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9772. International Student Mobility Flows and COVID-19 Realities
- Author:
- Leah Mason
- Publication Date:
- 08-2021
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Institute of International Education (IIE)
- Abstract:
- The flow of international students crossing borders to pursue educational opportunities has been significantly affected by the COVID‐19 pandemic, causing higher education systems worldwide to consider the context and realities of global academic mobility before and after the health crisis. This joint paper by the Institute of International Education (IIE) and IC3 analyzes significant international student mobility trends before the COVID‐19 pandemic, the role of the United States and other host countries in offering international students academic opportunities, and the increased competitiveness among countries to attract international students. The paper will provide an overview of the global mobility flows to and from major world regions in the 2019/2020 academic year. The paper will then consider the effects of COVID‐19 on global student mobility and how the pandemic has comparatively affected international students and the countries that serve as their hosts.
- Topic:
- Mobility, Higher Education, Students, and COVID-19
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus and United States of America
9773. Economic Value of Peace 2021: Measuring the global economic impact of violence and conflict
- Publication Date:
- 01-2021
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP)
- Abstract:
- The comprehensive methodology includes 18 indicators covering the direct and indirect costs of violence, and the expenditures to contain and prevent violence. The model also includes a multiplier for the direct costs to account for the additional economic activity resulting from a redirection of these costs to more productive pursuits. The economic impact of violence provides an empirical basis to better understand the economic benefits resulting from improvements in peace. Estimates are provided for 163 countries and independent territories, covering over 99.5 per cent of the global population. It uses the best available data to calculate the overall impact. However, not all categories of violence have reliable data, therefore preventing their inclusion in the model. Some examples of costs excluded from the model are counter-terrorism and intelligence agency expenditures, insurance costs, lost business opportunities and family violence. As such, the estimates presented in this report are considered highly conservative. In 2019, the economic impact of violence decreased by $64 billion from the previous year. This was the equivalent of a 0.4 per cent decrease and was largely driven by reductions in Armed Conflict. This fall predominantly occurred in the Middle East and North Africa region and was driven by fewer terror attacks, conflict deaths, and population displacement costs. This is a continued reversal of previous periods where between 2012 and 2017, the global economic impact of violence rose by 12.2 per cent to peak at $14.8 trillion. This is the second consecutive year of improvement.
- Topic:
- Political Violence, Terrorism, Peacekeeping, Violence, and Peace
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
9774. Global Peace Index 2021: Measuring peace in a complex world
- Publication Date:
- 06-2021
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP)
- Abstract:
- This is the 15th edition of the Global Peace Index (GPI), which ranks 163 independent states and territories according to their level of peacefulness. Produced by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), the GPI is the world’s leading measure of global peacefulness. This report presents the most comprehensive datadriven analysis to-date on trends in peace, its economic value, and how to develop peaceful societies. The GPI covers 99.7 per cent of the world’s population, using 23 qualitative and quantitative indicators from highly respected sources, and measures the state of peace across three domains: the level of Societal Safety and Security, the extent of Ongoing Domestic and International Conflict, and the degree of Militarisation. This year’s results show that the average level of global peacefulness deteriorated by 0.07 per cent. This is the ninth deterioration in peacefulness in the last thirteen years, with 87 countries improving, and 73 recording deteriorations; however, the change in score is the second smallest in the history of the index. The 2021 GPI reveals a world in which the conflicts and crises that emerged in the past decade have begun to abate, only to be replaced with a new wave of tension and uncertainty as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and rising tensions between many of the major powers.
- Topic:
- Peacekeeping, Global Security, Violence, and Peace
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
9775. Business & Peace 2021
- Publication Date:
- 05-2021
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP)
- Abstract:
- Rather than asking what businesses can do for peace, this study differentiates itself by focusing on what peace can offer businesses. The Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP) sees this as an important, but missing step in business analysis. In order for the private sector to engage with peacebuilding, investors first need to see the benefits of peace to their investment decisions. This work shows that economic performance can be predicted by movements in the same socio-economic developmental factors that affect peacefulness. These conditions are known as Positive Peace. The global economic impact of violence was $14.4 trillion in 2020. This is broadly equivalent to the entire economy of China. If humanity were to reduce violence by ten per cent per annum, the savings of $1.4 trillion would broadly equate to adding an economy the size of Russia’s or Brazil’s every year to the global fold. The burden of violence on an economy is self-evident. However, this report focusses on the converse perspective: countries that improve their underlying conditions, as gauged by IEP’s measures of peace, create the potential for a significant peace dividend for business.
- Topic:
- Economics, International Political Economy, Business, Peace, and International Business
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
9776. Mexico Peace Index 2021: Identifying and measuring the factors that drive peace
- Publication Date:
- 05-2021
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP)
- Abstract:
- The 2021 report is the eighth edition of the Mexico Peace Index (MPI), produced by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP). It provides a comprehensive measure of peacefulness in Mexico, including trends, analysis and estimates of the economic impact of violence on the country. The MPI is based on the Global Peace Index, the world’s leading measure of global peacefulness, produced by IEP every year since 2007. Mexico’s peacefulness improved by 3.5 percent in 2020. After four years of successive deteriorations, this marks a change in trend following the sharp increases in violence recorded between 2015 and 2018. This change can be traced to well before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Homicide and firearms crime rates peaked in July 2018 and have since been gradually declining. Other crime rates began to fall in mid-2019, which also preceded the pandemic. While improvements were occurring prior to the onset of COVID-19, further reductions in specific types of violence in 2020 followed the implementation of public health measures and stay-at-home orders. Crimes typically associated with people’s everyday movements — such as robberies, assaults, kidnappings and extortion — all recorded notable improvements in 2020.
- Topic:
- Crime, Economics, Violence, and Peace
- Political Geography:
- Mexico
9777. Labour Reforms in the Indian State of Rajasthan: a boon or a bane?
- Author:
- Sourabh Paul and Diti Goswami
- Publication Date:
- 01-2021
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University
- Abstract:
- The authors examine the impact of labour law deregulations in the Indian state of Rajasthan on plant employment and performance. In 2014, after a long time, Rajasthan was the first Indian state that introduced labour reforms in the Industrial Disputes Act (1947), the Factories Act (1948), the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act (1970), and the Apprentices Act (1961). Exploiting this unique quasi-natural experiment, the authors apply a difference-in-difference framework using the Annual Survey of Industries longitudinal data of India’s manufacturing establishments. Their results show that reforms had an unintended consequence of the decline in labour use. Also, worryingly, the flexibility resulted in a disproportionate decline in the directly employed worker. Evidence suggests that the reforms positively impact the value-added and productivity of the establishments. The strength of these effects varies depending on the underlying industry and reform structure. These findings prove robust to a set of specifications.
- Topic:
- Economics, Labor Issues, Reform, Employment, and Regulation
- Political Geography:
- India
9778. Can a Machine Learn Democracy?
- Author:
- Rajendran Narayanan, Sakina Dhorajiwala, and Chakradhar Buddha
- Publication Date:
- 01-2021
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University
- Abstract:
- The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) provides up to 100 days of work in a year for every rural household at a minimum wage. The Act has several landmark worker-centric provisions. For the implementation of MGNREGA, for the first time in the country, a transaction-based Management Information System (MIS) has been made available in the public domain; a feather in the cap of transparency. However, there are several critical questions to be examined in this regard. Our main focus in this article is to explore the tensions between technocracy and democratic values/participation in the context of MGNREGA and its associated MIS. We use our action research on information-based interventions in several states to examine whether the MGNREGA MIS incorporates democratic values, whether it has been inclusive or if it has widened the existing inequities. We use specific examples to illustrate how such an information system has been used to subvert the legal rights of workers. We underscore that technological interventions, with a compassionate human-centred design are potentially powerful tools for transparency, accountability, and grievance redressal. However, technology alone can neither enhance participatory democracy nor reduce socio-economic inequalities.
- Topic:
- Economics, Science and Technology, Labor Issues, Democracy, Employment, and Artificial Intelligence
- Political Geography:
- India
9779. Tracking Employment Trajectories during the Covid-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Indian Panel Data
- Author:
- Rosa Abraham, Amit Basole, and Surbhi Kesar
- Publication Date:
- 01-2021
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University
- Abstract:
- Using the CMIE’s Consumer Pyramids Household Survey, we track a panel of households prior to the lockdown (in December 2019), during the lockdown (in April 2020) and afterwards (in August 2020) to investigate the employment and income effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and its associated containment measures. We identify four distinct employment experiences during the pandemic for those who were in the workforce just prior to the lockdown: no loss of employment (“No effect”), loss of employment followed by recovery (“Recovery”), loss of employment with no recovery (“No recovery”), and a delayed loss of employment (“Delayed job loss”). Overall, 54% of individuals experienced no job loss, while 30% lost work in April but recovered by August. 12% had not recovered employment as of August 2020. We analyse how these trajectories vary across different social and economic characteristics to quantify contractions and recovery in the labour market and the extent to which the vulnerabilities vary across different social groups, employment arrangements, and industries. We find that women were substantially more likely to lose employment as well as less likely to recover employment. Job loss was also more severe for lower castes as compared to intermediate and upper castes and for daily wage workers as compared to regular wage workers. Younger workers were particularly vulnerable to job loss compared to older workers. Having lost employment in April, younger workers were also less likely to recover employment in August. Finally, for those who were employed in both December 2019 and August 2020, we examine the changes in employment arrangements. We find a much greater frequency of transitions from wage employment to self-employment, more than that in the seasonally comparable period last year (Dec 2018 to Aug 2019). Our results call for urgent additional fiscal measures to counteract these effects.
- Topic:
- Economics, Labor Issues, Employment, Unemployment, Pandemic, Job Creation, and Consumerism
- Political Geography:
- India
9780. A Short Note on Debt-Neutral Fiscal Policy
- Author:
- Zico Dasgupta
- Publication Date:
- 01-2021
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University
- Abstract:
- One of the central concerns against increasing expenditures in the recent period has been the possibility of an adverse impact on debt-GDP ratio. Once stability of debt-ratio is regarded as a policy-objective, the aggregate expenditure that is consistent with the stability condition gets determined by the given level of output growth rate and revenue receipts. Instead of perceiving expenditures to be determined by the debt-stability condition, this short note attempts to lay bare the conditions under which the debt-stability condition is restored despite increasing the growth rate of non-capital primary expenditure to a targeted level. The targeted level of growth rate of non-capital expenditures can be perceived to be one which compensates for the income loss of labour during the pandemic. In contrast to conventional wisdom, the possibility of increasing such expenditures is explored not by reducing capital expenditures, but rather by increasing the latter. Using the multiplier value of capital expenditures estimated by the RBI, it is argued that the debt-ratio would remain unchanged despite increasing the growth rate of non capital primary expenditure if the capital expenditures growth rate is allowed to increase in a specific proportion.
- Topic:
- Debt, Economics, Political Economy, Labor Issues, GDP, Employment, and Fiscal Policy
- Political Geography:
- India