It’s evolution, baby – how institutions can improve without critical junctures

Brazil, an oil-exporting nation, was still struggling to recover from the depression which started around 2014/15 when it was hit by a quick succession of shocks: the COVID-19 pandemic and the oil price collapse. The global pandemic triggered major economic dislocations and contractions in foreign and domestic markets, which further exacerbated the fall in demand for oil, sending world prices tumbling further. Poverty was already widespread in Brazil pre-pandemic. And despite recen ...

The Multidimensional Poverty Index provided for the UNDP (United Nations Developed Program) looks beyond monetary income and shows how poverty is the experience of multiple and simultaneous deprivations. People can fall behind in terms of health, education, and living standards, with challenges including lack of access to drinking water, sanitation, adequate nutrition, or primary education. Those who are deprived of at least one third of the index’s components are classified as mult ...

En distinguant trois économistes reconnu(e)s pour leurs travaux sur l'approche de la pauvreté, les Nobel 2019 ont redonné ses lettres de noblesse à l'économie du développement. Mais, cette nomination c'est aussi la validation d'une méthode d'analyse, jusqu'alors essentiellement utilisée en médecine, méthode d'expérimentation aléatoire, encore appelée randomisation. C'est, donc, un nouveau tournant que prend la recherche économique, celui d'une démarche empirique commencée il y a une ...

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson caught policymaker’s attention to the critical role of institutions for development. Their work gives too much emphasis to the prospects of revolution, however. A reading of the World Bank’s World Development Report of 2017 points to directions that all actors involved in the process, whether domestic or international, elite or non-elite, can take to improve societies. ...

According to forecasts released in the IMF’s April 2016 World Economic Outlook, unemployment rates are expected to increase this year in the Latin America and Caribbean region and among commodity-exporting economies. ...

The IMF recently revised down its growth forecasts, making large changes in the forecasts for some emerging markets, in particular Brazil and oil-producing countries (such as Nigeria and Saudi Arabia). This report presents a snapshot of the global unemployment outlook and discusses what the recent revisions could mean for the unemployment outlook for these countries based on past relationships between growth and unemployment. We conclude with a look at the growth-unemployment link f ...