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16341. Firm-Level Exposure to Epidemic Diseases: Covid-19, SARS, and H1N1

Author:
Tarek A. Hassan, Stephan Hollander, Laurence van Lent, and Ahmed Tahoun
Publication Date:
04-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Abstract:
Using tools described in our earlier work (Hassan et al., 2019, 2020), we develop text- based measures of the costs, benefits, and risks listed firms in the US and over 80 other countries associate with the spread of Covid-19 and other epidemic diseases. We identify which firms expect to gain or lose from an epidemic disease and which are most affected by the associated uncertainty as a disease spreads in a region or around the world. As Covid-19 spreads globally in the first quarter of 2020, we find that firms’ primary concerns relate to the collapse of demand, increased uncertainty, and disruption in supply chains. Other important concerns relate to capacity reductions, closures, and employee welfare. By contrast, financing concerns are mentioned relatively rarely. We also identify some firms that foresee opportunities in new or disrupted markets due to the spread of the disease. Finally, we find some evidence that firms that have experience with SARS or H1N1 have more positive expectations about their ability to deal with the coronavirus outbreak.
Topic:
Economics, Infectious Diseases, Global Markets, Finance, Pandemic, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Global Focus

16342. How Much Can the U.S. Congress Resist Political Money? A Quantitative Assessment

Author:
Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen
Publication Date:
01-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Abstract:
The extent to which governments can resist pressures from organized interest groups, and especially from finance, is a perennial source of controversy. This paper tackles this classic question by analyzing votes in the U.S. House of Representatives on measures to weaken the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill in the years following its passage. To control as many factors as possible that could influence floor voting by individual legislators, the analysis focuses on representatives who originally cast votes in favor of the bill but then subsequently voted to dismantle key provisions of it. This design rules out from the start most factors normally advanced by skeptics to explain vote shifts, since these are the same representatives, belonging to the same political party, representing substantially the same districts. Our panel analysis, which also controls for spatial influences, highlights the importance of time-varying factors, especially political money, in moving representatives to shift their positions on amendments such as the “swaps push out” provision. Our results suggest that the links between campaign contributions from the financial sector and switches to a pro-bank vote were direct and substantial: For every $100,000 that Democratic representatives received from finance, the odds they would break with their party’s majority support for the Dodd-Frank legislation increased by 13.9 percent. Democratic representatives who voted in favor of finance often received $200,000–$300,000 from that sector, which raised the odds of switching by 25–40 percent.
Topic:
Economics, Political Economy, Elections, Democracy, Finance, Legislation, and Money
Political Geography:
United States

16343. Profits, Innovation and Financialization in the Insulin Industry

Author:
Rosie Collington
Publication Date:
03-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Abstract:
The list prices of analogue insulin medicines in the United States have soared during the past decade. In the wake of high-profile cases of prescription medicine “price-gouging”, such as Mylan’s EpiPen and Turing-acquired Daraprim, actors across the insulin supply chain are today facing growing scrutiny from US lawmakers and the wider public. For the most part, however, the role of shareholders in the insulin supply chain has been overlooked. This paper considers the relationship between profits realized from higher insulin list prices, pharmaceutical innovation, and the financial structures of the three dominant insulin manufacturing companies, which set list prices. It shows that despite claims to the contrary, insulin manufacturers extracted vast profits from the sale of insulin products in the period 2009-2018, as insulin list prices rose. Distributions to the company shareholders in the form of cash dividends and share repurchases totaled $122 billion over this period. The paper also considers the role of other actors in the insulin supply chain, such as pharmacy benefits managers (PBMs), in the determination of list prices. The data and analysis presented in the paper indicates that financialization could be considered in tension with not only the development of new drugs that will be available to patients in the future, but also the affordability of products that already exist today.
Topic:
Economics, Health, Health Care Policy, Finance, and Price
Political Geography:
United States

16344. Payroll Share, Real Wage and Labor Productivity across US States

Author:
Ivan Mendieta-Muñoz, Codrina Rada, Ansel Schiavone, and Rudi von Arnim
Publication Date:
04-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Abstract:
This paper analyzes regional contributions to the US payroll share from 1977 to 2017 and the four major business cycles throughout this period. We implement two empirical exercises. First, we decompose the US payroll share across states. Utilizing a Divisia index decomposition technique yields exact contributions of real wages, employment structure, labor productivity and relative prices across the states to the aggregate change in the payroll share. Key findings are that the decline in the aggregate (i) is driven by decoupling between real wage and labor productivity; and (ii) is initially driven by the rust belt states, but subsequently dominated by relatively large states. Second, we employ mixture models on real wages and labor productivity across US states to discern whether distinct mechanisms appear to generate these distributions. Univariate models (iii) indicate the possibility that two distinct mechanisms generate state labor productivities, raising the question of whether regional dualism has taken hold. Lastly, we use bivariate mixture models to investigate whether such dualism and decoupling manifest in the joint distributions of payroll shares and labor productivity, too. Results (iv) are affirmative, and further suggest a tendency for high performing states to have relatively high payroll shares initially, and low payroll shares more recently.
Topic:
Economics, Political Economy, Labor Issues, Productivity, and Workforce
Political Geography:
United States

16345. China’s Activities in the South Caucasus: Issue 2, 27.07.2020 – 23.08.2020

Author:
Medea Ivaniadze
Publication Date:
08-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Georgian Foundation for Strategic International Studies -GFSIS
Abstract:
The digest covers China’s political, diplomatic, economic and other activities in the South Caucasus region and relations between China and the South Caucasus countries. It relies on a wide variety of sources, including the Chinese media. It is worth noting that the Chinese media is controlled by the Communist Party of China (according to the World Press Freedom Index China is nearly at the bottom of the list and ranks 177th out of 180 countries)
Topic:
Diplomacy, Politics, Media, Economy, and Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)
Political Geography:
China, Eurasia, Caucasus, Georgia, and South Caucasus

16346. Some Considerations on the Election of the BSEC Secretary General: The Georgian Perspective

Author:
Valeri Chechelashvili
Publication Date:
01-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Georgian Foundation for Strategic International Studies -GFSIS
Abstract:
Multilateral diplomacy is an effective leverage to advance the foreign policy interests of a state in the network of international relations. This, similarly, applies to the regional level. Therefore, the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC), despite the mostly justified criticism addressed towards it, in this sense remains in the focus of the attention of its member states.
Topic:
International Relations, Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Regional Integration, and Economic Cooperation
Political Geography:
Caucasus, Georgia, and Black Sea

16347. China’s Activities in the South Caucasus: Issue 3, 24.08.2020 – 20.09.2020

Author:
Medea Ivaniadze
Publication Date:
09-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Georgian Foundation for Strategic International Studies -GFSIS
Abstract:
The digest covers China’s political, diplomatic, economic and other activities in the South Caucasus region and relations between China and the South Caucasus countries. It relies on a wide variety of sources, including the Chinese media. It is worth noting that the Chinese media is controlled by the Communist Party of China (according to the World Press Freedom Index China is nearly at the bottom of the list and ranks 177th out of 180 countries).
Topic:
Diplomacy, Economics, Politics, and Media
Political Geography:
China, Caucasus, Georgia, and South Caucasus

16348. China’s Activities in the South Caucasus: Issue 4, 21.09.2020 – 18.10.2020

Author:
Medea Ivaniadze
Publication Date:
10-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Georgian Foundation for Strategic International Studies -GFSIS
Abstract:
The digest covers China’s political, diplomatic, economic and other activities in the South Caucasus region and relations between China and the South Caucasus countries. It relies on a wide variety of sources, including the Chinese media. It is worth noting that the Chinese media is controlled by the Communist Party of China (according to the World Press Freedom Index China is nearly at the bottom of the list and ranks 177th out of 180 countries)
Topic:
Diplomacy, Economics, Politics, and Media
Political Geography:
China, Caucasus, Georgia, and South Caucasus

16349. Impact of Anti-Pandemic Restrictions and Government Anti-Crisis Measures on Employment, Incomes and the Poverty Level in Georgia

Author:
Merab Kakulia and Nodar Kapanadze
Publication Date:
12-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Georgian Foundation for Strategic International Studies -GFSIS
Abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic has posed unprecedented challenges to the world economy. It is no coincidence that the crisis provoked by the pandemic has been compared to the largest economic crises of the last hundred years such as the “Great Depression” of 1929-1933 and the “Great Recession” of 2008-2009. According to the International Monetary Fund, the “Great Lockdown” (Gopinath, 2020) has simultaneously weakened economic activity around the world, sharply reduced household consumption, particularly harmed the service sector and severely hit the labor market and international trade (IMF, 2020). The result was a massive loss of jobs and a depletion of regular sources of income for households, precipitating a real threat of a sharp rise in poverty. Clearly, Georgia has not been able to avoid these events, even more so since the service sector particularly affected by the pandemic crisis, including the tourism industry, accounts for 74 percent of the country's economy (Geostat, 2019). Although the spread of the disease was initially relatively small in the face of anti-pandemic restrictions imposed by the government, the country's economy has suffered greatly. To at least partially offset the severe socio-economic consequences caused by the restrictions to prevent the further spread of COVID-19, including forced home isolation, governments around the world, among them the Georgian government, have started to implement anti-crisis measures. However, the assessment of their effectiveness proved to be difficult in the view of an almost continuous increase in the scale of the pandemic. The following study aims to evaluate the: - Direct impact of state anti-pandemic restrictions on employment and unemployment; - Role of government emergency anti-crisis measures in mitigating the negative impact of antipandemic restrictions, including lockdowns, on employment and unemployment; - Employment and unemployment forecast for 2020-2021, taking into account the results of the first wave of the pandemic; - Direct impact of anti-pandemic restrictions on the dynamics and structure of household incomes; - Role of government emergency anti-crisis measures in neutralizing the negative impact of anti-pandemic restrictions on household incomes; - Household income forecast for 2020-2021, taking into account the results of the first wave of the pandemic; - Direct impact of anti-pandemic restrictions on the poverty level according to the subsistence minimum (extreme poverty line); - Role of government emergency anti-crisis measures in preventing a rise of extreme poverty as a result of anti-pandemic restrictions; - Forecast of extreme poverty levels for 2020-2021 taking into account the results of the first wave of the pandemic; - Effectiveness of government emergency anti-crisis measures.
Topic:
Economy, Crisis Management, Pandemic, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Eurasia, Caucasus, and Georgia

16350. Policy Documents: National Minorities in Political Processes – Engagement for Better Future

Author:
Ana Mosashvili, Nika Petriashvili, Irakli Mikiani, Gega Oragvelidze, Irakli Kartvelishvili, Roland Baghaturia, Elena Alimbarashvili, Lasha Makhatadze, Tornike Mumladze, Giorgi Mskhalaia, Salome Lomidze, Giorgi Areshidze, Ani Shaishmelashvili, Mamuka Jugheli, Nino Gachechiladze, Nino Tsanava, Ednar Mgeladze, Elisabed Sarkisova, and Natia Liluashvili
Publication Date:
12-2020
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Georgian Foundation for Strategic International Studies -GFSIS
Abstract:
The Policy Paper Series include policy documents developed within the framework of the project - National Minorities in Political Processes – Engagement for Better Future. The papers were elaborated by the young representatives of political parties, for whom it was the first attempt to work on an analytical document. The papers address the challenges and solutions for the ethnic minorities engagement in the political, economic or social life of Georgia. The project was implemented by the Rondel Foundation with the support and active participation of the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities (OSCE HCNM). The project aims to increase the political and social inclusion of ethnic minorities and to facilitate healthy policy debate on the issues of national minorities among the political parties, thus overall contributes to the good governance practices. Within the framework of the multi-component project, members of Tbilisi-based political party youth organizations, young people living in Samtskhe-Javakheti and Kvemo Kartli and active representatives of the local community attended various thematic seminars. The project also included thematic meetings of representatives of political parties and government agencies with the representatives of national minorities, the preparation of TV programs, and internships for young people representing ethnic minorities in political parties.
Topic:
Development, Education, Politics, Tourism, Culture, Minorities, and Youth
Political Geography:
Caucasus and Georgia