commission, 2023) and seems to have been corroborated by the strong performances of Green parties in the 2018 European elections and in a number of national elections since. However, European Union climate policies, being put in place as part […]
In the absence of effective and cost-competitive carbon capture or removal technologies, a near complete phaseout of fossil fuels will be required to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. This column evaluates two labour market frictions that could slow down the fossil-to-green transition in the US: skills and geography. The findings suggest that the fossil-to-green pipeline […]
