Documents social cost 50 results

"Economists and the governments they advise have based their macroeconomic policies on the idea of a natural rate of unemployment. Government policy that pushes the rate below this point - about 6 per cent - is apt to trigger an accelerating rate of inflation that is hard to reverse, or so the argument goes. In this book, Storm and Naastepad make a strong case that this concept is flawed: that a stable non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU), independent of macroeconomic policy, does not exist. Consequently, government decisions based on the NAIRU are not only misguided but have huge and avoidable social costs, namely, high unemployment and sustained inequality. Skillfully merging theoretical and empirical analysis, Storm and Naastepad show how the NAIRU's neglect of labor's impact on technological change and productivity growth eclipses the many positive contributions that labor and its regulation make to economic performance. When these positive effects are taken into account, the authors contend, a more humane policy becomes feasible, one that would enhance productivity and technological progress while maintaining profits, thus creating conditions for low unemployment and wider equality."

"La crise budgétaire grecque et les politiques d'austérité mises en place depuis 2010, en plus d'avoir entraîné des conséquences économiques et sociales dévastatrices, ont aussi transformé le paysage politique. Pour une grande partie de la population, l'arrivée de Syriza au pouvoir en janvier 2015 a alimenté l'espoir d'une réparation des sacrifices et injustices imposés par cinq années d'austérité budgétaire. Toutefois, sur le plan des relations professionnelles, très peu de changements et d'améliorations ont eu lieu. Après les élections de septembre 2015 et suite à la signature d'un mémorandum supplémentaire, le gouvernement a été appelé à prendre des décisions pénibles, au coût social et politique élevé. Il est donc possible qu'on assiste à une montée de la conflictualité sociale."

"We show that several of the most important economic models of climate change produce climate dynamics inconsistent with the current crop of models in climate science. First, most economic models exhibit far too long a delay between an impulse of CO2 emissions and warm¬ing. Second, few economic models incorporate positive feedbacks in the carbon cycle, whereby carbon sinks remove less CO2 from the atmosphere, the more CO2 they have already removed cumulatively, and the higher is temperature. These inconsistencies affect economic prescriptions to abate CO2 emissions. Controlling for how the economy is represented, different climate mod¬els result in significantly different optimal CO2 emissions. A long delay between emissions and warming leads to optimal carbon prices that are too low and too much sensitivity of optimal carbon prices to the discount rate. Omitting positive carbon cycle feedbacks also leads to optimal carbon prices that are too low. We conclude it is important for policy purposes to bring economic models in line with the state of the art in climate science."