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Begin New Search Topic Economics Political Geography Global Focus Content Type Policy Brief Publishing Institution Peterson Institute for International Economics Publication Year within 5 Years

1. Can the World Trade Organization be saved? Should it?

Author:
Alan Wm. Wolff
Publication Date:
05-2023
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Abstract:
Heads of state, trade ministers, and academics have repeatedly called for reforming the World Trade Organization (WTO), the institution charged with the stewardship of the global trading system. The durability and worth of the WTO are being increasingly questioned despite the fact that by almost all objective measures, it has been a great success, with world trade growing much faster than global GDP over the last 75 years. However, past success does not guarantee future performance. This Policy Brief examines the institution’s most serious defects and the multitude of challenges it faces. It suggests the institution needs to evolve to reach broad-based international trade agreements, adding much needed new rules to the world trade rulebook and developing effective means to settle disputes that would render the rules of the system enforceable once again.
Topic:
Economics, International Trade and Finance, Treaties and Agreements, and World Trade Organization
Political Geography:
Global Focus

2. The international tax agreement of 2021: Why it’s needed, what it does, and what comes next?

Author:
Kimberly Clausing
Publication Date:
04-2023
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Abstract:
In 2021, more than 135 jurisdictions agreed on transformative new international tax rules that would establish a minimum tax rate of 15 percent on multinational corporate income regardless of where it was reported. In December 2022, the European Union unanimously moved forward to implement this minimum tax, and other countries, including South Korea, Japan, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, are also either implementing the tax or taking substantial steps toward implementation. In tandem, the United States should also reform its international tax system and adopt a stronger minimum tax. While the future of the international agreement is uncertain, it has important implications for the ability of governments worldwide to create tax systems that are administrable, fair, and efficient. The agreement also demonstrates important guiding principles for the future of multilateral cooperation on global collective action problems, including efforts to protect public health from future pandemics, address nuclear proliferation, and resolve territorial conflicts. US progress on international tax reform would enhance much needed international cooperation on these issues.
Topic:
Economics, Treaties and Agreements, Reform, European Union, and Tax Systems
Political Geography:
Europe and Global Focus

3. How to save the WTO with more flexible trading rules

Author:
Robert Z. Lawrence
Publication Date:
12-2022
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Abstract:
The clash between the Western and Chinese economic systems is threatening the world trading system, with countries increasingly using trade as a tool to coerce other countries. It is imperative to return to an inclusive, rules-based international trading order before the problems in trade spill over into the other geopolitical frictions that plague the world. This Policy Brief argues for a system that steers between two extremes that have emerged: “deep integration,” a single undertaking in which all members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) are expected to adhere to all rules regardless of their preferences and circumstances, and “decoupling,” in which groups of countries centered on the United States or China limit trade with each other. Instead, Lawrence says, the world trading system should have a “variable geometry” that allows open plurilateral agreements among self-selected members that desire deeper integration on particular issues while allowing members that prefer to implement distinctive domestic policies to remain outside some of these agreements and follow a set of more limited rules. The universal rules would permit diversity but still promote trade between all countries through measures such as safeguards that would deal mainly with the most harmful systemic frictions. If the multilateral system is not up to the task of creating such an approach, it is likely to lose its relevance as differentiated regional or topic groupings become increasingly dominant.
Topic:
Economics, International Trade and Finance, World Trade Organization, Reform, and Trade
Political Geography:
Global Focus

4. The online gig economy’s impact is not as big as many thought

Author:
Lee G. Branstetter
Publication Date:
07-2022
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Abstract:
The explosive global growth of online ride-hailing platforms raised concern (and, in some quarters, optimism) that similar growth in other platforms could rapidly disrupt traditional labor arrangements on a large scale in advanced economies. But the evidence to date suggests no significant changes in the overall importance of “gig” work in the US labor market nor a significant decline in the importance of traditional employment relationships. Online platforms may play a growing role (relative to traditional “brick-and-mortar” intermediaries) in connecting gig workers to their customers, but that alone does not guarantee a large increase in the importance of gig work. Branstetter reviews this evidence, noting the gaps in labor market data series that make the measurement of this phenomenon so difficult. Even if traditional employment relationships are not likely to decline significantly in the near future, the rise of online gig work nevertheless highlights longstanding inadequacies of labor market regulations, which recognize employees and truly independent contractors but struggle with the intermediate kinds of worker-firm relationships the online platforms enable. Branstetter summarizes proposals for regulating gig economy work and the lessons policymakers in South Korea and other economies can learn from the literature he reviews in this Policy Brief.
Topic:
Economics, Employment, Labor Market, and Gig Economy
Political Geography:
Global Focus

5. The evolving gender gap in labor force participation during COVID-19

Author:
Simeon Djankov, Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg, Lisa Hyland, and Eva (Yiwen) Zhang
Publication Date:
04-2021
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Abstract:
Despite many significant gains by women in the paid workforce in recent decades, the percentage of women participating in the labor force has remained lower than the percentage of male participants. Now, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the global economic downturn it precipitated, the gap in labor force participation between men and women in some economies has actually widened, with potentially damaging repercussions for women’s career prospects and pay. The pandemic has disproportionately affected sectors employing more women, such as retail stores, restaurants, and the hotel and hospitality business. An increase in family caregiving responsibilities because of school and childcare closures has also fallen on working mothers' shoulders. Both factors have pulled women out of the labor force. The authors track trends in male and female labor force participation in 43 countries and find substantial differences across countries in the way women’s participation has been affected relative to that of men. In some countries, such as Colombia, Chile, and Cyprus, the gender gap in labor force participation widened the most during the pandemic. The gender gap also widened in the United States, driving 2.5 million women from their jobs in what Vice President Kamala Harris called a “national emergency” for women. In other economies, such as Luxembourg and Lithuania, the gender gap in labor force participation, unexpectedly, shrank during the early period of the pandemic. On average, female employees have fared better in countries where women are less concentrated in the services sector, less likely to be employed as temporary workers, and where laws supported greater equality at the onset of the crisis. Greater government expenditure on childcare in the pre-COVID-19 era, however, does not appear to have insulated female workers from the damaging repercussions of the pandemic.
Topic:
Economics, Gender Issues, Labor Issues, Women, Services, COVID-19, and Empowerment
Political Geography:
Colombia, Chile, Cyprus, Global Focus, and United States of America

6. What might have been: Globalization on the medal stand at the Tokyo Olympics

Author:
Soyoung Han and Marcus Noland
Publication Date:
04-2020
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Abstract:
The Summer Olympic Games are the most globalized sporting event on earth. Until now, the Summer Games had been postponed only three times—in 1916, 1940, and 1944—all because of world wars. So, the announcement that in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 Tokyo Games would be postponed by a year is significant, implicit testimony to the destructiveness of the pandemic. The Tokyo Games were expected to continue the evolution of the Games away from the aristocratic European milieu where the modern Olympic movement began. As poverty has declined and incomes across the global economy have converged, participation in the Games has broadened and the pattern of medaling has become more pluralistic, particularly in sports with low barriers to entry in terms of facilities and equipment. This Policy Brief presents forecasts of medal counts at the 2020 Tokyo Summer Games had they had gone on as scheduled, setting aside possible complications arising from the coronavirus pandemic. The forecasts are not just a depiction of what might have been. They establish a benchmark that can be used when the Games are eventually held, to examine the impact of the uneven incidence of the pandemic globally.
Topic:
Economics, Globalization, Sports, and Olympics
Political Geography:
Japan, Asia, and Global Focus

7. Automatic stabilizers in a low-rate environment

Author:
Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence H. Summers
Publication Date:
02-2020
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Abstract:
With interest rates persistently low or even negative in advanced countries, policymakers have barely any room to ease monetary policy when the next recession hits. Fiscal policy will have to play a major and likely dominant role in stimulating the economy, requiring policymakers to fundamentally reconsider fiscal policy. Blanchard and Summers argue for the introduction of what they call “semiautomatic” stabilizers. Unlike purely automatic stabilizers (mechanisms built into government budgets that automatically—without discretionary government action or explicit triggers—increase spending or decrease taxes when the economy slows or enters a recession), semiautomatic stabilizers are targeted tax or spending measures that are triggered if, say, the output growth rate declines or the unemployment rate increases beyond a specified threshold. The authors argue that the trigger should be changes in unemployment rather than changes in output, and the design of semiautomatic stabilizers, whether they focus on mechanisms that rely primarily on income or on intertemporal substitution effects (changing the timing of consumption), depends crucially on the design of discretionary policy.
Topic:
Economics, Government, Monetary Policy, and Finance
Political Geography:
Global Focus and United States of America

8. Average Inflation Targeting Would Be a Weak Tool for the Fed to Deal with Recession and Chronic Low Inflation

Author:
David Reifschneider and David Wilcox
Publication Date:
11-2019
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Abstract:
The Federal Reserve faces two important monetary policy challenges: First, since the Great Recession it has struggled to move inflation convincingly up to the 2 percent target level. Second, during the next recession it will struggle to deliver enough support to the economy unless the recession is unusually mild. As a result, the search is on for alternative policy frameworks that might allow the Fed to achieve its monetary policy objectives more effectively. Among the alternatives is average inflation targeting (AIT). The basic idea is simple: Instead of aiming to return inflation over the medium term to the target rate of 2 percent, the Fed would aim to return the average of inflation over some period to the target rate. The crucial innovation of AIT is that when inflation has been running below the target rate, it would have the Fed aim for above-target inflation in the future, in order to bring average inflation up toward the target. Simulations of the Fed’s workhorse econometric model of the US economy (the FRB/US model) suggest that AIT would be a weak addition to the Fed’s policy toolkit for dealing with recessions and persistently low inflation. In addition, simple versions of AIT would sometimes compel the Fed to run an undesirably restrictive monetary policy. AIT is thus not a very appealing alternative to the current framework.
Topic:
Economics, Global Recession, Monetary Policy, and Federal Reserve
Political Geography:
North America, Global Focus, and United States of America

9. Keeping Up with the Future: Upgrading Forecasts of Political Instability and Geopolitical Risk

Author:
Cullen S. Hendrix and Sooyeon Kang
Publication Date:
07-2019
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Abstract:
The nature and magnitude of geopolitical risk is changing more rapidly than the ability to anticipate it, with increasingly severe economic consequences. This Policy Brief discusses the economic costs and risks associated with episodes of political instability, arguing that firms, government agencies, and international institutions must update their forecasting and risk assessment efforts to take global factors into account. Since the global financial crisis, political instability has shifted from emerging-market countries in the developing world to larger, more globally impactful econo¬mies. Acknowledging this changing risk profile—and developing better tools to predict major episodes of instability—will allow both policymakers and firms to plan with greater confidence.
Topic:
Economics, Geopolitics, Economy, and Political stability
Political Geography:
Global Focus

10. Keeping Up with the Future: Upgrading Forecasts of Political Instability and Geopolitical Risk

Author:
Cullen S. Hendrix and Sooyeon Kang
Publication Date:
07-2019
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Abstract:
The nature and magnitude of geopolitical risk is changing more rapidly than the ability to anticipate it, with increasingly severe economic consequences. This Policy Brief discusses the economic costs and risks associated with episodes of political instability, arguing that firms, government agencies, and international institutions must update their forecasting and risk assessment efforts to take global factors into account. Since the global financial crisis, political instability has shifted from emerging-market countries in the developing world to larger, more globally impactful econo¬mies. Acknowledging this changing risk profile—and developing better tools to predict major episodes of instability—will allow both policymakers and firms to plan with greater confidence.
Topic:
Economics, Financial Crisis, Geopolitics, Political stability, and Risk
Political Geography:
Global Focus