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Ecuador

Elections 2023

Latin America and the Caribbean

Ecuador News Round-Up No. 3: Presidential Candidate Fernando Villavicencio is Assassinated as Violence Escalates, Luisa González Leads Polls, Lasso’s Decrees Fail, and Accusations of Undue Influence Emerge
At around 6:20 p.m. on August 9, Fernando Villavicencio, the presidential candidate for the Movimiento Construye Ecuador alliance, was assassinated as he was leaving a campaign event in Quito.

Pedro Labayen Herrera / August 10, 2023

Article Artículo

China Doesn’t Need to Fear Deflation
In the wake of the Great Recession there was a spate of news articles warning of the menace of deflation. The story was that something really bad would happen if the rate of inflation went from a modest positive rate to a modest negative rate. This means something really bad would happen if the rate of inflation was -0.5 percent, as opposed to 0.5 percent. This made zero sense then and it also makes zero sense now.

Dean Baker / August 10, 2023

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Taxing Share Buybacks: The Cheapest Tax EVER!
I just saw a piece touting the tax on share buybacks as the basis of the investment boom we are seeing in factory construction. I’m a bit skeptical on that one, I think the incentives provided by the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) are a far bigger deal, but if taxing buybacks gave a little extra kick, I’m fine with that.

Dean Baker / August 07, 2023

Article Artículo

The July Jobs Report: The Good News Keeps Coming
It would be hard to imagine a much better jobs report than what we got Friday. The economy generated 187,000 jobs for the month, somewhat fewer than the consensus. The jobs numbers for the prior two months were also revised down by 90,000. At the same time, the unemployment rate edged down to 3.5 percent, just 0.1 percentage point above the half-century low reached in April. We have now have had below 4.0 percent unemployment for the last 18 months. The last time we had a streak this long was in

Dean Baker / August 06, 2023

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Manufacturing Jobs and Trade: A Tale of Two Graphs
The first decade of this century was pretty awful for manufacturing workers. In December of 1999, we had 17.3 million manufacturing jobs. This number had fallen to 11.5 million by December of 2009. This amounted to a loss of 5.8 million jobs, or one-third of all the manufacturing jobs that had existed at the start of the decade. That looks like a pretty big deal.

Dean Baker / August 06, 2023

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Playing Games with GDP Numbers: China’s Growth Has Not Slowed to a Crawl
GDP growth in the United States is always reported as an annual rate. This means that if the economy grew 0.5 percent from the first quarter to the second quarter, it would be universally reported as 2.0 percent growth, with reporters always giving the annual rate. This is basically four times the quarterly rate. (It's actually the first quarter's growth rate taken to the fourth power, but this will be the same for small numbers.)

Dean Baker / August 04, 2023

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Review of the Myth that Made Us, by Jeff Fuhrer
The full title of this book is The Myth that Made Us, How False Beliefs About Racism and Meritocracy Broke Our Economy and How to Fix It. The book is a direct attack on how economists, and probably most people, are inclined to see the economy and society, arguing against the idea that outcomes reflect merit and effort.

Dean Baker / August 03, 2023

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Bad Things That Could End the Good Times
Along with everyone else (okay, not Republicans), I have been celebrating the great economic news we’ve been getting the last few weeks. Inflation is clearly slowing, the unemployment rate remains low, real wages are rising, investment is growing rapidly, and the green conversion is going faster than any of us could have imagined, even if it’s nowhere near fast enough.

Dean Baker / July 29, 2023

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Why We Do This Crap: Review of The Ends of Freedom, by Mark Paul
Mark Paul has done a useful public service in etching out the goals of progressive economic policy. Many of us get bogged down in debate over things like whether the Average Hourly Earnings series is more accurate than the Employment Cost Index, or whether Section 230 protection is giving Facebook, Twitter and other Internet giants a subsidy compared to competitors in print and broadcast media.

Dean Baker / July 25, 2023