Search

The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) was designed to reveal the economic, social, and environmental trade-offs associated with conventional economic growth as traditionally measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Although originally designed for use at the national scale, an interest has developed in the United States in a state-level uptake of the GPI to inform and guide policy. This study presents the first fifty-state estimate for U.S. GPI in order to address questions over its design, implementation, and ultimate potential as a tool to guide state-level economic policy. Following a review of the current state of analysis and critique of GPI, we provide an overview of methodology and database development. Results are then presented, including discussion of lessons learned through a fifty-state application. The paper concludes with suggestions for further research and next steps to consolidating a consistent methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use two approaches to examine the macroeconomic consequences for the United States of disruptions in global food commodity markets. First, we embed a novel quarterly composite global production index for the four basic staples-corn, wheat, rice, and soybeans-in a standard vector autoregression model, and we estimate the dynamic effects of global food commodity supply shocks on the U.S. economy. As an alternative, we also estimate the consequences of 13 narratively identified global food commodity price shocks. Both approaches lead to similar conclusions. Specifically, an unfavorable food commodity market shock raises food commodity prices, and leads to a rise in food, energy, and core inflation, and also to a persistent decline in real GDP and consumer expenditures. A closer inspection of the pass-through reveals that households do not only reduce food consumption. In fact, there is a much greater decline in durable consumption and investment. Overall, the macroeconomic effects turn out to be a multiple of the maximum impact implied by the share of food commodities in the consumer price index and household consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The substantial increase in economic inequality in favor of the upper income group in the United States and many other developed and developing nations during the past 30 years has become a major concern in public policy. Modifications of the standard measures of inequality, the Lorenz curve and Gini index, are proposed that better reflect the decline in the share of income received by the poor and middle portions of the income distribution relative to the upper end. A second pair of curves based on the fractions of either the middle or lower portion of the income curve that has the same share as the topu% and the areas between them and the line of equality are introduced. The proposed curves and related measures indicate that a noticeably greater change in the U.S. income distribution occurred during the 1967–2013 time period than are observed in the Lorenz curve and Gini index. The maximum difference between the proposed curves for the income and wealth data in the United Kingdom's 2010–2012 survey are greater than that of the Lorenz curve. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]