International Day of Persons with Disabilities offers an ideal moment to assess the progress that has been made in achieving inclusive education systems for all learners, including learners with disabilities. The record remains decidedly mixed: Despite considerable progress worldwide to strengthen access to education and the quality of education, many of the most vulnerable and marginalized learners […]
Much attention has been paid recently to the potential for generative AI to disrupt labour markets in the long term, rendering certain professions redundant whilst enhancing the productivity of human labour in others. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the impact AI has already had on the labour market. This column investigates the […]
Families across the UK are struggling with inflation. This column asks whether low-income households have been disproportionately affected, using micro-data on food products to examine the rate of inflation for different income groups. Though firms passed rising upstream costs on to retailers at similar absolute rates, the increases for low-end products are disproportionately large when […]
Extracting measures of term premia from the term structure of interest rates is important to evaluate the response of financial markets to monetary and fiscal policy. The standard literature achieves the decomposition of yields by estimating a common factor structure for yields and excess returns. This column introduces a model in which yields are drifting, […]
Industrial policy is at the heart of the current economic discourse, propelled by major legislative acts from the Biden administration. This column presents an analysis of the ‘New Economics of Industrial Policy’, synthesising emerging literature to understand these complex policies. It highlights the broader objectives of modern industrial policy, extending beyond traditional sectoral support. Key […]
This year’s United Nations climate summit in Dubai is unlikely to achieve much because all 197 states must agree on decisions. The need for unanimity is a recipe for twiddling thumbs while the planet fries. It’s possible to imagine an alternative, better way to fight climate change. A few powerful nations could agree bold targets […]
Eleven climbers were found dead in Indonesia on Monday following the eruption of the Marapi volcano in West Sumatra, a rescue official said, as a search to find 12 more missing was temporarily halted over safety concerns. Three survivors were found on Monday along with the bodies of the 11 climbers, among 75 in the […]
Despite a renewal of public and scholarly attention to inequality, little is known about the role of government taxes and transfers in shaping inequality across countries and over time. Based on a database on the distribution of taxes and transfers in 151 countries, this column uncovers a number of new results on the evolution of […]
Climate change is a global common, but its impact across the world is not common – it is very uneven. Mitigation of climate change also involves distributional issues since historic, current, and future emissions are highly unequally distributed across the globe. This creates conflict lines that are increasingly blocking progress under the Conference of the […]
Sharp increases in earnings and income inequality in the late 20th century generated heated policy debates and academic enquiry into the causes of distributional change. But most of these analyses provide snapshots of income distribution at a given point in time without considering the trajectories of individuals’ earnings over their lifecycle. This column discusses recent […]
