Publications

Should the ECB Helicopter Adjust Its Dropping Zone?

| 4 February 2015
Monetary, Blog | Tags: Inequality, QE
“Let us suppose that one day a helicopter flies over this community and drops an additional $1000 in bills from the sky…” This pleasant image conveyed by Milton Friedman’s famous metaphor is taken to new heights by Mario Draghi, who promised to inject €60 billion ... continue reading

Inside CETA: Unpacking the EU-Canada free trade deal

| 12 December 2014
Trade, Blog | Tags: Employment, Environment, ISDS, Subsidies
How are sustainable development objectives treated in the latest major preferential trade agreements?  In late September, the European Union and Canada released the long-awaited text of a bilateral free trade pact, five years after launching talks, and almost one year on from announcing they had ... continue reading

Monetary Policy and Inequality – What Do Central Bankers Say?

| 24 November 2014
Monetary, Blog | Tags: Central Banks, Inequality
“Benign neglect” perhaps most aptly characterizes the attitude that central bankers have traditionally displayed toward the topic of economic inequality. Indeed, monetary policy and inequality have long been regarded as having nothing more in common than just the fact that they both coexist. In the ... continue reading

At Whose Service? Jobs and Services Trade in Developing Countries

| 17 November 2014
Trade, Blog | Tags: Development, Employment, Poverty, Services Trade, WTO
Services-led Employment Growth? Creating jobs to match their ever increasing, relatively young labor forces is probably the biggest challenge that developing countries are facing in the medium term. Reducing unemployment is perhaps the most effective tool to achieve a wide range of development goals, such ... continue reading

Does Unconventional Monetary Policy Affect Inequality? Evidence from Japan

and | 17 October 2014
Monetary, Research Papers | Tags: Inequality, QE
Inequality has been largely ignored in the literature and practice of monetary policy, but is gaining more attention recently. Here, we exclusively focus on the impact of unconventional monetary policy (UMP) on inequality. We look at how the recent UMP in Japan affected inequality, using ... continue reading

Asia’s Poor Increase by One-Billion Overnight

| 16 September 2014
Trade, Blog | Tags: G20, IMF, Poverty, Trade, WTO
The news has been exceptionally bad recently: carnage in the Middle East, race riots in the US, ongoing recession in the Eurozone and Japan, tension in the South China Sea, high youth unemployment virtually everywhere, the Ebola epidemic and so on and so depressingly forth. ... continue reading

Growth Escalators and Growth Convergence

| 5 September 2014
Trade, Blog | Tags: Development, Services Trade
This article was first published on VoxEU.org and is republished with permission. The literature on global growth convergence and divergence is vast and deep. And it is still evolving. Some have argued that global growth is actually diverging across countries. Pritchett (1977) called this “divergence, ... continue reading

TTIP and Jobs: Does the Emperor Have Clothes?

| 21 August 2014
Trade, Blog | Tags: Employment, Services Trade, TTIP
With negotiations of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) in full swing, policymakers across the Atlantic are reiterating calls for more support of an agreement.  In the wake of increasing public criticism of the plans for a deal, notably in Europe, policymakers are under ... continue reading

Does Inflation Really Hurt the Poor More than the Rich?

| 26 May 2014
Monetary, Blog | Tags: Inequality, Inflation
After being neglected for decades, income and wealth inequality are back at the center of economic discussions. Recent work by the IMF, renowned economists like Joseph Stiglitz (e.g. in his book “The Price of Inequality”), as well as the lively debate generated by Thomas Piketty’s ... continue reading

Inflation and Income Inequality in Developed Economies

| 15 May 2014
Monetary, Research Papers | Tags: Inequality, Inflation
This paper explores the empirical link between income inequality and inflation in ten OECD countries over the period 1971 to 2010. In addition to inflation, we include six control variables ... continue reading