Ascent after Decline: Regrowing Global Economies after the Great Recession
Chair:
Marcelo Giugale
Sector Director
Poverty Reduction & Economic Management
Africa Region
World Bank
Authors:
Otaviano Canuto
Vice President
Poverty Reduction & Economic Management
World Bank
Danny M. Leipziger
Professor of International Business
George Washington University
Discussants:
William Cline
Senior Fellow
Center for Global Development &
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Nemat Shafik
Deputy Managing Director
International Monetary Fund
The great recession of 2007-09 has left permanent scars in the world economy, and the global recovery has lost steam. Advanced economies are still struggling with high unemployment and debt, and the remarkable role that emerging markets have played as engines of the recovery is no longer certain. In this new book, co-edited by Otaviano Canuto and Danny M. Leipziger, more than a
dozen distinguished contributors scan the economic horizon, spell out the new fiscal reality, and highlight the policy choices on which economic regrowth will depend.
This event is sponsored by the Infoshop and Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network
Related Experts
Monday, March 12, 2012
1:00pm to 2:30pm
Upcoming Events
In a recent paper, Kate Ambler and coauthors studied the impact of one-season cash transfers for agricultural investment in Senegal and Malawi, using data from a randomized control trial (RCT) in each country. They found evidence that transfers reduced both the number of decision makers and female decision making in Senegal in the short-run, particularly for measures directly related to agriculture. However, the effects disappeared two years after the transfers. Conversely, the authors find transfers in the Malawi program led to robust transitory increases in these measures, seeing a greater impact related to the number of decision makers in the household persisting after two year period. Join us for the latest CGD Invited Research Forum to discuss these opposing findings on the effects of cash transfers on household decision making.
Indian agriculture remains vulnerable to the vagaries of weather, and the looming threat of climate change may expose this vulnerability further. Using district-level data on temperature, rainfall and crop production, Siddharth Hari’s paper first documents a long-term trend of rising temperatures, declining average precipitation and increase in extreme precipitation events. One key finding is that the impact of temperature and rainfall are felt only in the extreme: when temperatures are much higher, rainfall is significantly lower, and the number of “dry days” greater is than normal. He also finds that these impacts are significantly more adverse in unirrigated areas (and hence rainfed crops) compared to irrigated areas. Can policy makers react to the challenges of climate change and find ways to get “more crop for every drop?"
Estimating intergenerational mobility in developing countries is difficult because matched parent-child income records are rarely available and education is measured very coarsely. In particular, there are no established methods for comparing educational mobility for subsamples of the population when the education distribution is changing over time.
In their recent paper, Sam Asher and coauthors present new methods and new administrative data to overcome this gap, and study intergenerational mobility across groups and across space in India. They find that the intergenerational mobility for the population as a whole has remained constant since liberalization, but cross-group changes have been substantial. Rising mobility among historically marginalized "Scheduled Castes" is almost exactly offset by declining intergenerational mobility among Muslims, a comparably sized group that has few constitutional protections. These findings contest the conventional wisdom that marginalized groups in India have been catching up on average. The paper also explores heterogeneity across space, generating the first high-resolution geographic measures of intergenerational mobility across India, with results across 5600 rural subdistricts and 2300 cities and towns.
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