Speevr | Economics

Argentina: Of Economic Programs, Jobs, and Exchange Rates

Become a member to read the rest of this article Username or E-mail Password Remember Me Forgot Password

World View & Risks

Become a member to read the rest of this article

Making progress on gender equality: It’s time for more transparency

While there are strong commitments to achieving gender equality with sustainable development goal (SDG) 5, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated resource constraints and widened gender inequalities. As underscored by the recent G-7 communiqué, the Generation Equality Forum, and other international forums, there is a recognition that a renewed focus on gender equality is needed. Fundamental to “building back better” is the need for more transparent information about gender equality initiatives.
Improved data capacity, along with engagement and quality around gender financing and programmatic data, will support more rigorous policymaking and help gender stakeholders across all types of organizations to address funding gaps, to coordinate programs, to hold funders accountable to their gender equality commitments, and to learn which initiatives make societies more equal and why.
On July 8, the Center for Sustainable Development at Brookings will host a discussion on how we can make gender funding flows more transparent and effective. Friends of Publish What You Fund and Publish What You Fund will launch a research report “Making Gender Financing More Transparent” and discuss their recommendations for how donors can better engage with national stakeholders and improve the publication of their gender financing globally.
The panel discussion will feature gender funding experts from various perspectives who will address specific actions that can lead to more transparent information and move us closer toward SDG 5. More speakers to be announced as confirmed.
Viewers can submit questions for panelists by emailing events@brookings.edu or via Twitter by using #GenderFinancing.

Argentina: The Descent Into Insignificance and the (Long) Road to Recovery

Become a member to read the rest of this article

Climate Risk and the Fed: Preparing for an Uncertain Certainty

Mary C. Daly

Protecting and elevating early years programming during and after COVID-19: Tools to support adequate, equitable and efficient investments

Time Zone:

Key Developments & Chart of the week

Become a member to read the rest of this article

Africa in the news: A COVID-19 third wave, solar energy in Togo, and security updates

Africa faces third wave, COVAX’s limitations, and vaccine technology transfer hub in South Africa
As the third wave of COVID-19 sweeps through the continent, African governments are struggling to contain the virus, with only 1.12 percent of the African population vaccinated. With the virus’s rapid surge, the World Health Organization (WHO) projects the virus will outpace cases from the second wave by early July. DNA sequencing by the WHO of recent COVID-19 cases in the DRC and Uganda revealed most cases were tied to the Delta variant of the virus. The Delta variant has also been identified in 12 other African countries. With at least 20 nations entrenched in a third wave of the pandemic, many countries are reporting severe oxygen shortages—an essential component of treating high-risk cases—which are causing preventable deaths. African CDC Director John Nkengasong expressed concern regarding the severity of the third wave, stating, “We are not winning in Africa this battle against the virus.”

The COVAX program, a global vaccine-sharing scheme devised by the WHO, is facing shortages in the midst of the heightened need by African countries. COVAX has “delivered 90 million doses to 131 countries”—40 million of which have been administered in Africa—but many of these countries have already or nearly exhausted their supplies. Facing uncertainty about vaccine supplies, many COVAX-participating countries are halting or slowing their vaccination efforts to ensure their citizens are not left partially vaccinated. The Biden administration, hoping to accelerate the pandemic’s end, has responded by announcing a donation of 500 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine to low-income countries.
In a bid to resolve longstanding vaccine shortages in Africa, the WHO announced Monday that it is negotiating the development of a technology transfer hub in South Africa. The hub will provide companies from low- and middle-income countries with the knowledge and licenses to manufacture mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, but relies on a consortium of companies with the mRNA technology, such as Pfizer and Moderna, to participate in the technology transfer.
Largest solar plant in West Africa opens in Togo; Mozambique receives grant for agro-processing enterprises
The largest solar plant in Western Africa opened on June 24 in Togo. The plant, which is located in the Centrale Region of Togo, will provide electricity to 158,333 households given its 50-megawatt capacity. Any electricity that is not consumed locally will be diverted to parts of Ghana and Nigeria. The plant is also the country’s first private utility solar park and was built by Dubai-based AMEA Power. The company chose Togo because of the country’s “renewable-friendly” regulations that allowed the project to be completed in just 18 months. AMEA Power was given further assurance when the project was supplied with $8 billion in pre-funding from Togo’s National Development Plan. The project also provided local training and job opportunities, as 80 percent of the construction workforce was Togolese.
In other news, the African Development Bank (AfDB) announced the approval of a $1 million grant on June 24 that will support small- and medium-sized agro-processing enterprises in Mozambique. The grant, which is financed by the Italian Technical Cooperation Fund, will assist approximately 300 businesses to boost their productivity and improve quality control. The project also seeks to enable transformative infrastructure growth and agriculture transformation, two strategic pillars outlined in the AfDB’s Mozambique’s Country Strategy Paper. Italian Ambassador Gianni Bardini commented that the grant improves bilateral relations and “can act as a catalyst to extend it to the private sector where it exists a huge and largely untapped potential.”
Ethiopia holds elections amid violence; combating terrorism in Mozambique and the Sahel region
Ethiopia held elections this past Monday despite ongoing violence in the Tigray region and all regions not participating in the vote. The day after the elections, dozens of people were killed in a government airstrike that hit a market in Tigray, one of the deadliest events in an ongoing war that first broke out in November 2021 and that has continued to create instability and now famine in the region. As of this writing, there are no preliminary results from the election. This is the first test of Abiy Ahmed’s power since the war started due to the election being delayed twice.

How New Brunswick implemented its computer science education program

Computer science (CS) education helps students acquire skills such as computational thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration, among others. It has been linked with higher rates of college enrollment, and (Brown & Brown, 2020; Salehi et al., 2020) a recent randomized control trial study also showed that lessons in computational thinking improved student response inhibition, planning, and coding skills (Arfé et., 2020). As these skills take pre-eminence in the rapidly changing 21st century, CS education promises to significantly enhance student preparedness for the future of work and active citizenship. CS education can also reduce skills inequality if education systems make a concerted effort to ensure that all students have equitable access to curricula that provides them with the needed breadth of skills, regardless of their gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status.

Based on prior analysis and expert consultation, we selected 11 country, state, and provincial CS education case studies from which we can draw lessons that may apply broadly to other education systems. These cases come from diverse global regions and circumstances and have implemented CS education programs for various periods and to different levels of success. As such, we have examined information to extract lessons that can lead to successful implementation.
This study will examine how New Brunswick seeks to improve and expand its CS education activities to train a future workforce that can thrive during economic transition and support the Canadian province’s budding technology sector. The Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD) and various stakeholder organizations aim to give all students the opportunity to learn CS and apply their lessons in a creative and collaborative environment.
An overview of CS education in New Brunswick
New Brunswick’s education system placed an early emphasis on CS for a period in the 1970s and 1980s that dissipated in the next decade. Then, in the early 2000s, the DEECD decided to refocus its curriculum on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects, including information and communications technology. This brought the necessary infrastructure and knowledge of digital technologies into schools that would later set the stage for mandatory CS courses in 2017.
The DEECD faced the challenge of rolling out CS education for students of two distinct language groups. Primary school teachers in the anglophone sector were encouraged to incorporate CS and computational thinking as interdisciplinary subjects, while the francophone sector had no requirement to offer either subject in primary schools. All lower-secondary school students, whether English- or French-speaking, take CS courses that emphasize programming skills. Further, both language systems offer more advanced CS courses in upper secondary school as electives.
Organizations, such as Brilliant Labs and the national flagship coding initiative CanCode, familiarize K-12 students with CS through classroom and after-school activities. This enables students to apply their CS lessons during hands-on classroom lessons.
Lessons Learned

CS education should be delivered to both the anglophone and the francophone education systems as the DEECD attempts to meet the needs of students in each language group.
CS activities encourage students to find creative and practical uses of digital technologies that can spark an interest in CS. In particular, makerspaces—customizable learning spaces that allow students to develop their own projects—have created an interactive and collaborative environment that have produced positive learning outcomes.
The DEECD works closely with NGO partners, leaning on their resources to engage students. This includes providing after-school programs, summer camps, and even activities with CS integrated as an interdisciplinary subject.
Teachers can use communities of practice to share information about helping students from different backgrounds learn about CS.

Read the full case study > >

Will Biden deliver for rural America? The potential of the proposed Rural Partnership Program

While the American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion relief and stimulus, was designed to help communities claw back from the worst ravages of the pandemic, the Biden administration’s proposed American Jobs Plan (AJP) is the opening salvo in an envisioned economic transformation. Forming the basis of its negotiations with Congress on infrastructure, the AJP seeks to put communities on a path to long-term prosperity that distributes opportunity and economic mobility more fairly while mitigating climate change.

With an orientation on “place” (its companion, the American Families Plan, focuses primarily on people), the AJP’s proposals provide ample opportunity to target specific kinds of communities. The word “rural” gets 29 mentions, reflecting an earnestness to follow through on the president’s pledge to “build a new rural American economy for our families and the next generation.”
As we showed in a recent analysis, what currently passes for rural policy at the federal level is really a vast collection of programs that is fragmented, incoherent, and often unfriendly to rural realities. The wide range of investments in the AJP that could benefit rural America—from $100 billion in support for broadband and $10 billion for a new community revitalization fund to $5 billion to clean up brownfields and $10 billion to transition rural electric cooperatives to clean energy—raises questions of how the administration will avoid adding to the confusion and ensure that rural communities can package and maximize the use of these resources to meet their long-term needs.
The Rural Partnership Program: Redefining the Social Compact with Rural America
One answer lies with the proposed new Rural Partnership Program (RPP). The president’s budget codifies this proposal with a $5 billion FY2022 request, with outlays over five years, placing the RPP within the Rural Development division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA-RD).
This would represent both a significant modernization and financial boost to USDA-RD’s capabilities for facilitating equitable community and social development: For comparison, the FY2021 program level for USDA-RD’s Rural Business-Cooperative Service (the office focused on economic development) is a little over $1.5 billion based on $319 million of budget authority.
Envisioned to “help rural regions, including Tribal Nations, build on their unique assets and realize their vision for inclusive community and economic development,” the RPP seeks to match the diversity of rural places across the U.S. and invest in local leaders, organizations, and strategies, giving communities a fighting chance to build resilience and prosperity on their own terms. The flexibility, size, and time horizon of its resources would fill a gaping void in the federal architecture.
Yet the devil, as they say, is in the details. A successful RPP will hinge on its ability to stay true to some key principles:
1. Put capacity-building at the core
While politicians spar about different uses of the word “infrastructure,” it is clear to local leaders in rural places that one of the key challenges they face, even in the face of 400+ federal programs, is a severe lack of investment in the “software” that makes a community run—staff capacity and training; technical expertise; strong and healthy nonprofits, community associations, and public administration; and connected networks and trusted relationships among different constituencies who are communicating and collaborating.
If the RPP is to recognize local leadership and strategies as the starting point for successful, equitable rural prosperity, strengthening this type of community and civic infrastructure must be central to its mission. That will require putting scaffolding in place at the national, regional, and local levels.
The U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development’s (HUD) Section 4 program on capacity building for community development offers one model that might be adapted to enable a set of national intermediaries focused on rural. Regional rural development hubs are well-positioned to help communities, towns, counties, or states collaborate across geographies and leverage regional differences to their comparative advantage. And local, grassroots efforts require flexible and direct investments to increase and upgrade their human and organizational capital.
2. Modernize the metrics of success
RPP is an opportunity to rethink how successful, equitable rural development is measured. The standard focus of federal economic development programs on jobs created and retained, infrastructure projects completed, or funds and financing invested does not provide a full picture of rural well-being nor creates healthy incentives. Changing this will require investing in high-quality rural data, especially in communities of color, and adopting a holistic, outcomes-based approach. Evaluation policies and metrics from international development programs (USAID, Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), USDA Foreign Agricultural Service) and asset-based development approaches (such as Wealth Works) will provide useful models. RPP could be a catalyst to modernize USDA-RD’s technical expertise and staff capacity.
3. Aim for long-term, lasting community impact
RPP should be positioned as an “on ramp” for communities to achieve long-term improvements in their economic resilience and well-being, offering flexible and substantial grants with long-term time horizons. The MCC five-year “compact” provides a model, as compacts are locally developed yet rigorously define a small set of clear, mutually agreed priorities that promise the highest return on investment. Some of the communities that could use the investment most—especially in persistently poor counties—may be the least equipped. This means that RPP will have to consider how to balance and serve communities across a spectrum of “readiness.” Given the administration’s priorities, it is likely that RPP would prioritize those communities and entities that are able to deliver on an integrated approach, ensuring that cross-cutting issues such as climate mitigation and racial equity are woven into projects to improve facilities and infrastructure, expand business activity or start-ups, improve delivery of services, or invest in human capital.
While it is a tiny portion of the overall investment portfolio suggested in the American Jobs Plan, the RPP displays important recognition that federal policy must shift to unlock the full potential of rural America. It signifies a change in approach, and represents a first step toward redefining the federal government’s role and strategic orientation in responding to the pressures and headwinds facing many rural communities. It will be important to ensure that this first step does not become the last one.

Category: Economics