Office of the Under Secretary for Economic Affairs’ Post

I have a new working paper out! Using public data, I construct experimental county-level regional price parities (#RPP) for all counties in the United States. The blog below discusses top-level findings from the experimental dataset I created, and the working paper details the methodology. And you can check out the experimental dataset yourself, it is linked within the blog! Blog: https://lnkd.in/eshncJ72 Working Paper: https://lnkd.in/edeTvhQQ #economicresearch #regionaleconomics #prices

We have two reports for you! First, we have the economic indicators analysis for the third quarter. You can read that report by clicking here: https://lnkd.in/g8axGC4b Second, we also wrote up the Laramie County Housing Study for the Chamber of Commerce. You can read that report by clicking here: https://lnkd.in/gyQgki2M

Stay tuned for some new #cdnpoli polling analysis from me over the next week or so at Abacus Data and on my newsletter (link below): 1️⃣ What is happening in Atlantic Canada? Has the Liberal red wall cracked? I've pulled together 5 surveys and built a sample size of over 1,300 in the region. 2️⃣ What is happening in BC? With a split centre-left, are the Conservatives posed to sweep the west coast? Big sample size = more robust, confident insights. 3️⃣ Is the carbon tax an anchor on Liberal support? What do people make of Poilievre's promise to axe the tax? I'll dig into some new questions I'm fielding right now with a national sample of almost 4,000. Subscribe to my newsletter (paid subscribers get exclusive access) and the Abacus Data newsletter for all the details in the coming days.

Do you like long walks on the beach with long-run economic statistics? If so, I have some exciting news: the NZ Institute of Economic Research (NZIER) has updated their great Data 1850 tool, which provides oodles of long-run economic and population data for New Zealand. You can find it here: https://lnkd.in/gH3m7rZU From time to time, my team's dabbled in long-run economic analysis. We've looked at issues like long-term trends in housing supply and prices (https://lnkd.in/geSYuVfa), implications of past decisions about land protection for infrastructure (https://lnkd.in/gG9rKfRS), and the history of local government debt and investment (https://lnkd.in/g3Np9k-M). This analysis has often resulted in surprising findings that have caused us to rethink the nature of the challenges facing us. And while we usually go and compile a lot of previously-uncompiled for these papers, we tend to rely on the consistent long-term 'spine' of population and economic statistics from Data 1850. So kudos to the team at NZ Institute of Economic Research (NZIER) for the awesome work! Definitely worth a look.

#DYK, the healthcare industry was the top employer in rural communities in 2021, with an average salary of $47,000. Find this fact and other rural facts in our Economics Dashboard 👉 https://tabsoft.co/3dXOOUN #RuralONFacts #RuralData #DataAnalysis

Nice write up from Civil Service World on our Royal Statistical Society comments in relation to the Lievesley Review and the Cabinet Office response to that review. Notably, “We recognise that the government requires statistics to govern and plan effectively, but for a healthy democracy, the public need to have the right data to hold the government to account. We counter the government's response that their needs will always take precedence.” Resources are limited - we recognise that - though arguably more resource directed towards the UK’s data infrastructure would likely be money well spent. Public accountability is the price to be paid otherwise.

Here is a nice graph we created today in my regional economics class. I am introducing them to some data analysis using Stata. In this exercise, we graphed the 10 counties that contribute the most the to the state's GDP. It was surprising, even to me, to see that the top 10 counties account for more than 60% of all the state's GDP. We often refer to NC as a success story, which it is, but it is important to acknowledge the immense concentration of economic activity. New Hanover county had the 8th share of state GDP and its share grew from 2.3% to 2.5% between 2017 and 2022. I am not sure how much they are enjoying the process of rolling up their sleeves and doing some "harmless" coding but I think it is immensely useful to become conversant in a few different statistical packages. It not only helps you do interesting work but it also allows you to think, in my opinion, more deeply about policy questions. #NCgdp #counties #Stata #regionalgrowth #concentration #economics #growth #uncw

One of my favorite parts of my job is working with Tyne and the University of Missouri to deploy and decipher the Ag Economists' Monthly Monitor survey. We have a brilliant group of industry and academic economists who participate each month, and I enjoy analyzing their responses to questions on current events and market conditions. I was honored that Tyne asked me to share some of the highlights from our February survey. Click the link below to read the full story!

Great paper by Kevin Grier and Robin Grier, just published at the Journal of Comparative Economics, titled "The Washington consensus works: Causal effects of reform, 1970-2015. More empirical evidence showing that Neoliberalism (once again) works! Abstract: Traditional policy reforms of the type embodied in the Washington Consensus have been out of academic fashion for decades. However, we are not aware of a paper that convincingly rejects the efficacy of these reforms. In this paper, we define generalized reform as a discrete, sustained jump in an index of economic freedom, whose components map well onto the points of the old consensus. We identify 49 cases of generalized reform in our dataset that spans 141 countries from 1970 to 2015. The average treatment effect associated with these reforms is positive, sizeable, and significant over 5- and 10- year windows. The result is robust to different thresholds for defining reform and different estimation methods. We argue that the policy reform baby was prematurely thrown out with the neoliberal bathwater. #neoliberalism #WashingtonConsensus #economics #data #ideas https://lnkd.in/evSw8XQD

In an interesting book by David Colander and Roland Kupers, I read: "the planning would involve schemes about how to design the system to minimize government intervention into the market, but still achieve socially desirable ends". And, again, "The most productive debate should focus on how the inevitable influence that the government has on the ecostructure will best achieve the ends society wants". These sentences sound very reasonable, but... I have a problem with expressions such as "socially desirable ends" and "the ends society wants". Who determines what socially desirable means? Does society really have wants? It may be simple to say that, in example and ceteris paribus, we (the society) prefer a lower rate of unemployment to a higher one. But, even if we assume that they (policy makers) could design policies which are able to give us the desired level of unemployment, such a perspective ignores that trade-off are everywhere. Even if they were truly able to implement policies which reduce unemployment, the point is that those policies have costs. The question, thus, is not "do I want or not lower unemployment?" (easy answer), but rather "am I ready to pay a X cost in order to get lower unemployment today?". And that cost could be higher inflation, higher deficit, cyclical fluctuations and so on... Talking about socially desirable ends means 1) identifying who is going to decide what is socially desirable and 2) giving them the authority to decide which costs are socially acceptable in order to obtain that socially desirable ends. In a nutshell, Colander and Kupers seem to ignore that same complexity they claim to be at the root of their own analysis. Like I was writing back in 2022, "In the current political economy environment, the struggle for humility probably is the most significant battleground between those who believe in measurable and achievable-in-size policy targets (pretence of knowledge) and those who believe that “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (W. Shakespeare, Hamlet) (limits of knowledge). Presently, this distinction is more important than any traditional boundary among schools in economics and such a vision is even more relevant in the current time of resurging inflation".