The Shifting Roles of Monetary and Fiscal Policy in Light of Covid-19

The Shifting Roles of Monetary and Fiscal Policy in Light of Covid-19. Center for Strategic & International Studies. Jack Caporal, Victoria Meyer. February 23, 2021

The Covid-19 pandemic has drastically affected both the U.S. and the global economy. In February 2020, the U.S. unemployment rate was at near lows of 3.8 percent. By April, it reached 14.7 percent—nearly five percentage points higher than the peak of the Great Recession. While many of these unemployment claims were temporary, the economy is still in distress. In October 2020, 40 U.S. states either added fewer jobs than in August or lost jobs. The U.S. national rate of job growth in September and October was less than half its August rate. By January 2021, the economy had over 9 million fewer jobs than prior to the pandemic. Permanent job losses remained elevated in January at 3.5 million, 2.2 million more than the previous February. The labor force participation level was 1.9 percent lower than February 2020, indicating that individuals who left the workforce have not rejoined it. In terms of the global economy, the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) October 2020 World Economic Outlook predicted that the world real GDP would fall by 4.4 percent from 2019. [Note: contains copyrighted material].

[PDF format, 15 pages].

How Americans Navigated the News in 2020: A Tumultuous Year in Review

How Americans Navigated the News in 2020: A Tumultuous Year in Review. Pew Research Center. Amy Mitchell et al. February 22, 2021

Americans inhabited different information environments, with wide gaps in how they viewed the election and COVID-19

Americans are divided – that much is obvious after a contentious presidential election and transition, and in the midst of a politicized pandemic that has prompted a wide range of reactions.

But in addition to the familiar fault line of political partisanship, a look back at Pew Research Center’s American News Pathways project finds there have consistently been dramatic divides between different groups of Americans based on where people get their information about what is going on in the world. [Note: contains copyrighted material].

[PDF format, 54 pages].

Digital Capital and Superstar Firms

Digital Capital and Superstar Firms. Brookings Institution. Prasanna Tambe et al. March 4, 2021

Superstar firms, unique in their capabilities to scale up innovations, have become increasingly important in the US economy. Investments related to digital technologies are likely to play a particularly important role, reflecting, among other things, economies of scale and network effects. Much of the rise in the concentration of power in these firms has been attributed to intangible investments. For digitally-focused firms, investments in the intangible assets needed to realize value from new technologies – like cumulative investment in skills training, new decision-making structures within the firm, management practices, and software customization – often account for significantly greater total costs than the technologies themselves. As the economy becomes increasingly digitized, these assets can be expected to grow even further in importance. For instance, there has been a wave of interest in the potential of data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to become the next important general purpose technology that drives economic growth and business value. [Note: contains copyrighted material].

[PDF format, 57 pages].

Produce Safety: Requirements, Implementation, and Issues for Congress

Produce Safety: Requirements, Implementation, and Issues for Congress. Congressional Research Service. Amber D. Nair. March 9, 2021

In the United States, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and sprouts continue to be associated with a series of foodborne illness outbreaks across the country, resulting in hundreds of illnesses and hospitalizations, as well as kidney failure and death. Many in Congress have expressed concern that foodborne illness outbreaks are occurring despite enhanced authorities and resources provided to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and state public health authorities following the 2010 enactment of comprehensive food safety legislation as part of the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA; P.L. 111-353). FSMA amends the Federal Food,Drug, andCosmetic Act (FFDCA, 21 U.S.C. §§301 et seq.), which required FDA to develop produce safety standards for certain fruits, vegetables, nuts, and sprouts, as well as other rules to enhance food safety. To provide FDA with the means to implement FSMA, Congress has provided more than $300,000,000 in FDA’s base appropriation for FSMA since FY2011 (H.Rept. 115-232).

[PDF format, 34 pages].

Measures and Methodology for International Comparisons of Health Care System Performance: Final Report

Measures and Methodology for International Comparisons of Health Care System Performance:  Final Report. RAND Corporation. Laurie T. Martin et al. February 24, 2021.

The Immediate Office of the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is seeking to identify measures that could improve the ability of the United States and other countries to learn from international comparisons of health system performance. To inform the identification of measures for international comparison that could eventually be proposed to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), RAND Corporation researchers worked with a diverse group of 15 experts in quality measurement, clinical care, and health economics to generate and prioritize potential measure constructs that align with HHS priorities and are particularly promising for international comparisons. Eight measure constructs were identified as having the most promise for international comparison, but they will require additional development work to establish their operational definitions and specifications to ensure that any measure developed is valid and feasible for international comparisons of health system performance. This report is designed to lay a strong foundation for these future refinements by noting the degree of consensus among experts about the importance, scientific acceptability, perceived feasibility, and usability of measure constructs; summarizing the strengths and limitations of the measure constructs; and providing additional context that can be useful for informing the selection of measure constructs that might ultimately be developed into measures and proposed to OECD for consideration. [Note: contains copyrighted material].

[PDF format, 226 pages].

The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election

The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election. Atlantic Council. Election Integrity Partnership. March 2, 2021.

The Election Integrity Partnership, comprising organizations that specialize in understanding those information dynamics, aimed to create a model for whole-of-society collaboration and facilitate cooperation among partners dedicated to a free and fair election. With the narrow aim of defending the 2020 election against voting-related mis- and disinformation, it bridged the gap between government and civil society, helped to strengthen platform standards for combating election-related misinformation, and shared its findings with its stakeholders, media, and the American public. This report details our process and findings, and provides recommendations for future actions. [Note: contains copyrighted material].

[PDF format, 282 pages].

What’s Ahead for a Cooperative Regulatory Agenda on Artificial Intelligence?

What’s Ahead for a Cooperative Regulatory Agenda on Artificial Intelligence? Center for Strategic & International Studies. Meredith Broadbent. March 17, 2021

In her first major speech to a U.S. audience after the U.S. presidential election, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen laid out priority areas for transatlantic cooperation. She proposed building a new relationship between Europe and the United States, one that would encompass transatlantic coordination on digital technology issues, including working together on global standards for regulating artificial intelligence (AI) aligned with EU values. A reference to cooperation on standards for AI was included in the New Transatlantic Agenda for Global Change issued by the Commission on December 2, 2020. In remarks to Parliament on January 22, 2021, President von der Leyen called for “creating a digital economy rule book” with the United States that is “valid worldwide.” Some would say Europe’s new outreach on issues of tech governance and the suggestion of establishing an “EU-U.S. Trade and Technology Council” is incongruous to the current regulatory war being waged against United States firms in the name of unilateral European tech sovereignty. [Note: contains copyrighted material].

[PDF format, 19 pages].

Debt Distress and Development Distress: Twin Crises of 2021

Debt Distress and Development Distress: Twin Crises of 2021. Brookings Institution. Homi Kharas and Meagan Dooley. March 17, 2021

Just over a year into the COVID-19 crisis, it is apparent that there is great urgency for governments to address an overlapping set of issues—among them health, climate, nature, resilience, recovery, jobs, and inequality—at a scale far larger than would have been imaginable before the onset of the crisis.

Political leaders have concluded that bold action today on resolving debt and development distress simultaneously is less risky than caution and incremental change, or an effort to sequence debt resolution before development. This recognition draws a parallel between dealing with the pandemic and dealing with broader issues of global equity and fairness. Just as success in the fight against COVID-19 is not achievable until there is almost universal vaccination and the virus dies out, it is equally true that all countries need to shift to a path of sustainable development to build resilience into the global economy. Efforts of all countries are needed to avoid surpassing the tipping point thresholds of greenhouse gas concentration and to conserve the planet’s biodiversity, as extinction cannot be reversed. [Note: contains copyrighted material].

[PDF format, 35 pages].

Is Climate Finance Towards $100 Billion “New and Additional”

Is Climate Finance Towards $100 Billion “New and Additional”. Center for Global Development.  Ian Mitchell, Euan Ritchie and Atousa Tahmasebi. March 15, 2021

We have now passed the 2020 deadline agreed in 2009 and later reaffirmed in the Paris Agreement for developed countries to mobilize $100 billion in “new and additional” climate finance. In this paper, we examine the extent to which development finance as a whole has increased since 2009 and interpret this as an upper limit for the amount of climate finance that can be described as “new and additional.” We analyse “total development finance” (official aid, multilateral contributions, and less-concessional finance, including export credits) and find that for countries included in the OECD-reported climate finance figure of $78.9 billion, there has been additional development finance of only $43.6 billion since 2009, meaning almost half of the OECD figure is not new and additional. Several countries have actually reduced overall finance levels relative to 2009. Looking only at aid-funded finance, France and Japan report large increases in bilateral climate aid but have not materially increased overall aid levels. We also note the importance of the US to further progress; it championed the target in 2009 and is responsible for almost half of developed-country carbon emissions to date but has made no additional financial contribution. [Note: contains copyrighted material].

[PDF format, 17 pages].

What 2020’s Election Poll Errors Tell Us About the Accuracy of Issue Polling

What 2020’s Election Poll Errors Tell Us About the Accuracy of Issue Polling. Pew Research Center.  Scott Keeter et al. March 2, 2021.

Most preelection polls in 2020 overstated Joe Biden’s lead over Donald Trump in the national vote for president, and in some states incorrectly indicated that Biden would likely win or that the race would be close when it was not. These problems led some commentators to argue that “polling is irrevocably broken,” that pollsters should be ignored, or that “the polling industry is a wreck, and should be blown up.”

The true picture of preelection polling’s performance is more nuanced than depicted by some of the early broad-brush postmortems, but it is clear that Trump’s strength was not fully accounted for in many, if not most, polls. Election polling, however, is just one application of public opinion polling, though obviously a prominent one. Pollsters often point to successes in forecasting elections as a reason to trust polling as a whole. But what is the relevance of election polling’s problems in 2020 for the rest of what public opinion polling attempts to do? Given the errors in 2016 and 2020, how much should we trust polls that attempt to measure opinions on issues? [Note: contains copyrighted material].

[PDF format, 36 pages].