South China Morning Post: Internet access, social media shutdowns cost world over US$8 billion in 2019. “The total economic cost of major internet access and social media shutdowns around the world topped US$8 billion last year, according to a new report, which predicted that these disruptions would continue amid ongoing political turmoil.”
economics
Congressional Budget Office: CBO Releases an Interactive Tool and Related Computer Code for Analyzing the Effects of Federal Minimum-Wage Increases
Congressional Budget Office: CBO Releases an Interactive Tool and Related Computer Code for Analyzing the Effects of Federal Minimum-Wage Increases. “Today, CBO released an interactive tool that allows users to explore the effects of policies that would increase the federal minimum wage, including the Raise the Wage Act (as passed by the House of Representatives on July 18, 2019) and options CBO analyzed in The Effects on Employment and Family Income of Increasing the Federal Minimum Wage. Users can also create custom policy options to examine how different approaches to changing the minimum wage would affect earnings, employment, family income, and poverty.”
FE News: New tool to democratise debates on tax and welfare policy across the UK
FE News: New tool to democratise debates on tax and welfare policy across the UK. “Tax and benefit models are used to assess the impact of policy changes on household incomes and government finances. UKMOD will be an invaluable tool for those wanting to analyse who wins or loses from commitments made in the Autumn Budget, and how the pain of austerity or the proceeds of any new giveaways are being shared between richer and poorer households.”
Harvard Gazette: New interactive website helps chart paths for economic growth
Harvard Gazette: New interactive website helps chart paths for economic growth. “The Growth Lab, a program of the Center for International Development (CID) at Harvard Kennedy School, has just launched its Country Profiles portal, an interactive website that boils down 6,000 data points into a handful of interactive graphs. The algorithms built into the program generate suggested growth strategies and identify economic opportunities for each of the 130 profiled countries.”
The European Sting: An economist explains how to value the internet
The European Sting: An economist explains how to value the internet. “It is one the most commonly used measures of economic activity: gross domestic product (GDP), defined as the total market value of all final goods and services produced within a country in a given period. But GDP misses out on huge chunks of value in the digital economy. When digital goods, whether Google Maps or Wikipedia, are available free of charge, they make no impact on GDP despite the value to their users.”
NREL: New I-JEDI Online Tool Examines Jobs and Economic Impacts of Clean Energy Around the World
NREL: New I-JEDI Online Tool Examines Jobs and Economic Impacts of Clean Energy Around the World. “The USAID-NREL Partnership has launched the new International Jobs and Economic Development Impacts (I-JEDI) website, which houses the I-JEDI tool. I-JEDI can estimate the potential economic impacts of wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal energy projects. Countries represented in the I-JEDI tool include Colombia, Mexico, the Philippines, South Africa, and Zambia.”
MIT News: Facebook is free, but should it count toward GDP anyway?
MIT News: Facebook is free, but should it count toward GDP anyway? . “For several decades, gross domestic product (GDP), a sum of the value of purchased goods, has been a ubiquitous yardstick of economic activity. More recently, some observers have suggested that GDP falls short because it doesn’t include the value of free online goods such as social media, search engines, maps, videos, and more. A new study by MIT researchers puts a dollar value on all those free digital goods people use, and builds the case that online activity can and should become part of GDP some day.”
