Author: jpellg

The Data War Comes 黑料社区

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The Trump administration鈥檚 ongoing attempts at manipulating US government economic data echoes controversies that have existed in the realm of development data for decades. These controversies highlight the unavoidable, intrinsically political nature of measuring social phenomena with economic statistics, and the role of economists in legitimizing (or not) such measures.

In early August, the employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) showed weaker than expected job growth for July and announced downward revisions (fewer new jobs than previously reported) for the two months prior. Trump responded by . This move provoked a from other civil servants, economists, and experts on democracy, which only intensified when Trump initially nominated as the replacement E.J. Antoni, the chief economist for the right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation. Antoni had been an jobs data altogether, and was widely perceived by critics as both and for the position. There is that the jobs report will become less reliable, even leading to the current staff at the BLS to still trust their numbers, for now. The BLS is also responsible for producing the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the central measure of inflation produced by the US government. Inflation鈥檚 centrality in recent politics, including promises from Trump to bring down prices on 鈥�,鈥� have led . There would of a degraded CPI measure,  which affects tax brackets, the value of some treasury bonds, and social security and other social insurance payments.

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Premature Deindustrialization and the Defeminization of Labor

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In two previous posts on this blog, I鈥檝e discussed the issue of premature deindustrialization and some of its possible consequences. In a , I, along with co-author Bret Anderson of Southern Oregon University, explored the potential consequences of premature deindustrialization further by examining the possible connections between premature deindustrialization and the defeminization of industrial employment. Premature deindustrialization is a situation in which the shares of manufacturing value added and employment begin to shrink at per-capita income levels much lower than those of the early industrializers, along with manufacturing employment peaking at lower levels. The scarce manufacturing jobs that do remain, however, are likely to be relatively high paying jobs that countries and workers compete for. In our work, we assessed whether premature deindustrialization is a feminizing or defeminizing force in industrial employment. By examining 62 countries from 1990 to 2013, we find that premature deindustrialization is likely to amplify the male bias of industrial upgrading.Read More »

Unequal Inequalities Revisited

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Any discussion of inequality includes an implicit normative or ethical comparison of distributions; a certain distribution of some good, or of gains in that good, is acceptable or not acceptable, is better or worse, is improving or stagnating. If discussions of inequality also inevitably involve rankings and comparisons of different distributions, then how inequality is . The choice of measurement of inequality is therefore not value neutral.Read More »

Consequences of Deindustrialization in Brazil and South Africa, and Potential Remedies

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In a previous post, I wrote about the global trend of premature deindustrialization; the trend towards lower levels of industrial employment, and a shift away from industrial employment at lower levels of per capita income, and how the effects on human well-being of these trends are not yet clearly understood. An important question in understanding the impact of these changing structural patterns on individuals鈥� well-being is to whether either a lifting of the living standards of those not in formal employment, or the generation of employment to replace the manufacturing employment, is taking place.

, I illustrated how combining a household level indicator of well-being with decomposition of change analysis can shed light on these questions by focusing on two specific episodes of growth; South Africa from 1996 to 2007 and Brazil from 1991 to 2010. Using Census data from , I created indices of well-being on a scale of 0-100, using indicators such as child survival rate, access to clean water and electricity, and educations levels, culled from census data. Next, each household was assigned to a 鈥渢ype鈥� based on sectoral employment of the household head and urban/rural location, and average household scores were calculated for each type. A decomposition of change analysis was then used to assign improvement in well-being to improvement within the types and shifts in population between these types.Read More »

Premature Deindustrialization and its Consequences for Human Welfare

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Seagate_Wuxi_China_Factory_Tour.jpegRecent research suggests that late industrializers have not been following previously observed patterns in terms of sectoral change and employment, but the effect of these changing structural patterns on well-being and the distribution of gains from growth has not yet been systematically examined. There is a global shift towards both lower employment in industry at all levels of income per capita and de-industrialization, the shift from manufacturing to service employment, taking place at significantly lower levels of income (See work by ; ; and Rodrik , and ).

Deindustrialization, Employment Generation, and the 鈥淧recarization鈥� of Global Labor
There are many reasons why these new patterns may have negative effects on inclusive development; emphasizes the important role that periods of high levels of manufacturing employment have played in now wealthy countries, and the dearth of wealthy countries that have skipped such a phase; there are concerns about the effects of lower levels of manufacturing output on both growth and employment generation ( See again and ).Read More »