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In RealTime posts, PIIE senior staff and colleagues discuss the fast-moving economic news, financial developments, and public policy choices confronting the United States and the world.
As poor countries go, Egypt is not in the bottom rank even among nations in the Arab world. Measured by such conventional indicators as the percentage of population living on less than $2 a day, Egypt’s poverty is not high by international standards. Incomes have steadily risen and progress on life expectancy, infant mortality, years [...]
The American people have spoken. They are fed up with stalemate and inaction in Washington. The “old” Congress has an opportunity to prove that it hears the message, even before the “new” Congress is sworn in. Fifteen million Americans remain unemployed and more than 40 percent of them have been unemployed for more than 6 [...]
French labor unions are preparing to block President Nicolas Sarkozy’s proposal to raise the French retirement age by two years.1 They plan open-ended strikes to shut down France’s transport and energy infrastructure, hoping to repeat their success in 1995 when street protests forced President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Alain Juppe to abandon their proposals [...]
The eurozone’s divergences can be traced back to a moment in the last decade when political behavior in Italy, France, and Germany took very different paths. I use Real Effective Exchange Rate (REER) data in both their forms (consumer price index [CPI]-based and unit labor cost [ULC]-based, as provided by the European Central Bank) to [...]
A lively debate is under way between those who want more fiscal stimulus to create jobs and those who worry that our national debt is already too high. Both sides are ignoring the obvious alternative—one that would create jobs and lower the deficit. In a newly-posted Policy Brief [pdf], I present the argument for easier [...]
The President convenes a meeting of corporate executives, union presidents, and economists to discuss the “jobless recovery.” December 2009 in Washington, DC? No, July 1993 in Chicago. We have seen this problem before, in other words. But have we learned the right lessons from the last jobs summit? The first lesson is that there has [...]
Before heading to Asia in November, President Obama announced that a White House “jobs forum” will be held in December on jobs and economic growth.1 The president called for “openness to any demonstrably good idea to supplement the steps already taken to put American back to work,” while simultaneously warning against any “ill-considered decisions—even with [...]
“American taxpayer dollars should not be used to finance those Chinese jobs.“ Who could disagree with Senator Schumer’s statement, which accompanied his recent call for cancellation of $450 million in federal stimulus funds for a new $1.5 billion wind park in Texas—on the grounds that it would utilize 240 wind turbines made in China? As [...]
The decision by the United States to slap a 35 percent tariff on tire imports from China is, of course, significant. It follows a decision last week by the US Department of Commerce to impose countervailing duties on imports of steel pipe from Chinese firms. In the world of the 24/7 news cycle, one trade [...]
The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas recently suggested the US labor market in the current recession is now breaking the law—Okun’s Law, that is.1 Larry Summers would seem to agree. In a revelatory aside during his speech at the Peterson Institute on July 17, the head of President Obama’s National Economic Council joked that “there [...]